CULTURES: On Fox, viewers are given the status of friends!

MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2024

At MSNBC, we viewers are now "beloved:" Last Friday, Ainsley Earhardt was helping tease the 7 o'clock hour of the long-running morning program, Fox & Friends.

Earhardt's co-hosts had started the tease. At 7:02, she ended the tease with this:

EARHARDT (3/1/24): The second hour of Fox & Friends starts right now, and remember:

Mornings are better with friends!

"Mornings are better with friends?"

We've heard the slogan several times in the past few weeks. Is it a long-standing branding / marketing message? We have no idea.

As we've noted in the past, Fox & Friends is one of the longest-running programs on the red tribe's Fox News Channel. The program premiered on February 1, 1998. The two principal male co-hosts—Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade—have remained in place to this day.

The idea that you're starting the day with friends is presumably offered as part of the program's appeal. It's an especially friendly branding message in an era in which our American nation, such as it was, has split into two rival nations—Red America and Blue.

Mornings are better with friends? For many viewers, the message may be reassuring.

If you're starting the day with friends, you as a viewer know that you will never be confronted with material that challenges you—material you may dislike. You'll hear one set of facts, frameworks and viewpoints—full stop. 

Every guest on the friendly program will reinforce your pre-existing point of view!

Presumably, your friends will always service your needs and your tribal desires. So it goes as red tribe viewers are told that they'll be happier if they start the day with friends.

This implicit reassurance is a long-standing part of red tribe culture. That said, let's recall a bit of advice we blue tribe viewers received as we watched The Rachel Maddow Show on Monday evening, February 5.

Midway through the hour, Maddow began calling her viewers' attention to an upcoming event. Directly out of a commercial break, she began her new segment with a somewhat unusual suggestion:

MADDOW (2/5/28): So if you can change your schedule around this week—your school schedule, your work schedule or childcare, whatever you need to do—if you can make time for it on Thursday morning, this week, you will have the opportunity to hear American history being made, live and in real time.

That Thursday morning, at 10 a.m. Eastern, the Supreme Court was going to hear oral arguments in the Colorado ballot case. This was the case that would decide whether "states can keep Donald Trump off the ballot under the provisions of the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution," Maddow correctly said.

The case would be argued that Thursday morning. Maddow was suggesting that viewers might want to change their schedule around so they could listen to the oral arguments, which were going to be broadcast live—audio only—on MSNBC.

A ten-minute segment followed. As she continued, Maddow listed the three main questions the Court would likely be exploring, then she offered this:

MADDOW: Anything can happen. The whole country is going to be listening in Thursday morning. Luckily for us, people who are experts at these things can help us understand what we should be listening for.

"The whole country is going to be listening?" Excitement about the hearing was running high on this cable news channel.

To our ear, it seemed a bit odd when this major media figure suggested that viewers should rearrange their school, work or childcare arrangements so they could listen on Thursday morning as American history was being made. 

By now, it wasn't entirely clear that any major history actually would be made. Also, Supreme Court hearings are famously hard to follow, especially so since videotape isn't allowed.

To our ear, Maddow's suggestions seemed a bit overheated—but, on balance, so what? Then, at the end of her hour, Maddow returned to the topic as she threw to Lawrence O'Donnell. 

She started by saying this:

MADDOW: Just a little note for your calendar before we go. 

This Thursday, 10 a.m. Eastern, the Supreme Court is going to livestream the oral arguments on whether Donald Trump is disqualified from holding federal office in the United States. Here at MSNBC, we will have that audio live and in full...

Then Thursday night, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, I'll be here with all my beloved colleagues. We will have a primetime recap of those oral arguments. I'll see you then.

That does it for us tonight. Now it's time for The Last Word with the great Lawrence O'Donnell.

There followed a discussion with the great O'Donnell. During that throw, Maddow reported that she had just readjusted her own Thursday morning schedule—that she'd done so rather frantically.

She had done so "in a panic," she told O'Donnell—later, she called it "a moral panic"—so that she would be able to listen to the livestream that Thursday morning.

Had Maddow really been in "a moral panic" as she adjusted her schedule? We would assume that the answer is no—that Maddow was simply telling us, as she is inclined to do, that her all-around state of being is more dramatic than ours.

That said, we were most struck by the reference to the people with whom she would recap the events on Thursday night:

Those people are her "beloved" colleagues? We didn't think we'd ever heard that characterization before.

Let's be clear! Presumably as a branding and marketing mechanism, hosts of MSNBC programs have long since begun describing their colleagues and guests as "friends."  Before too long, the inevitable embellishment began creeping into the messaging, with colleagues being described as "dear friends," even as "dear, dear friends."

So it has gone as "cable news" channels convince their viewers that they will be safe within a network of friends if they watch the channel in question. Now, those "dear, dear friends" had been bumped up another notch, attaining the peculiar status of being "beloved."

For us, the oddness of this presentation lingered when Maddow appeared with her colleagues on that  Thursday evening broadcast. 

In truth, the oral arguments hadn't seemed to proceed in the way our blue tribe had hoped. But as Maddow called the roll of the colleagues who would be part of the evening's two-hour broadcast, she referred to them as her "beloved colleagues" again.

We were struck by the hint of desperation involved in this marketing device. She then brought the analysts right out of their beanbag chairs when she offered this:

MADDOW (2/8/24): In the 1970s, Watergate hearings were also broadcast live during the workday. Recognizing how consequential, how important those hearings were, news networks during that time started recapping each day's Watregate hearings at night, on TV, in prime time, so no one would miss out on that incredibly important history in the making.

We then did the same during the daytime hearings of the January 6 investigation in Congress in 2022. We know from what we heard from you, our beloved viewers, that that was valuable, that was a useful thing. 

And so here we are, together again, tonight, with basically the same approach.

The analysts came right out of their chairs! Quickly, let's summarize:

By now, it seemed likely that no incredibly important history in the manner of Watergate was going to emerge from Monday's oral arguments. (We may find out today.)

Still and all, Maddow showered MSNBC with praise, comparing its recaps of the January 6 hearings to what had happened during that famous era.

As Maddow offered this introduction, she referred to the people sitting around her as "beloved colleagues" once again. But she brought the analysts right off their futon mats with that reference to us out here in TV land:

We were now the "beloved viewers" of our blue tribe's channel! We were the beloved viewers she and her beloved colleagues were working so hard to serve!

Over on the Fox News Channel, red tribe viewers have merely been told that they've attained the status of friends. On our own blue tribe channel, we've been bumped up to "beloved!"

To our ear, this was very strange journalistic behavior by a very major media figure. Maddow's formulations struck us as very strange. As always, your assessments may differ.

Our assessment? As in The Iliad, so too here:

As we've split into two separate nations, the cultures of our red and blue nations have sometimes grown quite different. Sometimes, though, those failing cultures are startlingly the same.

Tomorrow: The wages of "segregation"