NPR Contributor: ‘My 14-Year-Old Daughter Can Rattle Off the Entire MSNBC Line-Up’
Bill Maher likes to deride conservatives for living “inside a bubble” where they consume news from only those with whom they agree and so are unaware of the “facts,” but he could just as well be describing the insular world of himself or others in the liberal media.
Case in point: An NPR and Washington Post contributor who spends her days reading left-wing magazines and watching MSNBC, to the exclusion of any conservative news sources, so much so that she conceded: “My 14-year-old daughter can rattle off the entire MSNBC line-up, so that should tell you something about our household viewing habits.”
On Wednesday, JimRomesko.com highlighted an October 1 Atlantic Wire “What I Read” feature on Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, regular book reviewer for the Washington Post and a critic-in-residence at Georgetown University.
Corrigan recounted her news consumption, which includes the far-left The Nation but nothing from the right nor even the center, and devotion to Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes:
In terms of weekly and monthly reading, we have a household subscription to the following: The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Publisher’s Weekly, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Sports Illustrated....
Before falling comatose into bed around 10:30, I probably will listen to all or part of Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC (on weekends, I also watch Up with Chris Hayes.) My 14-year-old daughter can rattle off the entire MSNBC line-up, so that should tell you something about our household viewing habits. I don’t watch the whole evening line-up (my husband usually does) because I’m, again, reading or planning classes or grading papers, but I do try to catch Rachel Maddow’s show.
Corrigan’s narrow leftist world view fits right in at Fresh Air, NPR’s afternoon news magazine. Back in 2010, its host and executive producer, Terry Gross, told Atlantic Wire she also spends her evenings taking in MSNBC while also never missing Jon Stewart and Bill Maher:
I subscribe to a lot of magazines: Time, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Harper’s, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and The New Republic. I read them all kind of like they were catalogs. I read the table of contents and look for interesting story ideas we might want to pursue.
For TV, I’ve kept up with a lot of the HBO shows: Big Love, The Wire, Bill Maher. Also Damages, The Office and, when it was on, The Shield on FX. I should mention Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Those shows are just fantastic....
I keep MSNBC on a lot in the evening while I’m working. I feel like Olbermann and Rachel Maddow keep up on the Web sites. They digest it and talk about them on their show. I also watch some CNN and sometimes Fox News to see what they’re up to.
-- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow Brent Baker on Twitter.
