I used to loathe the also-ran cable news network. For a long time, I didn’t consider MSNBC a player in the cable wars.
For one thing, MSNBC had Imus in the morning, and — despite the brouhaha this year — I’m still not sure who watched him or why. (Maybe it’s the people who watch RFD and Imus’ll fit right in among the Big Joe Polka Show reruns.)
And they crammed weekends and late night full of reruns of assorted prison documentaries or whatever interspersed with paid programming. The one thing I used to watch on the network was the original Dan Abrams show, in which he spent an evening hour discussing the day’s legal issues.
A few years and an off-air stint as top dog later, Abrams is back in a self-titled show Monday through Thursday at 9p/8c. Live with Dan Abrams had a broader focus and includes segments such as Beat the Press, in which Abrams takes errant members of the media to task (discounting various technical issues; if you saw Wednesday’s show, you know what I’m talking about).
And that’s not all I’ve been watching at the cable network that originally seemed poised to capitalize on emerging technologies in a mid-nineties partnership between NBC News and Microsoft. The venture stood to capitalize on America’s insatiable passion for screen-delivered content: NBC had the TV chops and Bill Gates’ empire had the tech savvy. But MSNBC was initially unsuccessful because of its inability to integrate the two mediums with one another in a way that engaged and consistently delivered viewers.
The first thing that hooked me was the Doc Block, which rose to prominence under Abrams’ tenure. It allowed MSNBC to repurpose material from Dateline (To Catch A Predator reruns are a staple of the Doc Block) and keep primetime relatively fresh with a regular rotation of documentaries.
But the real quietly understated success in the shakeup following the Imus ouster is the lucky recipient of his early-morning timeslot. Joe Scarborough, former Florida senator and host of Scarborough Country (of which I was not a fan), has been working mornings since shortly after Imus’s much-ballyhooed departure. Scarborough’s no-nonsense attitude works well in the morning, and I find myself tuning in as I get ready for the day.
I’ve done my time watching Today. Mostly I watched it in middle school when I thought it was cool. The older I get (and the more bloated the sprawling four-hour Today gets), the more its ultimate purpose as a corporate tool grates. I made the jump to Good Morning America shortly after Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer came to save the day. That lasted for the brunt of my high school years.
Then I fell out of that habit, and as a college student, I haven’t made any of the morning news shows a priority, mostly because I didn’t tend to be up early enough to catch them (unless I caught a few minutes before going to bed). Anderson Cooper got his CNN show the fall I came to college, and the original cable newser was my go-to for several years. But the constant tinkering with American Morning, the ubiquity of Wolf Blitzer, and the constant back-and-forth with competitor Fox News Channel have driven me into the arms of a channel I never thought I’d be watching, especially on a regular basis.
These days, my morning routine starts around 7 a.m./CT, which allows me to catch most of the last hour of Morning Joe (live weekdays, 6-9 a.m./ET). Flanked by Willie Geist and newsreader Mika Brzezinski, Joe has a laid-back style that I find disarming. The show deals with topical issues, but tends to cut through the fluff a lot better than its major-network corporate cousins (you may recall Brzezinski’s viral video star turn after refusing to read a Paris Hilton story this summer).
This week, Scarborough even managed to make an interview with Rush Limbaugh good (and not off-putting) television. With MSNBC poised to make a dent in the competition’s ratings as part of its recent integration with NBC News operations, Abrams and Scarborough are leading the charge. And I never thought I’d be a convert.
