Checking in with John Oliver -- Compounding Pharmacies

Another one for our health care thread.

I ain't scared of reposts

Halloween with Orson and the gang.

The debut production of the Mercury Theatre of the Air, Dracula.




And, of course, the Mercury production of War of the Worlds.



While we're at it, here's a tour de force from Welles' favorite actor, Agnes Moorehead (don't let the corny intro turn you off) Sorry, Wrong Number.

Repost: This view from two years ago is a bit dated, but it still fits in with the great unwinding thread

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat

I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republican Party. I know this can sound overheated and perhaps even a bit crazy. There are few American institutions as long-standing and deeply entrenched as are the Democratic and Republican parties. Proposing that one of them might not be around 10 years from now beggars the imagination and if this story started and stopped with Donald Trump, it would be silly to suggest we were on the verge of  a political cataclysm.

But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.

The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.

The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).


With the scandals:

1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…

2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.

3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.


With the agenda:

1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.

2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.

3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…



Demographics:

As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.

Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.

Tuesday Tweets

... On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge...” - Raymond Chandler, The Red Wind, 1938

— Steve Lawton (@srlawton) October 27, 2019

MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Syrian Refugees To Tout Food Computers That Didn'T Work IEEE Spectrum - IEEE Spectrum https://t.co/3AcZecGUAo

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) October 27, 2019

Very few Horatio Alger stories start with being born the son of a humble CEO.

LMAO. "My grandfather was a cop, okay, and my mother was a schoolteacher..." Why would Donny leave out that his father was the CEO of an ad agency, which he then took over

— Andrew Perez (@andrewperezdc) October 27, 2019

(Thread)

Trump operates by putting people in fear.
This includes Republican Senators.

Once the walls were closing in on Nixon, he resigned.

This National Review article by @RichLowry explains why Trump won’t (reprinted in OK) 👇https://t.co/ETwll0Zw2F

— Teri Kanefield (@Teri_Kanefield) October 26, 2019

A very good traditional epidemiology degree makes you an extraordinarily good technician. Like all good technicians, you have a blueprint to how to do a good study in your field and an impenetrable jargon about how to do things well.

— Dr Joseph Delaney (@Canadian_JACD) October 27, 2019

I’m guilty as charged, of course, but this is not a positive development: One in five newsroom workers lives in New York, Los Angeles, D.C. ⁦@pewresearch⁩ https://t.co/LVQOWZS1IK

— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) October 24, 2019

In the report back to the client, the target had been killed 16 times.

— Tony Haile (@arctictony) October 25, 2019

2,000 employees fired as Adam Neumann walks away with an additional $1.7B — $850,000 per employee https://t.co/peGod1srHj

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) October 22, 2019

Yes, the new WeWork guy actually said "we got to drink our own Kool-aid"

It's remarkable how often the self-awareness meter can't even get a reading on C-level executives. [emphasis added]

In an exclusive recording obtained by Recode, on Wednesday the company’s new executive chairman, Marcelo Claure, SoftBank’s COO and the former CEO of Sprint, addressed WeWork’s worried staff in his first all-hands meeting. He confirmed reported layoffs but he declined to give details about how many jobs, or which ones, will be cut. He did promise that the people who leave will do so “with dignity,” and that the ones who stay will have to work hard to help the company make a historical comeback.
...

So it is definitely a big area of focus because we got a, you know, we got to drink our own Kool-aid, we got to make sure that if we’re selling this magic to others, we got to have this same magic in our spaces, in our first-floor employee workforce. So you can rest assured that what works stays and what doesn’t work, you know ,we’re going to change it and we’re going to innovate to make sure that we have a very high-satisfaction workforce. And we’re going to measure that because it’s easy to say you have a happy workforce, easy to say you have a great culture, but we’re going to measure it and we’re going to be very honest with each other.

For those coming late to the party, you can get a quick introduction here and here.

The maybe-you-aren't-special heuristic

I'm going to make this one quick and messy (I really need a better phone dictation app) because my schedule is getting tight and when this happens, my idea-to-attention span ratio gets even worse than normal, but I want to make sure to get this point in print reasonably quickly because it's likely to feature in some upcoming and ongoing threads.

Everyone is aware of the dangers of assuming that your perspective is representative. There is, however, an opposite error in reasoning which largely goes undiscussed despite occurring frequently and being often just as dangerous.

If we limit ourselves to extremes, assuming that your experience is completely unrepresentative makes even less sense than assuming it's completely representative. If you picked a person at random out of the population, you wouldn't start out with the assumption that he or she was an outlier. You would certainly admit it was possible, after all, n = 1, but you would probably consider it more likely that he or she was somewhere closer to the mean.

At this point, we need to make the distinction between assuming a fact vs considering a possibility. While you shouldn't assume that what you see is what everyone else sees, unless you have some reason to think otherwise, you should always allow for the possibility.

One of the things that struck me listening to This American Life’s coverage of the 2008 financial crisis was that, at every stage of the process, people observed that their part of the system had extremely troubling problems but they were sure that this wasn’t representative of the system as a whole. They were, of course, wrong.

In an age of hype and AstroTurf, it becomes even more important to remember that you may not be the exception. When you find yourself having what seems to be an unusual reaction or holding a minority opinion you should remember that what seems to be a popular consensus is often a facade based on massive marketing and PR campaigns with budgets sometimes hitting the multi billion dollar mark.

I'm drawing a blank for musical accompaniment, so here's a catchy non sequitur for your weekend.

Though we have to draw some inferences to get there, it appears that most, quite possibly all terrestrial superstations have a higher profit margin than Netflix

Another data point in our long-running thread.

On December 10th, 2018, Katz Broadcasting (owned by the E. W. Scripps Company) announced that they would relaunch Court TV as an over-the-air network following the acquisition of the intellectual property rights to the Court TV name and the pre-2008 Court TV original programming library from Turner Broadcasting System and Warner Bros. Entertainment. Scripps announced affiliation deals with Tribune Media and Univision Communications at that date, in addition to existing Scripps-owned stations. Further deals with Meredith Corporation, Nexstar Media Group (which was in the process of acquiring Tribune; the deal closed in September 2019), Tegna, and Quincy Media were announced on May 2, 2019.

The relaunched Court TV features live court coverage with original Court TV anchor Vinnie Politan as lead anchor, Court TV and CNN producers John Alleva and Scott Tufts as vice presidents and managing editors. The network began broadcasting on May 8, 2019.

Busy week, but I want to make a few quick points on this one.

Six years ago, just as terrestrial superstations were taking off, Nielsen released a study claiming that the over-the-air market was small and shrinking. The National Association of Broadcasters said their data showed just the opposite. Every bit of news we've seen since then suggests that Nielsen was wrong.

Not only has the industry (despite a near complete lack of hype) grown at a rapid and, more importantly, sustained clip, but the companies pushing hardest have been the owners of large numbers of TV stations. Not only are they the ones with skin in the game; they also have access to the most complete proprietary data. Pretty much every company in a position to know what's going on has expanded their presence in the market.

Where we do have head to head comparisons, the granddaddy of the industry, MeTV routinely dominates its much better positioned direct competitors like TVland. That's probably why CBS went with Weigel and passed over Viacom when starting Decades.

In addition to more stations constantly popping up, the individual superstations are becoming more ambitious, which brings us to a couple of points specifically about CourtTV. First, I believe this is the first case of a cable channel (even a dormant one) making the transition to OTA. CourtTV is still a brand of some value and considerable name recognition. The fact that it's showing up over the air rather than on cable tells you something about the growth and profit potential of the two media.

Second, this was not done on the cheap by Scripps. They not only acquired the original name and talent rather than putting together a knock-off; they went one step further and bought the original content library. That's a strong indicator of a serious long term commitment.

(By comparison, at least one very heavily hyped media company own far less of  its content than most people including journalists and investors realize, but that's a topic for another post.)

Read the whole thing. Make notes. We'll be coming back to this.

Jeffrey Funk has a new essay up ("What’s Behind Technological Hype?"), and if you've been following any of our hype economy threads, you definitely need to check it out.

Online tech-hyping articles are now driven by the same dynamics as fake news. Journalists, bloggers, and websites prioritize page views and therefore say more positive things to attract viewers, while social media works as an amplifier. Journalists become “content marketers,” often hired by start-ups and universities to promote new technologies. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, university public relation offices, entrepreneurship programs, and professors who benefit from the promotion of new technologies all end up sharing an interest in increasing the level of hype.

Sometimes the beliefs behind political and technology hype merge. Think of libertarians who love cryptocurrencies, defense hawks who love new fighter jets, adventurers who think space travel is human destiny, train buffs who love hyperloop, health care professionals who love any technology that might prolong lives, anticorruption crusaders who love blockchain, social entrepreneurs who love financial technology (fintech), and environmentalists who love renewable energy and electric vehicles. Many of these special interest groups often believe their overall goals are far more important than more practical issues such as cost, performance, economic feasibility, and profitability, a problem made worse by the increasing polarization of the American public along ideological lines. As these special interests push their technologies on social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, they create echo chambers in which people repeat the same message until it becomes an unquestioned mantra, even though few economic details are presented.

And when one overhyped technology fails to solve the world’s problems, there is always another waiting to be hyped. Train buffs replaced magnetically levitated trains with hyperloop, social entrepreneurs replaced microfinance (remember Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus?) with fintech, drug companies replaced stem cells with gene editing, and environmentalists have forgotten about nuclear fusion, solar water heaters, hydrogen vehicles, and cellulosic ethanol. Hype-driven economic disappointments seem never to dampen enthusiasm for new cycles of irrational exuberance.

Tuesday Tweets

Check out the thread

[1/4] Ok this is really funny, check this out.
I was in the process of booking a flight via @OneTravel. Trying to make me book ASAP, they claimed: "38 people are looking at this flight".
Whoa, 38 is a lot, I have to hurry up. But first I have to check how they came up with 38 >> pic.twitter.com/UaGhaiCQrR

— Ophir Harpaz (@OphirHarpaz) October 16, 2019

This is a real chyron, I promise I did not photoshop it, I feel like that's an important thing to point out in this situation pic.twitter.com/hj6Tm77gZu

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) October 18, 2019

More of a retcon than a retrofit, but still...

Mark Zuckerberg just publicly retrofit the reason for founding Facebook from a tool that could rate the attractiveness of female college students to an attempt to right the wrongs of the leadup to the Iraq War. You can't make this up

— Joe Bernstein (@Bernstein) October 17, 2019

The fake origin story of Facebook written for Mark Zuckerberg by the team of GOP political operatives who runs their DC office versus contemporaneous coverage of Facebook’s origins. pic.twitter.com/dUo7Yw4PrT

— Matthew EEEEK!-lesias (@mattyglesias) October 17, 2019

From our favorite Gawker-killing, anti-women's suffrage, vampiric lord of Ithuvania.

This excerpt from an occurrence in Peter Thiel's Stanford class on startups is a classic example of how "culture fit" is just tech company code for discrimination.

Any rejection based on "culture fit" when candidate is competent is usually sexism/racism/classism. https://t.co/0Sr84HbEnf

— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) October 19, 2019

Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free https://t.co/T88U3WbA9i

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 19, 2019

Disney remains one of the best arguments against media consolidation.

ESPN is of course, owned by Disney, which has huge commercial interests in China. A senior ESPN executive specifically instructed ESPN staff to play down the NBA/China controversy when it first broke. https://t.co/yIDG7S8npn

— Matt Schrader (@tombschrader) October 19, 2019

There is no defensible journalistic rationale for how differently these stories were played. pic.twitter.com/hodQ0H4AwU

— Dan Lavoie (@djlavoie) October 19, 2019

Buried in this piece about the streaming rights for South Park likely selling for $500 million (!) -- Apple isn't bidding because they don't want to upset China. https://t.co/7OSVNrndYT

— Adam Conover (@adamconover) October 19, 2019

Twilight of the Unicorns -- Blue Apron and the importance of unasked questions

Blue Apron IPO'd in June 2017 at a $2bn valuation

Yesterday, it closed at a stock price of $9.01, representing a market cap of just under $120mm

What happened and what can we learn?

— Adam Keesling (@adam_keesling) September 25, 2019

When business historians try to make sense of the rise and fall of companies like Wework and Uber, the biggest challenge will be trying to reconstruct the thought processes of seemingly rational investors  and analysts. While there will probably be an inclination to dismiss the whole thing as a madness of crowds, if you followed the events closely in real time, the decisions are a bit more explicable if not defensible.

Perhaps the first thing these future historians will have to understand is the extent to which influential people were both invested in and protective of the age of innovation narrative and the hype economy. If you'll pardon the expression, the "thought leaders" circa 2010 to 2020 firmly believed that they were in the center of a period of wondrous developments where all of the old rules had gone away and the next big thing was just around the corner. This narrative didn't just give them an excuse to dismiss what should have been glaringly obvious flaws in these overhyped business plans; it made them openly hostile to the very mindset which raised doubts and ask disturbing questions.

Even after one of these multibillion-dollar borderline Ponzi schemes collapsed, there was a real reluctance to acknowledge the herd of elephants that had been stomping about the room from the beginning. With Blue Apron, the lead elephant in the metaphor was competition. Meal kits (the culinary equivalent of a canned hunt) are very probably limited to a niche market, but more importantly, it is a market with no barriers to entry and a truly daunting queue of well positioned potential competitors with deep pockets, economies of scale, and well-established brands. There's Amazon/Whole Foods, of course. Add to that Walmart, the Kroger and Safeway groups and other major grocery store chains all of which have been edging into the home delivery space for a while, and fast casual places like Macaroni Grill which would be a natural fit. Then there are celebrity chefs and Food Network personalities who might partner with companies such as Uber Eats and that's far from an exhaustive list.

Blue Apron spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to popularized the idea of home delivery meal kits, but even if they had succeeded, they never could have cashed in on anything more than a limited scale. The market would have immediately become so intensely competitive that the profit margins necessary to justify Blue Apron's valuation would have been impossible.

These issues have been obvious from the beginning, but even now analysts are reluctant to bring them up. When you start pulling one that thread, who knows what will unravel.

More of Tex Avery's World of the Future

The T.V. of Tomorrow


The House of Tomorrow

Disappointed by the omission of MoviePass, but...

When we try to make sense of the unicorn delusion years from now, we'll want to revisit this passage by Derek Thompson. [emphasis added]

Several weeks ago, I met up with a friend in New York who suggested we grab a bite at a Scottish bar in the West Village. He had booked the table through something called Seated, a restaurant app that pays users who make reservations on the platform. We ordered two cocktails each, along with some food. And in exchange for the hard labor of drinking whiskey, the app awarded us $30 in credits redeemable at a variety of retailers.

I am never offended by freebies. But this arrangement seemed almost obscenely generous. To throw cash at people every time they walk into a restaurant does not sound like a business. It sounds like a plot to lose money as fast as possible—or to provide New Yorkers, who are constantly dining out, with a kind of minimum basic income.

“How does this thing make any sense?” I asked my friend.

“I don’t know if it makes sense, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last,” he said, pausing to scroll through redemption options. “So, do you want your half in Amazon credits or Starbucks?”

I don’t know if it makes sense, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last. Is there a better epitaph for this age of consumer technology?

Starting about a decade ago, a fleet of well-known start-ups promised to change the way we work, work out, eat, shop, cook, commute, and sleep. These lifestyle-adjustment companies were so influential that wannabe entrepreneurs saw them as a template, flooding Silicon Valley with “Uber for X” pitches.

But as their promises soared, their profits didn’t. It’s easy to spend all day riding unicorns whose most magical property is their ability to combine high valuations with persistently negative earnings—something I’ve pointed out before. If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that’s three more brands that have never record a dime in earnings, or have seen their valuations fall by more than 50 percent.

Companies with monopsony power abuse monopsony power

More competent evil from Amazon reported by Jay Greene of the remarkably independent Washington Post.

SEATTLE — When Jeff Peterson’s Amazon seller account was hacked recently, he frantically tried to reach Amazon’s customer service for help restoring access to his sports memorabilia store.

As nearly 4,000 fraudulent orders rang up, the Garden Grove, Calif.-based seller called Amazon’s seller support line, phoned its main customer service number, reached out via a separate account on its Canadian site, and even sent an email to chief executive Jeff Bezos. Nothing worked.

“I can’t get any answers from Amazon at all to fix this,” Peterson said, as negative reviews of his service accumulated, decimating his business.

One thing he hadn’t done was pay as much as $5,000 a month for a program Amazon offers sellers as a way to get quick help from a real person.

Amazon has become a powerful marketplace alongside its role as an online retailer, with more than 2.5 million third-party sellers who have become global businesses on its platform. Early on, Amazon compelled sellers to use its warehouses to guarantee speedy Prime shipping, in addition to other programs that largely benefited consumers. But now, sellers and former employees familiar with Amazon’s internal strategy say the company is increasingly focused on boosting its profits on the backs of its sellers — often without any clear upside for customers.

The services include charging sellers thousands of dollars to speak to account managers, as well as making it necessary to purchase ads to guarantee the top spot on a search page. Plus, Amazon is aggressively pushing its own brands — something that may be cheaper for consumers in the short run, but demonstrates its overall power over pricing and merchandise on the site. That gives it an advantage over rival products and sellers who rely on Amazon for their livelihood and have few alternatives if they want to thrive selling online.

Amazon says its success is dependent on those sellers and insists it always prioritizes shoppers.

As much as a third of every dollar merchants make goes back to Amazon, according to consultants and sellers. That helped Amazon generate $42.7 billion in revenue from seller services such as fees and commissions last year, a number that has nearly doubled in two years.

That has drawn the attention of regulators and lawmakers both in the U.S. and abroad, who are investigating Amazon and other large tech companies for potential violations of antitrust law and abusing dominant marketplace power. Traditionally, U.S. regulators have focused on consumer harm, but officials recently emphasized the need to look at the way several tech giants are using their market clout to lower quality, reduce innovation and diminish consumer privacy as officials consider regulating giants of the digital economy.

Tuesday Tweets (mostly non-political edition)

I once told someone from Uber that I was a transportation writer, and they said, "So why are you writing about us? We're a tech company." https://t.co/0LUddvONCa

— Laura J. "𝔣𝔞𝔦𝔯 𝔠𝔬𝔫𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔠𝔱 𝔫𝔬𝔴" Nelson (@laura_nelson) October 14, 2019

Maybe Malcolm Gladwell can work this into his next book.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 12, 2019

 

Today at @theprospect we have the very first excerpt from @matthewstoller's stunning book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
This one is all about Andrew Mellon, who ran the country and the economy in the 1920s. https://t.co/FhYkRaAxEo

— David Dayen (@ddayen) October 14, 2019

This is a lie: “Testing is done. It works. We are still working out funding and regulatory issues, but we are excited about it,” said Kristen Hammer, Manager of Business Development, with Virgin Hyperloop One.
https://t.co/xwt4RCzHVo

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 6, 2019

Instead we're getting this PR war of attrition against expert opinion culminating in this endless roadshow. They've already got us talking about public private partnerships and started tax money flowing for a system that most engineers say will never be viable.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 6, 2019

In a rare show of panic, other candidates are “running”.

— (((Brian Phillips))) (@blessdb1963) October 7, 2019

Voom pilot told me that our 30 mile, 15 minute helicopter trip burned 10 gallons of fuel. An entire tank of gas for a small car is 12. So, generating learnings, and lots and lots of greenhouse gas! https://t.co/ambfJoKtUs

— undeath & afterlife of ghastly american cities (@mslaurabliss) October 4, 2019

 

NEW: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hosting secretive talks & off-the-record dinners with conservative influencers in recent months to discuss free speech and partnerships. Among the participants: Tucker Carlson & Lindsey Graham. scoop w/@dlippman:https://t.co/n5IV0N66X4

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) October 14, 2019

 

No.

https://t.co/OYzGNNkjty

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 6, 2019

This is an extraordinarily important point. Even taking into account the difference between primaries and general elections, this comparative disinterest in a candidate's heart attack compared to that prompted by a fainting spell is striking. https://t.co/Y2mjNTOWBd

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 5, 2019

Today is also one of those days when making sense of events actually distorts them, because sense is what they fundamentally do not make. https://t.co/mqwZy5B8Yr

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 14, 2019

Trump as stressor -- Shep Smith edition

This is another one of those threads that goes back three of four years. The conservative movement's media strategy proved to be remarkably effective for a long time, but there waere always tensions and potential instability.

It only worked as long as things weren't pushed too far. With the mainstream press this meant keeping the spin just within the bounds of plausibility.

If you remember the elections of 2000 and 2004, you will probably recall talk of Karl Rove and his mastery of "political jujitsu." It was generally discussed as if it were some sort of mystical Jedi mind trick that allowed Rove to make strings into weaknesses and weaknesses into strengths. Mainly, it came down to the realization that most reporters would respond to obvious lies with straight faces and no follow-up questions.

In 2004, I remember Republican operatives making the argument that George W. Bush's military record compared favorably with that of John Kerry. Just to review, Kerry was a legitimate war hero in terms of courage, sacrifice, and effectiveness. On the other side of the ledger, even if we push aside all of the accusations and contested points about favoritism and completion of requirements, there is a relatively cushy stint in the National Guard.

These and other clearly untrue statements were usually allowed to stand largely because this was a symbiotic relationship. It was in both the source's and the journalist's interests to keep this relationship going and not to push the boundaries in either direction.

Another component was keeping a veneer of respectability on Fox News. This rested primarily on two journalists, Chris Wallace and Shep Smith. For decades, you could find actual news on  Fox, even though the majority of the programming consisted of spin, propaganda and often outright disinformation. These two types of shows could coexist because there was some overlap, or at least proximity, between the two narratives.

Over the past few years, the two versions have drifted so far apart that something has to break. Breakage, sharp and sudden, is what we saw last week. To get a sense of just how unexpected, check out the reactions in this clip. Cavuto and Roberts were professional enough to keep talking but they couldn't hide their shock.

Neil Cavuto and John Roberts clearly blind-sided by Shep Smith departure pic.twitter.com/36ijhC8th6

— Nicole Lafond (@Nicole_Lafond) October 11, 2019