Washington Post media reporter Jeremy Barr wrote a very lovely valentine to Rachel Maddow's brief return to five-nights-a-week fretting over Trump. This was the sappy headline:
Rachel Maddow is bringing viewers back to MSNBC — and giving them hope
Every quote in this story was either Maddow or Maddow's backers. He was...."Jeremy Barr None." There were seven quotations of "brilliance" from Maddow's MSNBC programs, starting with the first sentence: “We will get through all of this together. You and me.”
It included two positive quotes from Keith Olbermann, who's still taking credit for her career:
“If your numbers are lagging, then bringing in a personality who is the embodiment of that network and has been for [many] years only makes sense,” said Jonathan Klein, the former president of CNN U.S. “If she would work 24 hours per day, they should do that.”
“Television political commentary is better when she’s on the air,” said Keith Olbermann, who hosted a prime-time show on MSNBC from 2003 to 2011 and helped jump-start Maddow’s career — and that of other network stars — by having her on as a guest host.
As you should expect from the Democrat-dominated Washington Post, there was one brief Chris-Lichtian feint toward welcoming Republicans, but whew, they avoided that fiasco!
Multiple reports late last year suggested that Mark Lazarus, the executive who will oversee MSNBC once it is spun off as part of a new company, has indicated that he wants the network to be a more hospitable place for Republicans to appear. (The network has not commented on that reporting.)
But during an internal meeting on Jan. 14, Lazarus told MSNBC leaders that they shouldn’t expect a major overhaul. “The only thing I’ll say is the worst thing any leader can do is change something that’s working just because they can,” he said, according to a copy of his remarks. “So, if this is working, then there’s no reason to change it.”
There's no need to turn to conservative sources, who might talk about Maddow's record of embarrassing Trump coverage in the first term, especially all the enthusiastic Russian-collusion material. She and Adam Schiff are just going to pretend that was Pulitzer Prize stuff, as the Pulitzer Prize patrol still does.
The only "media observers" worth quoting are firmly on Team Rachel.
Many media observers, including Olbermann, have urged MSNBC to stay the course, editorially, and to trust that the network’s audience will return as Trump’s administration kicks into overdrive.
“Enough stuff is going to happen. People are going to come back,” Olbermann said. “When they come back, they will have discovered that most of the other liberal outlets in liberal media are not as liberal as they were. ... If the audience seems bereft of hope, then offer them some hope.”
The roughest part of the story was Barr's acknowledgement that while the early ratings were positive news, "the network is still attracting fewer viewers than it did before the election."
MSNBC touts how Trump's first 100 days is a critical time for Rachel Maddow's "unique insights and analysis" five nights a week. What a....treat. pic.twitter.com/rponY05EC2
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) January 24, 2025
