GQ puts out a lot of useless lists throughout the year, but 2017’s Least Influential People has officially become one of my Favorites of All Time.
Leading the list (rightly) are all the perverts of 2017. Or as GQ calls them, “All the Bad Men.” This list includes Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, and Harvey Weinstein.
But GQ’s ire really came out over disgraced Today Show host Matt Lauer, of which they said, “Matt Lauer was television mayonnaise. It is a damning indictment of our culture that someone that bland and eminently worthless was able to command $25 million a year and occupy his own fiefdom within NBC.”
But that’s not what makes this list a favorite.
Number 2 on the list? Formerly of The Washington Posts’s The Fix and current CNN contributor Chris Cillizza.
It’s not every day someone who induces eye-rolls at every turn in his written and television “analysis” gets the recognition he truly deserves. And this GQ mention is surely the most accurate.
I won’t deny that while Cillizza seems like an affable guy (I’ve never met him), his contributions to any news story, from politics to cultural, is at best boring tripe.
I have CNN on a lot throughout the day and no one can make Brooke Baldwin’s facial expression look like she’s dying inside more than when she asks for a response from Cillizza.
Of the man formerly known on Twitter as @TheFix, GQ said,
Everyone in media got laid off in 2017, but you know who thrived? You know who networks find TRULY valuable? It’s a sociopathic political junkie, an ur-Halperin, who has carved out his own niche in punditry by saying absolutely nothing:
Donald Trump hasn't had many good days as president. Tuesday was one.https://t.co/hRbQH4aVlG
— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) October 25, 2017
The key to understanding Trump: He likes people who like him. He hates people who don't like him.
That's it.
— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) September 23, 2017
If Roy Moore wins now, I want to be on record as officially stunned
— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) November 13, 2017
Chris Cillizza is the ideal embodiment of the quietly damnable state of the mainstream media. He is every White House press-corps member dutifully chuckling at Sarah Sanders’ jokes. He is every “let’s hear both sides” TV panel where a white supremacist gets treated to a seat at the table. He lives in a world where politics is entirely about optics and branding, and where the idea of journalism doubling as activism is plainly rude. He is Darren Rovell, but for politics.
Amen, brothers.
Others in the mainstream media who made the list are “David Brooks and the New York Times op-ed section.”
I bring this up mostly to point out that GQ singled out RedState’s own former Editor-in-Chief, Erick Erickson, as an example of someone The New York Times shouldn’t allow to grace their opinion pages.
This year, they gave op-ed space to Erik Prince AND Erick Erickson. All the bad Eri(c)ks. They are still striving to be “balanced” just to appease a handful of wingnut hate-readers who will never be appeased.
Trying to achieve balance in opinion coverage? How dare they!
And, thus, this makes GQ’s list of the Least Influential People of 2017 an official favorite.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member