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How Women Have Helped MSNBC Tip the Cable-News Ratings Scales
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ CARRILHO
How Women Have Helped MSNBC Tip the Cable-News Ratings Scales
Rachel Maddow and other talented reporters have transformed the media landscape in the Trump era
February 1, 2018 Steve Erickson Media, TV 5 Comments
Since January 20, 2017, no movie or TV show has been able to compete with the spectacle of American self-abasement. As the 45th presidency descends into psychodrama for which the price of admission is national shame, MSNBC has edged perennial front-runner Fox to become the top-rated cable news network by some metrics, and last fall, when politics, journalism, and entertainment were swept up in revelations of sexual abuse—with one of the most egregious offenders being the one who lives in the White House—what was conspicuous was the extent to which MSNBC’s resurgence has been driven by women.
The dominance of MSNBC’s female reporters, anchors, and commentators is more striking when compared with competitors CNN, with its all-male prime time, and Fox, whose few formidable women such as Megyn Kelly have bolted, telling tales of sexual predation by Fox’s late mastermind, Roger Ailes, and loudest mouthpiece, Bill O’Reilly.
The growing feminism of MSNBC doesn’t seem part of any grand scheme. Over the past couple of years MSNBC has increasingly featured all-female roundtable analyses, such as those that followed the 2016 national conventions, not as a gimmick by which the patriarchy amuses itself with the ponderings of the gentler sex but rather as a straightforward convergence of talent and tenacity. To paraphrase an old TV ad that only an old magazine writer would remember, the women on the set got there the old-fashioned way: They earned it.
Which is to say they triple-earned it, since that’s how worthy women get any-where. To be sure, MSNBC is hardly a man-free zone, what with warhorse Chris Matthews, whose own comments about a pretty face or two have gotten him into some trouble lately, and suave Brian Williams, redeeming himself from a scandal a few years back when he gilded his résumé with a few too many battle heroics.
But the network’s female dominance has evolved by way of intrepid Kristen Welker, Kasie Hunt, and Hallie Jackson covering the White House and Congress; Joy Reid, the most incisive commentator in TV news and the one least inclined to put up with nonsense; and influential Mika Brzezinski in the morning and the departed Alex Wagner, now at CBS after establishing at MSNBC a prototype for smart daytime political talk.
With due respect to all of them, however, the keepers of MSNBC’s current identity are Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, and Katy Tur, each distinct from the others while forming a gestalt in the resistance to the ongoing degradation of the American idea. The network’s star, Maddow is the daughter of an Air Force captain and a California school program administrator. The first openly gay Rhodes scholar, she likes to say her politics are progressive in the manner of Eisenhower-era Republicanism, but you have to wonder what Eisenhower Republicans would have made of her.
more...
http://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/msnbc-ratings-women/
13 replies
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Katy is decent, but could use some seasoning, I think.
Interesting article, though. Nice to see the women get their due.
