Public departures have been one of the biggest media stories of the summer. The New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss walked off the job in July, claiming the newspaper was now being edited by woke Twitter users. Andrew Sullivan used his last New York column to assert that he was being let go because his coworkers didnt like him. (Sullivans departure occurred amid larger layoffs at Vox Media, which owns New York.) Earlier this week, MSNBC producer Ariana Pekary said goodbye to the liberal cable news network because its single-minded pursuit of ratings (and the advertising dollars that follow) stokes national division and blocks diversity of thought.

Pekary ended her post by writing, More than ever, Im craving a full and civil discourse. This was catnip for conservative media and other opponents of cancel culture, which turned a short blog post by a hitherto unknown journalist into a multi-day smorgasbord of content. Here was proof that what liberals have been saying about Fox News for years was also true about MSNBC. It was proof that the left is more concerned with coddling its own than pursuing the truth. As one senior producer quoted by Pekary said, Our viewers dont really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.

Pekary posted a follow-up a day later underlining that she felt economic pressure, not ideological commitments, was ruining cable news. But at that point, it was too late: Her resignation had already become chum.

Whats striking about Pekarys letter, however, isnt what it says about the news media in 2020. It doesnt say anything about MSNBC or cable news that wasnt also true two decades ago. Its like a Jon Stewart bit without the humor: Cable news is simply not incentivized to be informative. In the social media era, when people can switch their attention at any point, this situation has gotten even worse, encouraging networks to turn their viewers into partisan junkies who dont change the channel because they need a fix that tells them theyre right about everything (and that the other side is wrong).

No one could deny MSNBCs turn toward the conspiratorial in the Trump era. During the Mueller investigation, Rachel Maddow at times went full Glenn Beck, to the point that you almost expected her to start scribbling on a blackboard. The networks overheated analysis of every turn in that investigation, big and small, led its captive audience to believe that the special prosecutor was about to uncover something huge. As Jacob Bacharach wrote in The New Republic last year, MSNBC has the strange simultaneity common to prestige TV: It is at once vast and circumscribed. A wider world intrudes, but the same central heroes and villains show up, week after week.

More:

The Problem With MSNBC Isn't That It's Too Liberal - The New Republic