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Thursday, July 23, 2009

So what is Rachel Maddow, chopped liver?
Posted by Jill | 6:04 AM
Here at Casa la Brilliant, we don't play favorites. Thanks to the DVR, we watch Keith AND Rachel AND Jon AND Stephen. But as much as we love all of them, none of them is Walter Cronkite, though I hope that in time Rachel Maddow becomes known nationwide, despite her leftward leaning, the media voice that can always be relied on to not overdramatize, not pull stuff out of her ass, and not blindly read press releases from the power structures of EITHER party. I'd say she's off to a brilliant start.

But as much as we love Jon Stewart, and think no one skewers the ridiculousness of the news, better than he does, he would probably be the first one to admit that he is NOT Walter Cronkite. But America disagrees.

You'd think that the major networks would realize that when a former stand-up comedian is the nation's most trusted newscaster, perhaps they ought to rethink their policy of carrying water for Republicans (*cough* Chuck Todd *cough*).

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Monday, December 01, 2008

Nice try, Tina Brown, but it ain't gonna happen
Posted by Jill | 8:37 PM
Yeah, I want a deck and a kitchen and a basement remodel and a Mini Clubman too, but it ain't gonna happen. Neither is Tina Brown's (and my) dream of Rachel Maddow taking over Tim Russert's old seat on Press the Meat:
One of the problems for NBC that was showcased during Russert’s media version of a state funeral in June is the way the chair of Meet the Press has become above all a Washington social and status position and only secondarily a journalistic assignment. Russert himself was not a journalist. He came from politics. His interviews either promoted his subjects or subjected them to opposition research. He was the Wash

Russert’s key gotcha device was to produce those laborious read-along quotes chosen to expose the hypocrisy or flip-flopping of whoever was in the hot seat. But did these quotes ever elicit interesting answers? They were always so long the interviewees had time to compose whole paragraph-long rebuttals from their store of mental talking points. Brokaw hasn’t retired this device but the next incumbent should.

NBC seems to be paralyzed by the sense that whomever they chose has to be another Russert. Not so. Russert defined an era, but that era is over. It’s as if in the months since he died the hands of the clock have spun with accelerated speed, leaving us all with a desire for reinvention. There's been an Obama effect in every sphere of business from General Motors to network TV.

Meet the Press has to change not just the host but the show itself. It may be successful now, but the winds of change could suddenly engulf it as they have the giants of print.ington élite’s staff man, stoking their prejudices, whims, and attitudes. His regular-guy persona flattered the élite by making them imagine they were regular guys too.

[snip]

Since NBC has not heeded my last suggestion to appoint either the unsung cable Rottweiler Greta Van Susteren or a reinvented, post-Palin Katie Couric, I say give Meet the Press to Rachel Maddow. She’s smart. She’s quick. She’s witty. She does her homework. And she listens to what the person she’s talking to is saying. She doesn't just go to the next question on her list.

If Obama is post-racial, Maddow is post-gender—divested of hair-frosted femininity in the anchor genre and more appealing because of it. Like him, she’s a calm, unflappable new era phenomenon. Sure, she’s a lefty, and in the past week she's been swinging away at Obama's cabinet choices, but I suspect she's ambitious enough to dial it back if she had to. (She also has that weird TV gene that’s so hungry for air time she’d probably insist on keeping her five-day job at MSNBC. Russert himself was on every show except Project Runway.)


Shorter Tina Brown: Tim Russert was the biggest tool in television news-o-tainment.

All this is true, of course, but it's preposterous to think that the General Electric network is going to give a gay leftist its marquee Sunday gasbag show. Of course I would be happy to have Rachel Maddow on 24 x 7, but that's not going to happen. Having someone moderate this show who isn't part of the Washington Village, who is going to have people on the panel other than Republican-leaning hacks who have never once in the last eight years been right about anything at all is change that the suits at NBC just aren't going to believe in.

So instead it looks like they are replacing one tool with another, and giving the Russert Seat at NBC to David Gregory. Yes, old "Stretch" himself, who thinks that asking George W. Bush a couple of tough questions over eight years somehow absolves him of this:




New boss, old boss, etc.

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Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Answer: It's Katie Couric
Posted by Jill | 8:10 AM
Bill Carter in the New York Times scratches his head and wonders if Katie Couric's abysmal ratings are because she's a woman or something about her.

I don't know why anyone is surprised at Couric's stunning failure. Hasn't anyone at CBS watched her over the last few decades? Couric has always been about "cute", and "cute" isn't what the largely older, largely traditional evening news audience wants to hear telling them about the latest travesty in Iraq. I don't think for a minute that if Christiane Amanpour or Meredith Viera or Lesley Stahl were CBS' newsreader that the ratings would be nearly as bad. But then, women in television news that have some gravitas are few and far between, because to make it in broadcast news these days, you have to be blond and either be or look perpetually 35. This is why you have Dana Bash and Paula Zahn and the many Blonde Bots of Fox News. You'll never see Candy Crowley or Lisa Myers or anyone who's been around the block a few times, is larger than a size four, or has eschewed the plastic surgeon's knife or botox needle sitting in the anchor chair.

But that said, Couric is an especially egregious choice, because this is a woman who made her reputation being the mom, the cute sister, the giggly girlie. That this demeanor hid a ferocious ambition may have been apparent to the suits in the corporate suite, but it isn't what most people saw. Add to Couric's inherent unsuitability to the gravitas that network news requires the ridiculous mistakes such as giving Rush Limbaugh, who God knows has little enough exposure for his rants, time on a 20-minute newscast to rant even further and you have a recipe for television news disaster.

There are still people who are going to want to be read the news by Daddy, and for that audience, Charles Gibson on ABC is the only show in town at the moment. But when you have a news industry in which a woman's ability to be a public face of a network is dependent on her adherence to a particular standard of beauty, an avoidance of appearing "tough", and a certain level of nonthreatening bubbleheadedness, you're never going to develop a talent that can wear the mantle of Walter Cronkite.

It isn't that there have never been women

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Saturday, March 10, 2007

Don't let the door hit you on the way out
Posted by Jill | 7:33 PM
Raspy McHuskerson is FINALLY out of MSNBC as of April 1.

Well, it's a start, anyway. Paging Rachel Maddow....

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Thursday, March 01, 2007

Network news viewers still want to see father figures
Posted by Jill | 7:42 AM
While the trend in cable television news is towards vapid-eyed, poufy-haired, lantern-jawed men and vapid-eyed blond botoxed women, all around the age of 35, it seems that among those who still watch network news in the evening, the mature, father figure still reigns supreme:

he looming change in the control room at “Nightly News” and the ratings surge by Mr. Gibson are but the latest developments in the most tumultuous two years in the recent history of broadcast news.

Mr. Williams succeeded Tom Brokaw in December 2004. After that, Dan Rather resigned as anchor at CBS in the midst of a reporting scandal, and was soon succeeded by Katie Couric. Peter Jennings died of lung cancer while still the lead anchor at ABC, and one of Mr. Jennings’s designated successors, Bob Woodruff, nearly died in a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq, setting off a sequence of events that ultimately led to Mr. Gibson’s move to the anchor desk at “World News.”

Only six months before Mr. Gibson got the evening news job, he was effectively passed over for it, in favor of two much younger journalists, making his current run at Mr. Williams’s broadcast all the more remarkable.

Even as some young viewers forsake television for the Internet, the three network newscasts continue to attract a collective audience of nearly 25 million viewers most nights. The programs are also among the most lucrative for the networks, with advertisers planning to spend nearly half a billion dollars on them this year.

More than a few viewers, and advertisers, choose their broadcast based on the personal strengths of those anchors. That has left some people at the networks wondering whether Mr. Gibson — who, at 63, is the oldest and most established of the three — may be proving more attractive to more viewers than Mr. Williams and Ms. Couric.


The network news viewer tends to skew older than the audience for cable news, and this undoubtedly counts for part of Gibson's rise. Elderly audiences don't want to be read the news by their kids. But I can't help but wonder if some of the loss of Brian Williams' audience doesn't come from his frequent presence at the side of Jon Stewart. Stewart's growth as a news personality is baffling to him, but it's more an indicator of the state of television news than a reflection on Stewart's own gravitas. The problem with Williams is that his role as a fixture of fake news/comedy indicates a healthy snark and lack of reverence for the traditional role of news anchor as father figure. Gibson, being a bit older, seems to embrace that role, and therefore his older audience is more comfortable receiving the news from someone who better accepts the "reassuring parent" role.

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