Matthew Felling Really, Really Likes Show He Occasionally Co-Hosts

It's a good thing Matthew Felling discloses that he's an occasional guest co-host on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."  Otherwise, the average reader might've been left to wonder how the story/review he's written could be so over-the-top positive even though it's written by someone who's supposed to be a critic of sorts.  I count exactly one comment with a specific criticism of the show, and zero comments in Felling's own voice that approximate anything but unabashed praise.

Some of my favorite tidbits:

• "It's the loosest yet most comprehensive three hours in morning television today--going so far, to some, as to set the agenda for the day's news." No one, in fact, says this in the piece.

• "The combination works for viewers, who see it as an accessible summary of what's going on in America's political scene." Well, it works for some viewers. As Felling points out in the second-to-last paragraph of his 3,000 word piece, "Morning Joe" gets clobbered by the inane "Fox & Friends" (952,000 viewers to "Joe"'s 289,000) and has roughly 25% fewer viewers than CNN's "American Morning," the second-place cable news show in the timeslot (421,000 viewers).

• "How fun? Horseplay fun. When the on-air behavior ends up with Tim Russert on the receiving end of an unexpected Mike Barnicle headlock, it's clear you're watching something quite different." Plagiarist and fabulist Mike Barnicle sure can be funny!

• "The show manages to stay informal yet stick to the day's news stories, veering in tone from 'Huntley-Brinkley' one minute to 'Swingers' the next." Just -- no.

The rest is not much better. Felling writes that people at the Media Research Center and Media Matters occasionally criticize material on the show, but, with one exception from Eric Boehlert (who airs a criticism that Felling allows Scarborough to shoot down), you have no idea what these organizations are saying and thus no way to tell whether their complaints have any merit. (Some of them certainly seem to.) As it turns out, I actually find "Morning Joe" to be superior to its competitors, but that's not saying much. A morning show appears to be an ideal vehicle for Scarborough, who never had much substance to begin with; and Mika Brzezinski, one of MSNBC's few real talents, has deservedly made a name for herself by demonstrating real news chops and a dry sense of humor that provides a nice counterpoint to Scarborough and Geist's sometimes deliberate, sometimes unintentional buffoonery. But surely the AJR should've been surprised to see a piece where no real criticism was levied. Here are just a few, off the top of my head:

• First, Willie Geist is making everyone who watches dumber.  The frattish class clown routine -- the calculated foolishness, mixed with what I assume is a sincere lack of interest in the substantive dimensions of American politics -- grows tiresome rather quickly.

• Second, why is Mike Barnicle on the air -- not just on "Morning Joe" for that matter, but any of the MSNBC shows? The same warm welcome has not been provided to other proven plagiarists and fabulists, but the headlock-loving Barnicle has lots of friends in the national media so he gets an undeserved pass. 

• This leads to a criticism more serious than the others: There is a frequently off-putting clubbiness to the proceedings on "Morning Joe." Elite journalists and pundits from national publications come on to talk about their work and traffic in often stale conventional wisdom that (like so many prognostications during this election season) turn out to be wrong. It's no wonder that people in the political media are such fans, because, like Imus before him, Scarborough and his guests corroborate and validate one another's outlook. As such, the whole operation falls prey to many of the problems in political journalism today -- a herd mentality; a focus on what should be meaningless campaign "gaffes" and "controversies" that crowd out discussions of the candidates' actual policies; the urge to psychoanalyze candidates by people with no training in psychoanalysis; a penchant for drama criticism masquerading as political analysis (see, e.g., Frank Rich); and on and on.

You don't have to agree with any of this, but if you're trying to write anything but fluff and you describe your subject in almost purely adulatory terms, you might not be doing your job well.

I tend to be mostly uninterested in the conflict-of-interest handwringing that pervades much mainstream press criticism, and, to be fair to Felling, he is normally a fairly conscientious media observer. This, however, is the sort of situation where you have an obviously compromised piece that (crucially) you can explain by the interest. You'd think that the combination of the two -- an apparent motivation for positive coverage coupled with almost unqualified, effusive praise -- should have been enough to give pause to the American Journalism Review before publishing it.  And yet...

Comments

[Sir Charles]

Well he may be a plaigarist, but c'mon -- putting Russert in a headlock -- that's quite an accomplishment.

Calling "Morning Joe" the best of the morning news shoes is the ultimate in damning with faint praise. Like calling Gene Simmons "the brains" of Kiss.

[litbrit]

Excellent post. I find Joe to be a maddening character--he showed signs of rising to the level of real, honest-to-goodness journalism in the days immediately after Katrina. He and his wife drove from their home in Pensacola, FL to Mississipi with as much food, water, and supplies as they could pile into her SUV; if I remember correctly, Joe then went on to New Orleans and reported on the horror that was unfolding there. Certainly I have very clear memories of Joe being among the first--if not THE first--journalist and Republican to criticize George Bush for his utter indifference and slow and ineffective reaction to the tragedy, as well as his inability to marshal and direct Federal aid when and where it was needed, even after said help would have been too late to save some of the victims but was nonetheless needed by others, not to mention vital as a show of strength to the world: America takes care of its own. Under Bush, it didn't, though, and Joe kept the heat on the administration, as almost no other Republican did or would.

Anyway, months later, he was back to the same partisanship-slinging. What a pity.

Mika is another infuriating presence. I do think she shows some real journalist chops on a pretty regular basis, but she has a tendency to take things out of context and pretend she has read--or watched--something in its entirety when it is plainly obvious that she hasn't. For example, the morning after Keith Olbermann's recent Special Comment, she was shaking her head and tut-tutting about his having compared Hillary to David Duke. What Olbermann actually said, though, was that specific statements issued by members of Hillary's campaign rose to the level of racism exhibited by David Duke. Entirely different things, in other words, the former of which itself rises to the level of inflammatory. Olbermann may be passionate, and his delivery can border on firey, but the actual content of what he said was factual, not inflammatory. Mika has also admitted, quietly and only once to my memory, that her brother works for the Hillary campaign.

Anyway, Barnicle is a plagiarist? Jeez, I knew there was a reason I didn't like him. To my mind, plagiarists belong in the stocks. They are among the lowest form of criminals.

*makes note to hang on to all those tomatoes rotting in the kitchen*

[weboy]

Scarbarough seems to be among the class of Reaganites who are so fully dismayed by the 2nd Bush Administration that it's up-ended their world view; tough he's largely still Republican, he's no fan of much of what's happened there. And he's capable of considerable insight when talking politics. That said, I don't think he really gets Democrats or how they think, and it colors his coverage, and his willingness to cause some of this season's major headaches for NBC (Matthews and David Shuster's troubles as seeming anti-Clinton stem, in part, from comments on Morning Joe). The show was meant to replace Don Imus, so that explains a lot of the political glad handing and cheesy punditry; there were some admirable experiments with other, more interesting voices, but ultimately NBC execs were apparently too nervous to repeat an Imus with anyone other than a safe pick they already knew (and, given the Shuster debacle... great work!). I didn't find any of the shows useful, and "American Morning" sunk lower for me when they swiped Kiran Chietry from Fox & Friends (though Chietry's made a calm switch to being dispassionate, considering). Now, without cable, I find myself more and more enamored of NPR Morning Edition and BBC World Service. Eek. What a liberal I am! :)

[Ankush]

Litbrit: You make good points. As for Scarborough, I'm also bothered by his self-conscious Regular Joe routine (pun intended!) -- as someone who doesn't take the news all that seriously because he's a regular guy and isn't all this back-and-forth between the candidates super-fun as opposed to an election for the President of the US, etc. Though I haven't really thought about it too much, there's a sense in which a political culture of frivolity per se, regardless of who's targeted, is bad for liberals. (In reality, of course, I think it's usually liberals who get this treatment.)

As for Barnicle: Yes, a plagiarist and fabulist. Though to tell from his exposure today, you'd never be able to tell!

Weboy: No disagreements, but just wanted to say the following re Morning Joe as Imus replacement. I think you're right, though to hear the spin from MSNBC, and to read the coverage the show has been getting recently, you'd think this model had produced some sort of ratings bonanza. But it hasn't! MSNBC still gets clobbered in the mornings, there's just a different guy being clobbered.

[weboy]

I think MSNBC has struggled (as elsewhere) with it's raison d'etre in the mornings; the Imus simulcast was itself a stopgap for lack of anyone who could handle mornings for them, and they're theory that they didn't need a presence of substance prior to 9am, at the beginning; as it became clearer that they were being clobbered (especially when CNN backed into 5am with hard news rather than repeats of nighttime shows, and Fox&Friends began to show serious signs of success), they moved Imus into heir srudio and adopted him fulltime; that, in turn led them straight to the Rutgers debacle; they shold have kept him at arm's length because he was always likely to do just what he wound up doing; he was never meant for television. Scarborough , I think, is their notion of how to build audience in the slot... but I agree, in that regard, he's probably hopeless. They need, probably, a quasi-Today (and hello, why not give it to Ann Curry) that can work from a couch and "softer" news rather than what they're doing (even though, that, too, I'd find unwatchable; but it would get them younger women). But I can't blame them for trying to sell what they have. It's just probably not going to work.