MADHOUSE MOMENT: The Home of the Progrifter Movement

When you're apologizing to the people who went right-winger for the money before you, you've lost all claim to being leftists.

by Josh Colletta
Cenk Uygur (left) and Ana Kasparisn (right) on the set of The Young Turks. Still from YouTube.

Ironically, I don’t want to get into too much detail about this, because there really isn’t much detail to be gotten into, but it’s worth stating for the record where I come down on TYT’s move to the right.

For me, this starts way back in 1998.  Barry Diller had developed a new programming concept for independent TV stations targeting a youthful audience.  The station itself would be an entity involved in the community, centered around live, on-the-street personalities (like MTV VJ’s) interacting with the public during commercial breaks, clever branding and marketing, and a rebelliously playful attitude.  Diller intended to invest heavily in local programming, like local professional sports, niche local entertainment shows, and most important to this story, alternative local news programming.  The flagship station for this idea was WAMI (pronounced “whammy”) in Miami, with studios prominently visible at the Lincoln Road Mall in Miami Beach.

The evening newscast was called The Times, and to produce it, Diller tapped a guy by the name of Cenk Uygur.  Uygur, in turn, tapped a guy by the name of Ben Mankiewicz (you’ll likely know him from TCM) to be the newscast’s anchor.  They built a small news department that devoted more time to deep dives on important topics than the day’s surface-level headlines — which, no joke, gave a kick in the pants to the more established local newscasts at WTVJ and WFOR, who had mostly been leaving the detailed reporting to WPLG and their “Big Story” features.

However, The Times never took itself too seriously, and was presented with good humor as long as it was appropriate.  In particular, the constant rotation of sex-appeal-only weather girls was genuinely played for the joke to poke fun at some of the other stations in town (*cough*WSVN*cough*).  Think of it as a local version of 60 Minutes wrapped in the Eyewitness News format with a dash of The Daily Show.  It was brilliant, it was unlike anything anywhere else on TV, and while it was never given the budget it deserved, it was an excellent program that covered quite a few important stories, and it had a devoted following… which included myself.

Unfortunately, Diller’s vision never quite panned out as planned (contracts to broadcast Florida Marlins and Miami Heat games are expensive), and while a few decent local shows were produced, the station fizzled out by 2001, mostly just carrying the roster of syndicated classics that former crosstown indie stations WBFS and WBZL had abandoned when they picked up UPN and the WB, respectively, in ’95.  Apart from running the Fox Kids lineup on the weekends (which local FOX affiliate WSVN had abandoned in ’93), WAMI became an endless loop of Bewitched, The Munsters, I Dream of Jeannie, and M.A.S.H. Univision bought the station in 2002 and it became the flagship of their secondary Telefutura network, now known as UniMas.

Now, I didn’t follow Uygur’s work much after that, but when he started TYT, I figured I’d check it out, because what he and Mankiewicz were able to accomplish on a shoestring budget at WAMI was impressive, and I was hoping he’d be bringing a similar approach to a national audience.  Which is sorta how it went… but unlike the on-air product in Miami, TYT’s deep dives never really seemed all that deep.  I’ve checked them out from time to time over the years, and the commentary has always seemed very surface-level to me.  Basic observations, some digging into the details, but never quite getting to the real roots of what was being addressed.  And if that’s all you were after, then that’s all well and good.  They were ostensibly getting to the truth (if not all of it, all of the time), and they were spreading the message they set out to spread.

But it wasn’t for me, and honestly, that lack of substance always rubbed me the wrong way.  I get that in-depth reporting isn’t for everyone, and there have been other TYT personalities putting in that work over the years, but Uygur and Ana Kasparian have always stayed at that base level.  At first I simply excused it as wanting to keep things as accessible as possible for newcomers, but at some point, once the viewership has plateaued (which it did long ago), it’s time to acknowledge that you’re now preaching to the choir, and the finer points have to be discussed.

That never happened, and now they’ve taken this turn to the right.  Kasparian with her “birthing person” meltdown and throwing trans people under the bus, Uygur grifting with his ridiculous “presidential campaign” (he’s not eligible, anyway; he’s not a natural-born citizen), Kasparian now jumping on the bullshit “why I left the Left” bandwagon with the likes of Dave Rubin, Jimmy Dore, and Tim Pool, the obvious catering to the center-left liberals, moderates, and center-right neocons who they spent literal decades correctly attacking and calling out…

It all confirms that I was right to feel rubbed the wrong way by them.

I have found many other voices that give me what I want, like The Majority Report with Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland, the I Doubt It podcast with Jesse Dollemore and Brittany Page, Farron Cousins and his work on The Ring of Fire, David Pakman, Jeff Waldorf, The Leftist Mafia and its members Matt Binder, David Doel, Mike Figueredo, Lance Lasheras, and others.  I still follow Bonnie Carollo and Jeff Wiggans now that they’ve left TYT.  I would still be following Francesca Fiorentini and John Iadarola, as well, if they left TYT (and the moment they do is the moment I start following them again).

None of those people sacrifice detailed research and commentary for the sake of accessibility, and the growth of their respective audiences — while TYT’s audience has demonstrably collapsed — indicates that detail does not inherently make content inaccessible.  Even moreso, it says to me that the deep dives are what people on the left are craving, because they’re not getting them from TYT, they’re definitely not getting them from any traditional media, and they sure as hell aren’t getting them from memes on social media.

I’m not saying any of this to toot my own horn or say “see I told you so.”  I’m not even saying this to present myself as an alternative (because that’s not the purpose of my work).  I’m simply pointing out where I’m coming from and why I find myself forced to agree with the assessment of others that TYT has turned out to be nothing more than a giant grift.  A giant grift that has accomplished many good things and elevated the voices of many good people, mind you, but a grift all the same.

I’m just as disappointed by watching this all unfold as everyone else is.  I wanted to be wrong.  I hoped for better out of them.  Unfortunately, that hope is now gone.

And the most disappointing part of all of this is that we desperately need independent news organizations with massive reach and active audiences in this country, because like I said before, the traditional, corporate-conglomerate-owned media have failed their purpose for existence.  We will not be getting ANY legitimate news from them anymore, especially not with them lining up to kiss Drumpf’s ass left and right (politically and metaphorically).  They were already nearly worthless before.  Now they have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  Independent outlets are our only hope, and TYT had the most money and best position to do something about it.  Now they’re bending the knee for the money.  That’s a devastating blow.

When even the alternatives to the existing systems fail to hold up against attacks, what the hell are we supposed to do?

You may also like

Are you sure want to unlock this post?
Unlock left : 0
Are you sure want to cancel subscription?
-
00:00
00:00
Update Required Flash plugin
-
00:00
00:00