QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● Shot: Why Have Late-Night TV Hosts Gone Silent on Tara Reade?
—The Daily Beast, today.
● Chaser:
This is also my theory about the big entertainment awards shows like the Oscars and the Emmys. If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.
What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.
—Why Late Night Hosts Like Jimmy Kimmel Are Suddenly So Political, Robert Tracinski, the Federalist, October 5, 2017.
To paraphrase Lorne Michaels’ tap dance for the reason NBC’s Saturday Night Live maintained radio silence on Harvey Weinstein in the fall of 2017, I’m sure the entertainment division of the DNC-MSM view Biden and Tara Reade as strictly “a Dover thing.”
Since so many low-information voters get their “news” second-hand from the late night shows and Viacom’s “Weekend Update” clone the Daily Show, the usual rules of journalism also apply here:
