A New Voice in Mushville

Anderson Cooper of CNN recently took a shot at Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s liberal host, and one of the few liberals in the liberal media.

I’ll get to that, but first there’s the matter of David Gregory being elevated to host Meet the Press on NBC. The Sunday talk shows are rarely interesting to me, but I did on occasion watch Tim Russert. He had a reputation for being a hard-nosed interviewer. He was no such thing. He offered a gentle forum, as he was well-schooled in the American news business, where if you don’t treat guests with proper submissiveness, you don’t get guests.

That brings me back to Maddow briefly. She has a hard time finding Republican guests. One time she had on Nancy Pfotenhauer, a McCain campaign aid, and didn’t show proper reverence, and no McCain person appeared thereafter.

That’s why I like Maddow. She’s a different breed. Anyway, here’s what Anderson Cooper has to say:

Rachel Maddow is an incredible talent — she’s funny, and smart, obviously well researched on subjects. I’m just not interested as a viewer in listening to anchors’ opinions. It seems like there’s an awful lot of yelling, and this year yelling’s been replaced by sarcasm and snarkiness.

Allow me to translate:

I’m an American journalist, and I therefore follow the American script. I show extreme deference to American government officials and allow them to put forth their positions unchallenged. It’s not my job to challenge them. That’s not what journalists do. I therefore think that Rachel Maddow is not doing her job. She’ not being properly reverential.

Anyway, poor Rachel may be a flash in the pan. She may not last. She may go the way of Phil Donohue – a liberal with high ratings who was canned during the pre-Iraq War media/government love feast.

But Rachel (and Keith Olberman) have proved a point – there is a market for liberals on TV, and a place for them in commentary. Maddow, a Phd from Oxford is also showing us that intelligence also sells. It’s a good leaning experience for moribund boring mushy middlin’-to-right-leaning television news and opinion programming.

P.S. This was priceless. Zbignew Brzezinski called up Joe Scarborough for being “stunningly superficial”. Scarborough, who defended himself by saying he reads the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and is therefore up to speed, had never heard of the Taba Summit – a late Clinton era meeting of minds between Israelis and Palestinians that was ended by Ariel Sharon when he took office. (We came very close to having peace, but as per usual, the Israelis balked.) Scarborough is too typical of American pundits and journalists.