Tag Archives: Rachel Maddow
Wheee!!!! The Rising Tide of Trump TV
And we’ll have fun, fun, fun….. 🙂 It’s clear that MSNBC has practiced on Donald Trump for years like Olympics training. 🙂 The fact that it finally has something simple to explain–counting votes, Mob-like behavior, holding secret documents, white men trying to be above the law–really helps. I never understood one word of its RussiaGate coverage.
Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow are Ivy(ish)-educated talented writers and broadcasters who were born perhaps for this exact moment. (Conversely, do you think that our Ivy-educated young sis, Abby Phillip, is ready to sound like them? Does she have the emotional strength/anger level to go for the jugular? Will CNN let her do so?) They get to finish a narrative they’ve been carrying on every afternoon/night for years. Reid has been really serious these last 10 days or so, and I like her that way instead of her many failures at trying to provide Jon Stewart/Trevor Noah-type entertainment. Maddow clearly wants to be a contemporary historian. And the Morning Joe team enjoys writing Trump’s obit every day.
I’d feel much better about this if MSNBC would re-hire the former in-house rebel Tiffany Cross. She did nothing wrong but be herself and tell her truth, 1969-style. But I guess one Al Sharpton is enough for the network, and even he won’t talk that way anymore….
Interesting That These Rich, Famous Network Anchors/Hosts…..
…..have openly demoted themselves to special correspondents. I’d like to think it’s a public commentary on the limitations of network anchoring and a true hunger to produce 20th-century, middlebrow magazine-like narrative–and those professional aspects might play a part. But hearing these goodbyes, it really sounds more like the intimate results of a work-life balance self-inventory, a real understanding that they are in a post-COVID/pre-old-age-illness vortex. (I mean, even Amy Goodman–who used to helm Democracy Now! no matter how sick she got!–actually took a day off last week to be part of a relative’s graduation.) In Chuck’s case, it’s almost like someone in his family told him, “You’re missing it.” Well, now he, Judy and Rachel won’t.
SEPTEMBER 10th UPDATE:
My Comments on “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” Finale (Episode 8)
Power to the Person?
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is a master storyteller, and Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra attempts to be an epic story for this moment. It succeeds in being hella entertaining.
My last Ultra post was about its historical emphasis, allowing this subsequent comment to be ideological in nature. And so, clad in my dashiki, a note to Maddow and MSNBC:
The best way to fight organized fascism is an organized radical united front, not just individual efforts because the latter depends on liberal democracy working on your behalf. Didn’t McCarthyism, instead of an American movement against fascism, flow from this history?
This kind of color-within-the-lines conclusion is why what Dave Chappelle said at the end of his Saturday Night Live monologue was so important: as Black people, we are no strangers to the system not working. Sadly but not surprisingly, Maddow doesn’t have a James Baldwin/I.F. Stone-type voice who would hit that target, expressing the idea that American democracy itself is a flawed concept at its core. Nope, me no trust paleface.
And, Rachel and MSNBC, um, you might want to, um, not take off the air anyone else who speaks plainly about the current rightwingers (*cough* Tiffany Cross *cough* 🙂 ).
MAY 11, 2023 UPDATE:
Brief Thoughts As We Wait For Next Week’s Finale of “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra”
A true drama about a deliberately-forgotten time
Tellingitlikeitis/keepingitreal/keepingithunnert, etc. I have never gotten the Rachel Maddow hype. Every night I tuned in to her MSNBC show she acted like she and her research/producing staff had broken Watergate or had the Pentagon Papers! LOL! I still don’t understand that RussiaGate stuff!
So, now, to her podcast narrative series Ultra. I’m now completely caught up and I’m excited about the forthcoming last episode.
Like the greatest middlebrow magazine writers of the last century, Maddow’s clearly a very talented reporter, narrator and dramatist. But she continues her television approach here. Clearly, the ultra-patriotic American nation was not shivering in collective fear before and during World War II because of the existence of small (but well-organized and armed) groups of American Nazis and their fellow travelers; their salutes dropped quickly after Pearl Harbor. And as someone who has also studied a little of the history of 20th-century radio, perhaps it’s debatable that the radio racist Father Charles Coughlin was as politically powerful as she is saying, the same way not everyone in the nation believed Martians were invading Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. 🙂 But she’s making the same point that Pulitizer Prize-winning historian David Blight made at the end of his recent Yale conference on teaching race and slavery: these politically-retrograde people have always been here, will always master any updates to the art and science of influence and are never leaving the collective, progressive us/US at peace.
Drums in the Global Village 