Kontextmaschine

18th November 2016

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Steve Bannon Trump Tower Interview: Trump's Strategist Plots "New Political Movement" | Hollywood Reporter →

The Hollywood Reporter? Off-brand Variety? That’s the last place I’d expect the first interview with a triumphant political macher to run.

That’s exactly where I’d expect an old Hollywood dealmaker to call in debts for a friendly outlet though. And that’s the last place I’d expect the writing staff to get uppity in the name of wounded journalist pride.

Steve Bannon has done some thinking about how to end-run the MSM, I assure you.

It’s not entirely dissimilar to Reagan, journalists started out trying not to normalize him, bird-dogging and fact-checking and after a few months their editors pointed out they’d gone out on crusade without an army following, and things calmed.

And so after a while you’d have press conferences where Teflon Don would deflect a hostile question through two completely unrelated talking points before concluding with a joke on liberals, and even the asker would laugh and laugh.

Which critics of the time felt horrifying, along there with “talking heads” and the chirpy frivolity of local TV Action/Eyewitness News formats and MTV-influenced stylized editing. What Max Headroom was getting at. Part of the backsliding from the Great Introspection of the 70s.

One difference there, I see journalists saying their Reagan-era bosses were saying “we can’t destroy ANOTHER president”. Because Nixon. Driving him from office had looked like the ideal realization of the noblest journalistic impulses but instead of yielding some bicentennial national renewal it gave us the muddy, paranoid, demoralizing ‘70s, when the center could not hold.

(Like what was what was significant about Reagan getting shot but pulling through joking, after which he was politically invincible - we not only had a President who wasn’t a lemon but we actually got to KEEP him this time like we hadn’t since Eisenhower)

And without that cautionary tale gonna be people going into this one gunning for Nixon, we’ll see.

Tagged: steve bannonamhist