When Maya Wiley talked a Trump aide off the ledge... (I'll explain)
Are these wild times?
Hello, Ari here — my latest newsletter is below!
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This long, strange trip!
Let me put it like this: Do you ever feel like we are living in extraordinary, intense, overwhelming times?
On The Beat, we just had a reason to review the last six years, and consider just some of the big developments:
The candidate who won fewer votes becomes President in 2017
He leads the most chaotic, criminal presidency in modern history
Americans respond with record-breaking turning in two elections in a row (2018, 2020)
A once-in-a-century pandemic arrives
Economic upheaval ensues
There’s a civil rights resurgence with BLM
and an actual insurrection
Roe v Wade is overturned
Putin starts the first major land war in Europe since WW II
And that is a partial list, of course. Some of these dynamics are linked — so just as prosperity and peace sometimes run together, the pandemic, economy and BLM protests ran together, just like Trump’s polarized impact on America.
Facts and the Internet
MSNBC assigned me to launch a news show in 2017, buffeted by all of the above. My team was just looking back on it all, because we hit a rare milestone for cable news — a billion total streams of our segments online!
If you believe in facts as a baseline for democracy and society, I think it’s a good sign when you see credible news reaching so many people, whether that’s the New York Times website, or MSNBC’s reach on YouTube. The Internet has upended most industries, and it wreaked havoc on business models for journalism, especially local and investigative reporting. Those problems continue, and we have to work on solutions (including subscribing to local papers and local writers’ newsletters, if you can).
At the same time, some national news is thriving. More people read, and pay for subscriptions, to the New York Times now than any point in history. As a show, The Beat reaches more live TV viewers than any hour of CNN, and then is one of the most watched news shows online, with this totally separate YouTube audience. And unlike cable, all our segments online are free to everyone around the world. So that’s cool.
And that brings us to this — the face attorney Maya Wiley made when listening to Trump aide Sam Nunberg proclaim, on live TV, that he would defy federal prosecutors in the Mueller probe:
It was one of those moments you could not imagine in advance, let alone script. Maya was not “talking about” the news, she was in it — face to face with a frazzled witness figuring out his legal moves in real time.
It’s one of the highlights we had to include in our new reel marking the billion views milestone, which aired this week.
I wanted to flag it for you if you didn’t happen to catch it live:
You may notice, I don’t usually just send videos out to the newsletter, but this one packs our last 5 years into ten minutes. We also have a shorter five-minute version here.
It was also fun to see the many artists we’ve had on, from David Byrne to Bon Jovi to Annie Lennox … to a few rappers here and there…
I am super grateful to have a job that touches on justice and culture, and that leads to meeting so may interesting people. We don’t do this work “in the abstract” — we only get to do it with a proven, recurring audience - so thank you for being a part of that!
Link up!
Also: if you want to get our Beat segments online, or recommend them to people who don’t happen to have cable — many people don’t, especially younger people… you can always bookmark our YouTube page here, it’s updated daily:
Tell me in the comments if you’re sharing the link, and your favorite Beat memory!
The Beat goes on…
Sometimes people ask me, why we do so much with music?!.. or, when I first got interested (considering that I don’t play an instrument, and have no musical talent whatsoever, believe me).
The answers are… my parents, who had records around and always exposed us to culture in the home; and then Garfield High School, which has a rich musical tradition. When I went there, everyone talked about music and new rap albums and that was just the norm. So I’ll sign off with a recent pic from when I “interviewed” my parents about their records for a TikTok video — my Dad on cam, my Mom talking off cam (their choices, you can guess which one I take after)….
P.S. You can see how “Reliable Sources” wrote up the billion news here.
Congratulations, Ari and yes, I’m sharing!
Re: Maya Wiley’s visual: As an African American woman, I am quite familiar with that look: from my mother, aunts, sisters, daughter, granddaughter, and yes, from me. To Sam Nunberg, that look was asking: “YOU GONH DO WHAAAAT?!” It was certainly my highlight from the reel! That was a live intervention of humanity. In that moment, all walls were removed, and we saw one human being caring for another, and the other being able to receive it. My other favorite was/is the camaraderie that has developed between Bill Krystol and Fat Joe. Two people from two totally different worlds, being able to SEE one another; to LISTEN, to LEARN, to understand and maybe even change a viewpoint.
C
My favorite segment was where Peter Navarro explained the Green Bay Sweep, and when you told him that was the plan for a coup he denied it like the thought never entered his mind.
Ari, I hope you and your team continue to bring out the facts and hold people accountable!
Congratulations and continued success!!