Seems the ratings at MSNBC have been falling and it's giving republicans the warm fuzzies because we Liberals are tuning out. As Digby notes, it seems to be happening across the blogosphere as well.
There are a number of reasons this could be so--it's not an election year and I don't think the enthusiasm is quite the same in off years. President Obama hasn't exactly been inspiring. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi make the Cowardly Lion look like fucking Audie Murphy. There's also the fact that we Liberals have never tuned into radio and TV quite like conservatives do. And being in power (at least the Presidency and the Senate) always makes for a bit more complacency.
But as someone who rarely watches MSNBC anymore (and I used to be a regular viewer, as in every night, sometimes watching the same show twice), I wonder if the people who have tuned out have noticed what I've noticed: the station is suffering (at least the nightly shows, I'm not home during the day) from a terminal case of tin man's disease--absolutely no heart.
Don't think so? Watch the way Rachel Maddow gets all glassy eyed when some foreign policy wonk is discussing drone strikes, though she doesn't have nearly the same reaction when discussing striking fast food workers. Or Chris Hayes when he has a panel discussion on climate change. Or Lawrence O"Donnell when he's taking about the workings of the Senate. Christ, Ed Schultz was about as clumsy on air as I would be wearing a tutu and performing Swan Lake on a Detroit street corner, but his love for ordinary Americans was a joy to watch. Most of the time watching MSNBC anymore I get the feeling their big three are a lot more interested in extolling their intellectual bona fides than they are in the problems of everyday America.
Don't get me wrong--I think Guantanamo and the use of drone strikes are antithetical to everything America stands for. I know climate change is real...but these days, I'm a lot more concerned with my family making it from payday to payday than I am about how much Arctic ice will be left a hundred years after I'm dead.
And I'd be willing to be there are a lot of Liberals in the same boat as me.
Peace,
emaycee
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I have never really watched because I've always felt this way about them. With that said, the issues they're talking about (climate change, the Senate, etc.) directly involve the poor.
ReplyDeleteClimate change will disproportionately effect (Now that I have a doctorate, I think I should know if I'm using the right one of those. But I do not.) the poor. I wrote a paper about this very thing, and without linking to a million things, you'll just have to trust me that it is true.
The Senate's inaction is a large part of the reason that nothing gets done about the poor.
Hell, I could even find a tie between the poor and drone strikes, but that's not the point. The point is that while they're talking about those issues, they're not relating them to the poor. I completely agree that it's about "their intellectual bona fides" more than anything else. But I guess I've always felt that way.
I don't mean to knock you for watching them in the past, but just to say that I'm not surprised. I simply wanted to point out that it's not that they're talking about the wrong issues, but rather that they're talking about the wrong aspect of those issues. Perhaps that's unnecessary nuance, but I'm a lawyer. So, yeah, civil liberties are really important, but they hardly matter when you can't eat. I like privacy, but I need food.