The decisions that Maddow makes go a long way toward defining what MSNBC is, too. “We have a few decisions to make about who we are as a show.” “We don’t do crime, but it’s an interesting story,” she said, as much to herself as to the two dozen producers and researchers clustered around her. She was standing in front of a whiteboard that had a list of twenty-nine possible topics for that night’s show, starting with “Flake, Ayotte waffle on guns” and ending with “Emergency contraception case before a judge today.” This was her daily afternoon meeting, held in a scruffy corner of the fourth floor of Rockefeller Center, beneath a low dropped ceiling. “I don’t know what to do about the Cleveland thing,” Maddow said. Although her analysis is reliably liberal, she likes to surprise viewers with obscure historical anecdotes and nimble shifts in tone the elections in Iran, apparently, were both “geostrategically important” and “amazeballs.” Maddow plays the cheerful docent, often taking viewers on a tour of the conservative movement, where she invariably finds something that inspires her not to anger but to joyful incredulity. But “The Rachel Maddow Show,” which airs every weeknight at nine, is known for even-tempered political discussion, not for screaming headlines. (In the interview that made him a star, Ramsey reported that a neighbor had told him, “You got some big testicles to pull this off, bro.”) Maddow is a cable-news star: the defining voice of MSNBC, which makes her, surely, the most influential liberal pundit in the country.
It was the kind of story that cable news loves: three women had been abducted and held hostage for years, until a garrulous local man named Charles Ramsey helped kick down the door of the house where they were kept. When the news broke-“ CLEVELAND KIDNAPPING VICTIMS FREE”-Rachel Maddow wasn’t sure she had much to add. The progressive cable news network has two problems these days: there’s not enough political drama, and there’s too much news.
0 kommentar(er)
