Bacharach at the new republic looks, not unsympathetically, at the evolution of MSNBC:
On Maddow: " She gestures widely. She shrugs. She is arch and broadly ironic. She is very certain that she is right ... far more appealing than I’d been prepared to find her ... Maddow is sincere without being overly earnest. She thinks that she is funnier than she is, but we all have friends who think they are funnier than they are. She is obviously smart, which makes the frequent weirdness and obscurantism of her show seem like a deliberate choice, like a serious author who has, for fun, decided to dabble in the absurd. "
"But Maddow—and much of her network these days—is frequently just as bonkers. "
He turns to MSNBC:
"By 2015, its popularity sometimes dipped below not just Fox News and CNN, but also CNN’s airport-lounge spin-off, HLN. "
"By late 2018, MSNBC could, on certain weeks, claim to be the number one news network on cable. "
"MSNBC has become what, just a few years ago, critics thought impossible: the liberal, Democratic cable channel. It is the touchstone network for the Resistance movement on social media, which is itself tightly wound around allegations of Russian plots and “collusion,” and its stars look likely to become kingmakers in the coming Democratic primaries."
" the effect of spending a whole evening with MSNBC for the first time is not unlike wandering into a scripted prestige television series in the middle of its third season. The careful place setting occurred long before you started watching, and now the narrative is barreling ahead."
"There is Trump himself, looming offstage, the oddly absent centerpiece of the whole production, like Julius Caesar in the later acts of Shakespeare’s play. There is Mueller, something between an oracle and a demiurge, also physically absent, and there was Mueller’s report, a promised deus ex machina hanging in the fly space above. "
"There are set-piece locations ... a complex establishing mythology, a series of actual acts and hypothetical acts and possibly mythological acts that, in total, build the texture of a sprawling world. There are terms of art and law that everyone seems to understand; they take the place, in this universe, of a fantasy show’s invented ancient language ... 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. "
"MSNBC has been through several iterations since its founding in 1996 ... From the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, the network also served as a weird clearinghouse for some of the great ghouls of conservative agit-prop, an early home-away-from-home for the likes of Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and Tucker Carlson ... recall the omnipresence of Pat Buchanan ... a network struggling and failing to capture the political zeitgeist at the end of the millennium"
"But as the Bush administration wore on, MSNBC began its turn toward liberalism ... "
"Suddenly, the Republicans were the wild reformists, coming with axes and dynamite for all the edifices of society and government that America had erected over the last 100 years, while the Democratic Party was the conservative party, which is to say: protective toward institutions, deferential toward established power, defensive around precedent, and deeply concerned that anything other than narrow tinkering at the margins represented a dangerous radicalism."
"a central problem with contemporary mainstream liberalism: the idea that the trouble is not so much institutions themselves as the people who run them. The result is an unfortunate tendency to rehabilitate dubious people and organizations the moment they line up against the right villains. How else to explain the sudden liberal affection for the FBI, the office of the special counsel, the “intelligence community”? "
"the network so rarely finds time to pan out from its narrow focus on the baroque divagations of the investigations of Donald Trump"
"one of the fundamental features of a conspiracy narrative is that it cannot end"
"the belief that there may yet be a gotcha moment, a crack in the case that forces a reckoning, a legal procedure through which normalcy may be restored, is well-nigh irresistible."
" it is possible to make MSNBC your principal source of news and information and, as a consequence, to escape knowing much of anything about what is going on in the world ... an entire primetime lineup without mention of Brexit, of the gilets jaunes, of any Eurasian politics beyond the bogeyman Putin and some snarking at Trump’s vague China tariffs. Venezuela makes an occasional appearance, mostly as it relates to our own domestic politics ... Brazil ... barely appears ... a “border crisis” but little sense of what is on the other side of that border ... “Syria,” but little actual reporting from the Middle East. North Korea bubbles up sporadically, ... and even then exists mostly as a platform to joke about Trump’s inability to close a deal. The Indian subcontinent hardly exists. Africa hardly exists ... the environment and climate change, as stories in and of themselves, hardly exist."
"MSNBC promises its audience that if we dig deep enough, we’ll get to the bottom of this thing, but what good is digging a hole in preparation for a flood? "
Read the whole thing:
https://newrepublic.com/article/153435/msnbcs-wild-ridesidd