OPINION | Forget Joe, Mika and MSNBC. What We Need Is A New Current TV
We have lots of progressive media options today but they are just too scattered
The world of political news has been reverberating with the fallout from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s bombshell visit with Donald Trump at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida home.
Viewers have been tuning out as the duo has been rightly castigated for selling out the values that they’ve been claiming to fight for every day on their program, Morning Joe.
These folks, including myself, despise Trump, have no interest in dialoguing with a fascist — as Scarborough and Brzezinski claimed to be doing — and were relying on media to hold the line against Trump. We certainly don’t want our media sane-washing him.
We viewers disgusted by the duplicity of corporate media which clearly are interested in putting profits and ratings ahead of values and journalistic integrity.
So what media could meet this new moment, as we fall off a precipice towards the downward spiral that will be the second Trump administration?
We once had that kind of media: It was called Current TV. And it brought together some of the strongest progressive voices of the time.
For a little while 15-ish years ago, Current TV was for the left the kind of bold, fearless media for the left what Fox News would be on the right. (Only without all of the toxic disinformation of Fox News.)
Keith Olbermann, in particular, was Current TV’s star host, and I remember tuning in every day to get Olbermann’s insights and reporting from Occupy Wall Street.
And he was backed up by an entire lineup of progressive and left hosts and programs.
Ultimately, former vice president Al Gore and the other owners of Current TV closed it down and sold it to Al Jazeera TV.
The media landscape certainly has changed since then.
There is a strong progressive and left political media ecosystem today. You can find it in a dozen or more channels on YouTube, for instance.
Farron Cousins’ Farron Balanced, Leeja Miller’s channel, Olayemi Olurin’s Olurinatti, Mike Figueredo’s Humanist Report, Reese Waters’ content, and Sam Seder’s Majority Report are but a few examples.
So you might reasonably ask, “With so many choices, what’s the issue?”
The issue is that these brilliant voices too often are disparate.
To use a popular analogy, it’s the difference between individual superheroes and the Avengers.
What we have today are lots of distinct superheroes doing their own thing, like separate Iron Man movies or Incredible Hulk adventures, or Captain America pictures.
But you bring them all together for an Avengers movie, you can have something special and maybe more than the sum of their parts.
That’s what we need today for progressive media is a team of the best, most-fearless leftist voices and content creators.
To stretch the analogy further, we Americans are about to face a sequel with the worst supervillain we’ve faced, in Donald Trump.
And now it’s time for our progressive Avengers to assemble in a place where we can find them any time we need.
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