I stopped reading his diaries and I found his show on MSNBC to be unwatchable, but I’m still somewhat amazed that Cenk Uygur lost his 6pm slot to Al Sharpton. In Mr. Uygur’s telling, he was offered a weekend slot but turned it down because he thought MSNBC president Phil Griffin was succumbing to White House pressure in demoting him.
Mr. Uygur, who by most accounts was well liked within MSNBC, said in an interview that he turned down the new contract because he felt Mr. Griffin had been the recipient of political pressure. In April, he said, Mr. Griffin “called me into his office and said that he’d been talking to people in Washington, and that they did not like my tone.” He said he guessed Mr. Griffin was referring to White House officials, though he had no evidence for the assertion. He also said that Mr. Griffin said the channel was part of the “establishment,” and “that you need to act like it.”
MSNBC is home to many hosts who criticize President Obama and other Democrats from a progressive point of view, but at times Mr. Uygur could be especially harsh.
The problem with Uygur’s analysis is that it always ascribes bad faith to the president and it never takes an honest accounting of the limitations Congress puts on the president’s ability to act. He’s just smart enough to understand the issues and the political landscape, and to realize that being outraged is a sensible reaction to the deficiencies and greed in our system. But he’s not smart enough to figure out how to properly apportion blame.
He reminds me of a bright 16-year old who thinks he’s got everything figured out but who really doesn’t know shit about how the world works. He has the self-confidence to be aggressively and arrogantly wrong, and the audience for that isn’t that large.
Now, I grew up in the New York media market in the 1980’s, and I lived through the whole Tawana Brawley fiasco. That incident pretty much destroyed Al Sharpton’s credibility. He became a pinata that the Republicans attacked with glee. He’s made a long climb back to get to the point that the Establishment prefers him to a guy like Cenk. Personally, I think there have to be ten, twenty, or thirty black people in the media world who would be better at doing a cable newsertainment show than Al Sharpton. I like Al. I think he’s funny. And he’s extremely smart. But I’m tired of his act and someone else deserves a chance. I have my problems with Rachel Maddow, but she does something most of these other hosts don’t do, which is to try to educate her viewers about issues they might not understand in depth. She rarely misinforms her viewers, and doesn’t create a format for people to yell at each other. That’s a better model than you get from Cenk Uygur or Al Sharpton.
