![]() ![]() A day simply goes better if I get to visit with Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker, A.B. During COVID-19, I lost track of grosses but I could tell you Betsy Woodruff had married Jonathan Swan from Axios and they had a baby and that Ashley Parker and Kasie Hunt were growing their hair out and that Eugene Robinson has the best book library in his Zoom shot and that I think Alexi McCammond at Axios has ridiculously incredible hair to match her ridiculously incredible work ethic.Īmong the MSNBC crew, I am pretty sure I have spent more time with Jonathan Lemire than any of my immediate relatives. I quickly became attached to a group of “characters” that I depended on every day to get me through what felt like unending darkness. In the same way that millions of people find escape in soap operas (“the stories”) that are populated by time-tested characters, the daily ticker tape of news was my soap opera. For the record, finger-waggers and well-meaning loved ones often pointed out that I was living in a media bubble, which I freely admitted.įor the past four years, I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours consuming the work - both literary and televised - of political writers and pundits. Day in and day out, their pursuit of the truth seemed heroic and exhausting. Obviously, I had spent years dealing with entertainment journalists, but this group seemed to have a much bigger challenge: dealing with a leader of the free world who thought nothing of spewing a blizzard of lies every day. ![]() in Cannes, I could watch the 11 pm rebroadcast from the previous night.īecause of Williams’ show, I literally started to feel like I was on a first-name basis with dozens of journalists and talking heads. A Slingbox got me through film festivals in foreign countries. 3, 2020, he started each show with a countdown to the election, which gave me hope. His exile to MSNBC happened exactly when a lot of people needed him to display his calm, classic anchor demeanor. I know Brian Williams made a big mistake years ago, and I am sure the gods at NBC News thought sending him over to their cable channel was some kind of punishment. Nobody was yelling or talking over each other like they did every night on CNN. show that was everything the other cable news shows weren’t. But about a month after the election, I happened upon Brian Williams’ 8 p.m. I would turn on CNN if there was an earthquake, or to watch the coverage of something like Princess Di’s funeral. Ironically, I had never watched much cable news before the November 2016 presidential contest, much less MSNBC. I found my peeps by becoming completely obsessed with those Trump had proclaimed to be the “enemy of the people” - the media, specifically the journalists who cover politics. So I looked for some sort of support group. Paying a therapist to complain about the president seemed indulgent. Eventually, I realized I was going to have to get some kind of help to make it through. It took me about a year just to process that this country had elected the host of a reality television show - thanks Mark Burnett! - to the highest office in the land. The orange glow and red menace emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was infinitely more frightening than any horror movie. ![]() Every day brought some event that seemed to be from a Will Ferrell comedy, except it was real. Instead, these past four years, I found myself constantly panicking that I was trapped in a combination of Being There, Gaslight (isn’t that the original “alternative facts” film?) and The Truman Show. 6 Summer Hearings Draw to a Damning Close ![]()
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