I don’t pretend to know what works well on political television, but I do know there should be some minimal standards of self-respect and decency. So yeah, I was a little shocked to read Martin Longman’s piece at TMS this morning reporting that MSNBC is angling for the rights to rebroadcast Bloomberg’s “Will All Due Respect,” featuring the most conventional of Beltway reporters, Game Change co-authors Mark Halperin and John Heileman.
Regular readers know I hold these dudes in minimum high regard, and only read them occasionally because they are, God forgive us, capable of affecting media coverage. Martin does a nice round-up of unfriendly assessments of the duo, and he could have doubled the quotes if he included conservatives, who don’t much like them either despite Halperin’s efforts to flatter them and buy into every false equivalence meme.
Martin thinks rebroadcasting their mush is an insult to the talent at MSNBC, including Rachel Maddow and Brother Benen.
I figure these worthies have their own ways of coping with (and occasionally offsetting) the things their network masters decide they have to do to stay on the air. But Martin does ask a tough question:
Trying to be more relevant by running reruns of Mark Halperin that first aired on a rival network that no one watches?
Good luck with that.
UPDATE: “Minimum high regard” is a phrase I picked up from my one-time boss, Sam Nunn. It’s intended as sarcasm, not a calculation. Those of you who know Nunn can probably just hearing him using it in reference to any number of bloated Beltway figures.
