UPDATE: Will likely use this chapter though see also the second chapter with Maddow in title relating to Jay Rosen’s View From Nowhere Journalism

With all my criticism of the MSM-which I believe to be justified here is a chapter about someone who does a lot right: Rachel Maddow. It’s not just that she dominates the cable ratings but why she does that is so great about her.

Here’s what I wrote about her back on August 27 after the news came about that she was again sweeping the ratings:

That Rachel Maddow rules-that she is simply THE BEST on cable news, period, bar none is a simple self evident fact.

Or at least so I and many others believe.

Q2 2017 Ratings: Rachel Maddow Has the No. 1 Cable News Show Among Adults 25-54

Turns out despite what MSNBC President Andrew Lack wants to believe-liberalism sells and we’re buying.

She and MSNBC are creaming Sean Hannity and Fox News.

“For Wednesday, Aug. 16, MSNBC averaged 1.52 million viewers for the total day across all of cable, edging out second place Fox News, who averaged 1.5 million. CNN ranked fourth among all cable networks for the day with 1.13 million total viewers. Nickelodeon was third with 1.17 million. However, in the key adults 25-54 demographic, CNN was number one among the cable news networks for the total day, averaging 381,000 viewers in that measure. Fox News was second in the demo for total day with 353,000 viewers, and MSNBC was third with 343,000.”

MSNBC Ranks as No. 1 Cable Network in Total Viewers for First Time Ever

And-of course-Maddow is the biggest primetime draw, period.

“Across all of broadcast in primetime, Wednesday’s episodes of “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” were among the top 10 shows of the night in total viewers, with Maddow averaging 3.25 million viewers at 9 p.m. and O’Donnell averaging 2.54 million at 10. They were both the highest-rated and most-watched cable news programs in their respective time slots, with Maddow also nabbing 778,00 viewers in the key demo and O’Donnell nabbing 597,000.”

Liberalism sells-and we’re buying! To paraprhase Megadeth.

https://lastmenandovermen.com/2017/08/24/rachel-maddow-rules/

But what I find most gratifying about Maddow’s success is why she rules. 

And what I really love is she totally goes against the grain of what is supposed to work on cable news-a la the CNN model. You know the CNN model-lots of guests, lots of squabbling partisans. Staying away from being too smart for fear of going beyond what the audience already knows or believes.

Also that liberalism has a hard time selling.

1. Maddow proves every night the Voice of God model still works. In a way it’s ironic as the VOG model is thought of as a male model-a la Dan Rather-Ted Koppell-Tom Brokaw.

Of course the GOP was able to destroy Rather based on nothing-he did nothing wrong. No one showed that anything he reported about W and his National Guard service was false. This happens sometimes-like recently some CNN reporters were let go though nothing they reported about Anthony Scaramucci was in any way shown to be false.

With Rather’s demise the VOG model was said to be a relic of the past-today’s cable audiences don’t have the time or patience for long monologues.

But Maddow as a woman is the one news host in the tradition of the old VOG model. She’s not afraid of the mic and isn’t constantly trying to delegate it to an endless array of guests.

What she has is an unparalleled talent to give a great monologue where she’s so good you just can’t pull yourself away even for one moment. She’s able to do a running, compelling monologue for 25 minutes and show no signs of breaking a sweat.

Even many of the other liberal hosts get on my nerves as they’re afraid of the mic. They’re afraid to have it on them to talk too long. Give me a Chris Matthew who talks too much over the host who starts the show with 20 different guests in the room and spends the first 15 minutes just introducing them all and asking everyone about their damn weekend.

Contrary to the CNN model, a host that can talk is best. Give me a host who talks too much over one who talks like a bird eats they’re so busy deferring to some guest to talk.

Maddow has guests but not too many and these guests are always relevant to what she’s been saying. They augment her own monologue. Not like other shows where you suspect the host needs people to help them fill up 60 minutes. She never needs a guest just for the sake of having a guest.

Her guests really add something to her narrative.

What I love about Maddow is she’s ready to go right away. Right away: Very important show tonight, a lot to get to, huge amount of news tonight and I’m strapped in. I can’t miss a second of her. Which brings us to 2.

2. Maddow knows her audience. She knows about viewers like me and my many liberal Democrat friends on Twitter.

CNN aims for viewers who are at best middling in terms of being informed. Maddow knows that viewers like us are already very informed. I mean it’s hard to find a story in this day and age we haven’t already read or seen, because we’re on Twitter and the Internet all day keeping up. I know the Cillizza types love to mock liberal Twitter but it’s nothing if not highly informed.

What Maddow does then is figure out how to come up with different angles that aren’t being covered elsewhere. She tries to do more than just report an ad hoc bunch of different stories but instead weaves them together in a larger narrative.

And with the Russia story her skills have been especially welcome. Which brings us to 3.

3. Russia is NOT FAKE NEWS. It is simply the biggest story of the Trump so-called Presidency, maybe the biggest story in U.S. history-at least domestically.

Maddow shows that great content has a ready audience and that today and for the near future, there is no bigger story than Russia.

One problem with Fox is that they pretend Russia isn’t happening.

So there are a few big takeaways of Maddow’s success:

A. Russia is simply the biggest story of our age-nothing else comes close and she does tremendous analysis on it every night.

B. The Voice of God model still works-and it works for a woman which shows it’s not a purely gendered style.

C. But another thing I love about Rachel is her love and feel for history, her way of beginning every show with some historical allusion with the task for the viewer being to figure out how this seemingly random historical allusion connects to the biggest stories of the day.

This is something she has this great sense of: connecting the constant onslaught of daily news into the 30,000 foot view where it can be put in a historical perspective.

None of this is to say I don’t love the other MSNBC hosts. Chris Hayes for me is the show I watch when I just want a quick summary of the days big stories-maybe I’m behind schedule and want to get to bed soon but I want to see a sort of quick collage of all the days biggest stories.

Over time Hayes has come to really make the Russia story his as well-which is just smart as it’s what the liberal-Democratic base wants.

There had been talk of letting Lawrence O’Donnell go-despite his being number 2 in cable news anchor ratings-just behind Maddow but the liberal viewers made it clear they would not stand for it and Lawrence got renewed.

I still think that he’s at his best when he starts the show with a long monologue. He’s got a real talent for it. Despite the prevalence of the CNN model there’s nothing  better than a host that can do a nice, long monologue.

UPDATE: Rachel is now the number one cable show-supplanting Sean Hannity.

Honestly if anything gives me hope in the American people this is it.

Turns out that a show like Rachel based on facts-ie the opposite of the Sean Hannity Fox News model- and that also rejects the CNN model of 50 guests per segment is not just quality tv but a ratings bonanza.

As for the Hannity model the most apt name for it these days is Hillary Clinton News-Hannity mentions her-almost three years since her fake ‘loss’- a stunning 85% of his shows. 

FN: If I have a criticism it’s that since the Mueller Report-really since Bill Barr’s fake exoneration letter the MSM as a whole has decided the entire scandal of Russian collusion is over though it’s really not-the MR confirms that collusion did happen in spades. But the Beltway has largely taken Barr’s fake exoneration for the narrative.

At times I’ve wondered if even the late night MSNBC hosts have pulled back a little-the clear desire of the MSM in general has been to ‘move on from Mueller’-Kasie Hunt flatly declared ‘people are tired of Mueller’ to treating 2020 like some normal horse race.

For the most part I do think though that the Liberal Trinity-Hayes-Maddow-Lawrence-and to an extent Chris Matthews and Ari Melber-have done a pretty good job. With the Democrats now passing guidelines for their impeachment inquiry-will the MSM as a whole stop ignoring impeachment-beyond the ‘smart take’ that it ‘plays into the ‘President’s’ hands?’

End of FN.

UPDATE:

This Is the Moment Rachel Maddow Has Been Waiting For

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/magazine/rachel-maddow-trump.html

As the Mueller investigation limped to its conclusion, Paul Farhi, a media columnist at The Washington Post, rhetorically rolled his eyes at how Maddow “won’t let the Mueller probe go.”

I know what so the ‘President’ won his Office by colluding with Russia-I mean who cares? Can’t we get to the important subjects now like Bifen’s Gaffes or Warren’s DNA test? It’s subjects like those that really matter to the nation. 

And, of course, prior to Ukraine if you’re listening that’s what the MSM tried to do ‘let the Mueller probe go’-stolen election? Boring! Let’s have more segments navel gazing about the brilliant strategy behind Trump’s latest ignorant, offensive tweet. Here we are 30 months in to Trump’s fake ‘Presidency’ and so few pundits apparently have read Masha Gessen who’s analysis of MSM analysis of Trump remains spot on: he doesn’t play chess he throws the pieces around the board but the MSM acts as if he’s playing chess if a highly innovative and unconventional brand: You see Chuck (Todd) the ‘President’ is a counter puncher. 

Yes-Mr. Farhi that’s much more interesting than belaboring the fact that an election was stolen-faciliated in large part by the MSM’s own awful coverage-BUT HER EMAILS!

Then the whistle-blower story broke. Over the week that Pelosi called for an impeachment inquiry, Maddow’s ratings shot up to 3.3 million. On her show, she compared the day’s news to a Lazy Susan sitting on the countertop of world affairs. Slowly but surely, all her obsessions were coming back into view — the dirty international energy industry, the scummy Manafort, the American president accused of lobbying a foreign power to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, the Russia connection, the specter of impeachment. (Many of the players she discussed make appearances in “Blowout,” itself a sweeping narrative of international corruption looming over American democracy.) This new scandal felt “like a rerun” of Russiagate, she said, all the way down to the same cast of characters, presenting a rare opportunity in political news: a do-over.

Maddow on the development of her-brilliant Voice of God format:

From the very beginning of her show, Maddow knew she would never host partisan debate as blood sport. “I spent a long time doing the left-and-right, ‘Punch and Judy’ thing,” she said. “You know, two monkeys tied to each other in a cage.” She added, “That’s asking people to create the kinetic illusion of conflict so that we enjoy the sparring and nobody learns anything.” But she still believed there were insights to be found on the right. In the show’s early days, she invited on Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative three-time presidential candidate who was an MSNBC contributor at the time, for a regular segment called “It’s Pat,” where she called him her “fake uncle” and drew him into friendly debates.

This is an unappreciated dimension of Maddow

Since Trump’s inauguration, an anxiety has arisen among the media commentariat over Maddow’s role. When NBC selected her to help moderate the first Democratic presidential debate, Farhi raised an eyebrow. The Times distanced its reporters who cover political subjects from her program over what it viewed as a “sharply opinionated” orientation. But these critiques do not track with her sense of self. She votes in Massachusetts, where she and Mikula retreat on the weekends, but says she registers a party affiliation only shortly before the primaries and then unregisters shortly afterward. She declined to ask anyone to write a blurb for “Blowout” because she considers the process ethically compromising. It’s better, in her business, not to feel as if she owes anyone a favor.

She really doesn’t opine-she rarely refers to her own views  and while liberal Dem partisans like me love her show I’ve only recently noticed that she doesn’t tell us her views-arguably she shows them.

Interesting bit about her conversations with Ailes

Still, Maddow seeks out the views of her adversaries. At the 2011 Obama White House Christmas party, she struck up a conversation with Ailes. She asked him for tips, and he gave her notes on her angles, her affect, her presentation. He blurbed her first book, “Drift,” writing: “People who like Rachel will love the book. People who don’t will get angry, but aggressive debate is good for America.”

They did not talk much about politics. “He was a freaking very conspiratorial, very paranoid, very right-wing guy,” she said. “That was not an act. That was real.”

Of course, not had they discussed politics they couldn’t have stayed in the same room very long.

Her interest was in his mastery of cable news and how he molded his talent. “I still think that there is some Roger Ailes special sauce there that nobody has quite figured out and that I used to ask him about all the time,” she said. “There’s this annoying word, ‘authenticity’: That’s part of it. There’s trustworthiness: That’s part of it. There’s likability: That’s part of it. There’s humor: That’s part of it. There’s gravitas: That’s part of it,” she said. Ailes died in 2017, and, she told me, “I regret that I never figured it out before he passed.”

Another interesting bit about an observation fromTucker Carlson.

When Maddow’s old debate partner Tucker Carlson, who hosts the 8 p.m. hour over on Fox News, goes off the air, he told me, he often walks out the back of his studio and into his office, where he catches the beginning of Maddow’s show. In the TV news business, Maddow is known for her unique approach to the “A block,” the opening act of the show before it cuts to commercial break. Rarely does she lead with the news. Instead, she backs into it, charging into a tale of some seemingly unrelated historical anecdote or long-lost news figure that zags unexpectedly toward a news peg. As her show dilates time, it imbues the day’s news with a sense of world-historical climax. The day after the sitting president was targeted for impeachment, one of her chyrons read, “LEAD PROSECUTOR IN AGNEW CASE WAS REPUBLICAN GEORGE BEAL.”

Recently, as Carlson was taking off his makeup and chatting with producers, they turned the volume up and watched her for 15 minutes, transfixed. “It was a legitimately esoteric story,” he told me in a tone of genuine admiration. “It was about Donald Trump’s campaign plane or something. I never fully understood the point she was making, but I found it totally compelling.”

I think what this points to is she is that rare liberal host who has figured out the aesthetics of American politics. If you go back 20 years-in the time when talk radio dominated-before the rise of cable and the Internet-the conservatives totally dominated talk radio. Why this was no doubt was largely the biases of station managers at terrestrial radio-they tend to hew conservative.

But it’s also a fact that the conservatives tended to have a much better appreciation of the aesthetic aspect of politics. For the most part liberal shows didn’t understand that well.

The paradox is Maddow is what Bannon called her-a-refind phrase.

I have mixed feelings about her extreme modesty here-to be clear it’s totally sincere.

This summer, in the calm before the storm, I sat with Maddow in her office, and we discussed the perception, from both her fans and her critics, that she is a player in all this drama. “If anyone’s counting on me to make anything happen in the world,” she told me, “I am a bad thing to count on.”

For many of us she’s been a very important resource and sanctuary during the age of Trump’s fake ‘Presidency.’

She may well not see herself that way-and not wish to-but for many in the #Resistance she brings coherence into a chaotic irrational world. Even if she doesn’t’ advocate anything her analysis advocates it-why else is she such a polarizing figure?