[Music]
CHRIS HAYES: The communal experience of spectacle is an incredibly ancient human experience
and an incredibly vital human experience.
[Music]
One of the reasons I think it's a very exciting in the medium of television right now is the
breakdown of the old broadcast model means that you can be successful from a pure financial
standpoint without having to reach 10 million people.
I don't know what the future of television news is.
I do think there's something really powerful about the combination of live viewership and
social media where you're y'know, whenever it's Oscar night or a big football game, or
the Golden Globes or the people that watch our show that have their own hashtag and are
in dialogue with each other, there's something really fun about the communal experience of
watching the same thing with a bunch of other people and then interacting about it so I
think that will have a future.
Our show is, in the grand scheme of things, a very small niche product and I'm incredibly
aware of that, but Girls on HBO is incredibly successful—it got re-upped for a second
season—more words have been written about Lena Dunham than like Abraham Lincoln and
Jesus Christ.
I don't know what the viewership numbers are but they're not viewership numbers of like
Seinfeld, right?
They're much, much smaller, but it's still a profitable undertaking and that has been
part of what has produced what people call this golden age of television and I think
it's really true.
There's just a lot of incredibly good stuff on TV.
I think a big part of it is because this market model functions in that way and we're a part
of that in the sense that we can be really true to our vision and totally understand
that there are people that really don't like the show, they email me how much they don't
like the show, they don't like my voice, they don't like me making interjections or cracking
wise about things and that's cool.
There's lots of other things for them to watch and a lot of other things on our network that
are different, but the people that do love the show love the show and we can be a very
successful product without really making compromises away from what our vision is.
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I think increasingly MSNBC has gotten more successful and has gained a larger share.
You hear more people calling it the Fox News of the left.
I'm not gonna be able to convince a hardcore Fox viewer that that's not true, but I do
think that there are some differences.
I mean, one is Fox is run by someone who by his own admission is a real ideologue, right?
And it's also owned by an extremely outspoken conservative who owns a bunch of conservative
media properties that explicitly avow conservatism and so in its DNA, it is partly a political
project.
And MSNBC just isn't foundationally a political project in the same way.
It's just not.
I mean, you can tell from the history of the network which has been all over the place
politically.
In my own experience, I just never get any like y'know memos from up top saying this
is the way we're gonna treat this story.
We y'know treat the story the way we want to.
So I think there are real distinctions between the two.
But I also think—I think the other thing I would say is embedded in that question is
partly this idea that y'know ideological media is somehow lesser or corrupt and I just think
that's just absolutely untrue.
The history of media—the overwhelming majority of media—since basically the industrial
age, since basically the colonists is explicitly ideological or explicitly partisan or explicitly
agenda-driven.
That's what most media throughout time has been.
The Nation magazine has always been a conduit for this kind of critique.
It was founded by abolitionists in 1865.
They were not neutral about slavery or reconstruction, nor should they have been.
And people aren't neutral about issues.
So I think there's a place for y'know media like the New York Times that have this kind
of objective—I'd say objective is the wrong word—unbiased perspective, but I also think
there's a lot of room for MSNBC and Fox and The National Review and The Nation and everything
around it, in between.
As long as there's a flowering of voices, that's all to the good.
Hi, I'm Chris Hayes.
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