So what was the real reason MSNBC replaced Cenk Uygur with Al Sharpton? THIS most assuredly makes sense. Key quotes (read it all):
For many, to know him is to loathe him. He’s enraging, he’s nutty — and worse, he’s blow-dried, dandified and politicized. He’s also very funny.
In other words he is all the things that make the right-wing phenoms of talk TV so popular.
Sharpton’s one of the only uber liberals on TV who doesn’t act like a mean schoolteacher.
Or a preachy one.
I get lots of people very angry when I dare to say it: As much as I feel drawn to watch left and right wing cable tv and listen to all kinds of talk radio, I can’t watch Rachel Maddow for too long since she repeats the same thought over and over and over. Every assertion has to be repeated three or four ways. There are three or four ways she will repeat every assertion to make it sink in. To make an assertion sink in, you see, she reframes it.
See how it works? She is funny, sarcastic, a tough interviewer — but she needs an editor or to say something once or maybe just twice. It is like sitting in a high school class with a teacher that is stuck on the same page of her lecture notes.
More on Sharpton:
Politics is a joke — so you better make it fun.
TV talk is not news — it’s entertainment.
So really, it’s about time that the liberals got someone entertaining to carry their water, too. The left side of the bucket is empty while the right side is overflowing.
In fact the PROBLEM in our country is that politics is NOT a joke but a lot is at stake. Talk radio and talk cable has turned it into a kind of political wrestling where the consequences of enabling and encouraging division and partisan derision are increasingly seen in the inability of the political class to effectively govern.
But I digress.
I’ve often noted that Air America had many shows that were truly unlistenable except to the political choir for which they were designed. The reason: they were not entertaining, they were lectures or shows specifically designed to counter Rush Limbaugh than to stand alone as BROADCASTS on their own merit. Limbaugh is a good, experienced broadcaster who uses a political schtick.
I found myself not planning to watch much of Sharpton but, in several instances, he made me laugh out loud. Love him or hate him, he takes politics and his partisanship seriously but seems to have FUN.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.