Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Brian Frazer, "Hyper-Chondriac" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1
Brian Frazer’s life reads far more colorfully than mine would, I’m afraid.
On the other hand, I managed to avoid that whole compulsive gambling- bodybuilding-speed-eating-colon-cleansing-Kabbalah thing that afflicted his youth.
In his first book, Hyper-Chondriac, Frazer comes clean… Did I just say that? …about a life lived at super-speed. It is one he spent most of his years in search of medical solutions to a litany of physical ailments when it turned out most of the trouble was in his head.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Gotta start with the most dangerous question of all: How you feeling?
FRAZER: I’m feeling pretty good, actually. I’m very fortunate that I found out I had a problem because, otherwise, I’d probably be dead by now.
ANDELMAN: Has your life settled down? Are you into a more comfortable routine now?
FRAZER: Yeah. Well, the first part about settling down is realizing that I had a problem because, basically -- and you know because you’ve read the book, but I’ll tell your listeners. Three months before my wedding, my hands were itching furiously so a friend referred me to his dermatologist, and I expected to walk out with some cortisone cream. And instead, within 45 seconds, a 60 year-old guy said that I was the most high-strung, uptight, intense person he’d ever met, and he wrote me a prescription for Zoloft. And I was like, Zoloft? I don’t need…I’m not depressed. I have a lot of other problems, but I’m certainly not depressed. And I refused to take the Zoloft for a few weeks and then finally said, you know what? I’m gonna take it, and it changed my life within a week.
ANDELMAN: Wow.
FRAZER: I realized that all of my problems, all of my rage…Every once in a while, sure, it’s somebody else, but for the most part, it’s me. I’m not in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s just my energy attracts other bad energy, and my rage…You have to let things slide. So until that happened, which was four or five years ago, I thought everybody else was a jerk and not me. That made me realize that I was a jerk. And then I wanted to get off of the Zoloft so I branched out and looked through some alternative therapies.
ANDELMAN: How much of your energy today, Brian, is devoted to staying calm, or do you feel that you’ve had it under control for a while?
FRAZER: I don’t think it’s ever under control. You have to work at it. If one was an alcoholic, it’s a day at a time. You never know what’s going to happen in life, and you have to just prepare yourself. If I keep my diet squeaky-clean and by squeaky-clean -- my diet was always good before. I would have like a banana and a soy yogurt in the morning, but I went to an Ayurvedist, which I found to be the most helpful thing available. And that’s another thing about the book. There’s no stunt journalism in this. This is my life. And the book’s been out for almost a year now, and I still continue to go to new things, anything that I think will help me. The Ayurvedist, who basically puts his thumb on you and measures your pulse and your seven different layers of energy, said that yeah, the foods I’m eating are healthy, but they’re not healthy for my body type and that I actually had to eat foods with less sugar and more fat. And that has helped me tremendously. If I would stay on an Ayurvedic diet 100 percent of the time -- which is hard to do especially if you’re traveling -- I’d never have to take another pill in my life.
ANDELMAN: Wow.
FRAZER: Making mung bean soup and these things that you wouldn’t even…I just smashed a coconut in my driveway this morning, which I do once a week, and I have a coconut and almonds and mango puree I make. I don’t cook so nothing I make is all that scientific or complicated. Like the mung bean soup has changed my life. I know it sounds really stupid, but I don’t know what’s in it, and it might not change your life or anybody else’s, but it’ll work for somebody else out there depending on their energy level.
ANDELMAN: Let’s come back to the food because I think the food comes in at the end of the story so let’s go back to the beginning a little bit. And I have to tell you, I can’t remember many books, many memoir-type books that I’ve read and felt guilty for laughing during, but I’m guessing you won’t take offense at hearing that.
FRAZER: No, no, not at all. I’ve had problems, family problems, as most people do, but my life is neither comedy nor tragedy. It’s a little bit of both. It’s not so bad. There’s a lot of people that have had a lot less and a lot worse lives than I have.
ANDELMAN: One of the things, Brian, that struck me as I was reading was that, as much as you seem to hate being noticed for all the quirks that made you stand out as a kid, you, nonetheless, wrote a catalog of them. Did you have second thoughts about putting all this in a book and opening yourself up?
FRAZER: No. A couple of people that I’ve known for years that read the book, and then I sat across the street from…In fact, even my publicist who set this up said, “Doesn’t it make you awkward to know that now I know all this stuff about you?” I’m like, “No. I didn’t kill a person. I didn’t really harm anybody but myself all these years.” My mother, obviously, still has not gotten over the book, and she’s sensitive to begin with. But I talked to her three times a week for 25 years, and now she’s not speaking to me. But I wouldn’t go back and change anything. If you’re gonna be honest, you have to be honest about everybody not just yourself. You have to kind of take everybody down with you.
ANDELMAN: Let’s start with your mother. I was going to say let’s talk about some of the issues from your youth, and we can start with your mom. One of the things that comes across is the reader may read into this. You get a ways into the book, and you think maybe he’s blaming his Jewish mother with the MS for some of his troubles. But I don’t really think that’s what you had in mind.
FRAZER: No, no, not at all. I, in fact, if anything, the only thing I blame her for is, present day, in that there’s not a solution to every problem, but there’s a partial solution to every problem, and I don’t know if she’s really explored all of her options. I’ve tried to get her to take Zoloft or Paxil or something like that, and allegedly she was on it for like a week years ago, and it was a great week, according to my father, and she just refuses to do that again. And it’s not like she’s pill-averse. She probably takes 30 pills a day. She almost wants to be a martyr, and she refuses to try and make things a little bit easier on herself. But, no, I love my mother. I love my parents. I dedicated the book to them so there’s certainly no malice there. But I think that a lot of the book centers around pain because, even though MS is not contagious, the symptoms certainly are. And disease and pain are contagious so I think that a lot of her pain has filtered down to me, and I’ve tried to compensate in other ways as you told your listeners at the beginning. I was a former bodybuilder, natural, steroid-free for about 10 or 12 years in an attempt to kind of insulate and protect my body so nothing horrible would happen to it as occurred to my mother.
ANDELMAN: Does your mother feel that there was an invasion of her privacy being written about in such detail?
FRAZER: Yes. She’s not really speaking to me, but you have to also realize that she has been retired for years, as has my father. They don’t go out. They’re basically confined to their house. They go out to eat for lunch at 11:00 maybe once a month, and that’s it. Had they had to face co-workers everyday, I may have thought otherwise, and I may have thought that I was stepping over the line. But nobody’s going to know anything about them. And the people that know her already know the difficulties that come with disease.
ANDELMAN: If it’s not your mother that contributed necessarily to some of the problems you’ve had over the years, could it be the father collecting the comic books? Because I know, as an old comic book guy myself, it’s been blamed for all kinds of things.
FRAZER: Both of my parents are still alive. If he had emulated a superhero a little bit more, then maybe the relationship with my mother and everybody else would be better because the problem is my mother is a little bit too mean, and my father’s a little bit too nice. So if my father became a little bit meaner and had more of a backbone, then my mother would realize that she couldn’t get away with everything that she’s getting away with. And then things would kind of move back toward the center a little bit.
ANDELMAN: I have to say that I connected to your description of struggling with your bar mitzvah. It was a hellacious time in my life, too. But the shocking thing there was that your rabbi, very shortly after your bar mitzvah, converted to Episcopalian, and that seemed to really have an effect on you and, of course, it’s a recurring theme later in the book. As you look at that now was that really a big deal in your life?
FRAZER: Yes. In fact, I just went to my high school reunion, actually, just October, and there were two or three other people that were there that I hadn’t seen in years that also went to my temple and that had read the book and were commenting about the rabbi. Yeah, it happened about two months after he bar mitzvahed me, and it’s kind of weird to have somebody kind of getting you through the rituals of becoming a Jewish man and then like two months later, he splits to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and he’s converted. So, yeah, it’s a little odd.
ANDELMAN: Does it still bother you today?
FRAZER: Yeah. I still have an aversion. I flipped out for a while. The Zoloft has calmed down my religious aversion, but I can’t really go into any house of worship, whether it’s Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish. It doesn’t matter. I tend to show up for weddings late because the ceremonies kind of freak me out. So a lot of that is attributable to my rabbi or ex-rabbi.
ANDELMAN: And for me, it was always I’d go to those things, and I just fall asleep in them, which grates on my wife terribly. She gives me the elbow because I’m asleep. So it’s a different kind of aversion, but…
FRAZER: Every once in a while there’s like a really long one. Like I went to a Catholic one with my wife, and I always make a go of it and sit in the very, very back row just cause I don’t want to disrupt anything and see how long I can take it. And it was literally…The ceremony was an hour and a half, and I’m like, “What? This is crazy! Where are the appetizers? An hour and a half?”
ANDELMAN: Yeah, all that time with no food.
FRAZER: Exactly.
ANDELMAN: At what age did you realize that not everyone was like you?
FRAZER: Probably 38 or 39, to be honest with you.
ANDELMAN: Oh, really?
FRAZER: Oh yeah, yeah. I just kind of went through life and didn’t think about it too much. I thought that people weren’t like me in that I was polite, and they were rude, which is where a lot of the rage comes from, but that’s certainly not true. But, yeah, it took a long time. And had I not stumbled onto this dermatologist, and like I said, I don’t know why a dermatologist is dispensing Zoloft, I don’t know if I would ever have realized that I had a problem.
ANDELMAN: Do you ever count up how many doctors and therapists and quacks that you went through in the course of this?
FRAZER: No. I still go to some weird things. I went to this thing called Bradiology recently after the book, which just shows that it’s not stunt journalism, where they kind of measure energy, and they see if you’re getting the right minerals and supplements, and they also ask you questions. And it’s kind of odd, but I got something out of it so that’s all I can ask. No, I’ve gone to a lot of them. I’ve also experienced a bevy of illnesses. My colon hemorrhaged at 25, and I had Hepatitis A at 31, and I had prostate problems. And it was all induced by stress because I’ve never been a big drinker, never done a drug in my life, had been exercising five or six days a week since I was 14. So all the stress has just built up in my body and has contributed to these diseases, which is why I’m 43, and I’m much healthier now than I was when I was 23, which is unusual.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Brian Frazer’s life reads far more colorfully than mine would, I’m afraid.
On the other hand, I managed to avoid that whole compulsive gambling- bodybuilding-speed-eating-colon-cleansing-Kabbalah thing that afflicted his youth.
In his first book, Hyper-Chondriac, Frazer comes clean… Did I just say that? …about a life lived at super-speed. It is one he spent most of his years in search of medical solutions to a litany of physical ailments when it turned out most of the trouble was in his head.
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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Gotta start with the most dangerous question of all: How you feeling?
FRAZER: I’m feeling pretty good, actually. I’m very fortunate that I found out I had a problem because, otherwise, I’d probably be dead by now.
ANDELMAN: Has your life settled down? Are you into a more comfortable routine now?
FRAZER: Yeah. Well, the first part about settling down is realizing that I had a problem because, basically -- and you know because you’ve read the book, but I’ll tell your listeners. Three months before my wedding, my hands were itching furiously so a friend referred me to his dermatologist, and I expected to walk out with some cortisone cream. And instead, within 45 seconds, a 60 year-old guy said that I was the most high-strung, uptight, intense person he’d ever met, and he wrote me a prescription for Zoloft. And I was like, Zoloft? I don’t need…I’m not depressed. I have a lot of other problems, but I’m certainly not depressed. And I refused to take the Zoloft for a few weeks and then finally said, you know what? I’m gonna take it, and it changed my life within a week.
ANDELMAN: Wow.
FRAZER: I realized that all of my problems, all of my rage…Every once in a while, sure, it’s somebody else, but for the most part, it’s me. I’m not in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s just my energy attracts other bad energy, and my rage…You have to let things slide. So until that happened, which was four or five years ago, I thought everybody else was a jerk and not me. That made me realize that I was a jerk. And then I wanted to get off of the Zoloft so I branched out and looked through some alternative therapies.
ANDELMAN: How much of your energy today, Brian, is devoted to staying calm, or do you feel that you’ve had it under control for a while?
FRAZER: I don’t think it’s ever under control. You have to work at it. If one was an alcoholic, it’s a day at a time. You never know what’s going to happen in life, and you have to just prepare yourself. If I keep my diet squeaky-clean and by squeaky-clean -- my diet was always good before. I would have like a banana and a soy yogurt in the morning, but I went to an Ayurvedist, which I found to be the most helpful thing available. And that’s another thing about the book. There’s no stunt journalism in this. This is my life. And the book’s been out for almost a year now, and I still continue to go to new things, anything that I think will help me. The Ayurvedist, who basically puts his thumb on you and measures your pulse and your seven different layers of energy, said that yeah, the foods I’m eating are healthy, but they’re not healthy for my body type and that I actually had to eat foods with less sugar and more fat. And that has helped me tremendously. If I would stay on an Ayurvedic diet 100 percent of the time -- which is hard to do especially if you’re traveling -- I’d never have to take another pill in my life.
ANDELMAN: Wow.
FRAZER: Making mung bean soup and these things that you wouldn’t even…I just smashed a coconut in my driveway this morning, which I do once a week, and I have a coconut and almonds and mango puree I make. I don’t cook so nothing I make is all that scientific or complicated. Like the mung bean soup has changed my life. I know it sounds really stupid, but I don’t know what’s in it, and it might not change your life or anybody else’s, but it’ll work for somebody else out there depending on their energy level.
ANDELMAN: Let’s come back to the food because I think the food comes in at the end of the story so let’s go back to the beginning a little bit. And I have to tell you, I can’t remember many books, many memoir-type books that I’ve read and felt guilty for laughing during, but I’m guessing you won’t take offense at hearing that.
FRAZER: No, no, not at all. I’ve had problems, family problems, as most people do, but my life is neither comedy nor tragedy. It’s a little bit of both. It’s not so bad. There’s a lot of people that have had a lot less and a lot worse lives than I have.
ANDELMAN: One of the things, Brian, that struck me as I was reading was that, as much as you seem to hate being noticed for all the quirks that made you stand out as a kid, you, nonetheless, wrote a catalog of them. Did you have second thoughts about putting all this in a book and opening yourself up?
FRAZER: No. A couple of people that I’ve known for years that read the book, and then I sat across the street from…In fact, even my publicist who set this up said, “Doesn’t it make you awkward to know that now I know all this stuff about you?” I’m like, “No. I didn’t kill a person. I didn’t really harm anybody but myself all these years.” My mother, obviously, still has not gotten over the book, and she’s sensitive to begin with. But I talked to her three times a week for 25 years, and now she’s not speaking to me. But I wouldn’t go back and change anything. If you’re gonna be honest, you have to be honest about everybody not just yourself. You have to kind of take everybody down with you.
ANDELMAN: Let’s start with your mother. I was going to say let’s talk about some of the issues from your youth, and we can start with your mom. One of the things that comes across is the reader may read into this. You get a ways into the book, and you think maybe he’s blaming his Jewish mother with the MS for some of his troubles. But I don’t really think that’s what you had in mind.
FRAZER: No, no, not at all. I, in fact, if anything, the only thing I blame her for is, present day, in that there’s not a solution to every problem, but there’s a partial solution to every problem, and I don’t know if she’s really explored all of her options. I’ve tried to get her to take Zoloft or Paxil or something like that, and allegedly she was on it for like a week years ago, and it was a great week, according to my father, and she just refuses to do that again. And it’s not like she’s pill-averse. She probably takes 30 pills a day. She almost wants to be a martyr, and she refuses to try and make things a little bit easier on herself. But, no, I love my mother. I love my parents. I dedicated the book to them so there’s certainly no malice there. But I think that a lot of the book centers around pain because, even though MS is not contagious, the symptoms certainly are. And disease and pain are contagious so I think that a lot of her pain has filtered down to me, and I’ve tried to compensate in other ways as you told your listeners at the beginning. I was a former bodybuilder, natural, steroid-free for about 10 or 12 years in an attempt to kind of insulate and protect my body so nothing horrible would happen to it as occurred to my mother.
ANDELMAN: Does your mother feel that there was an invasion of her privacy being written about in such detail?
FRAZER: Yes. She’s not really speaking to me, but you have to also realize that she has been retired for years, as has my father. They don’t go out. They’re basically confined to their house. They go out to eat for lunch at 11:00 maybe once a month, and that’s it. Had they had to face co-workers everyday, I may have thought otherwise, and I may have thought that I was stepping over the line. But nobody’s going to know anything about them. And the people that know her already know the difficulties that come with disease.
ANDELMAN: If it’s not your mother that contributed necessarily to some of the problems you’ve had over the years, could it be the father collecting the comic books? Because I know, as an old comic book guy myself, it’s been blamed for all kinds of things.
FRAZER: Both of my parents are still alive. If he had emulated a superhero a little bit more, then maybe the relationship with my mother and everybody else would be better because the problem is my mother is a little bit too mean, and my father’s a little bit too nice. So if my father became a little bit meaner and had more of a backbone, then my mother would realize that she couldn’t get away with everything that she’s getting away with. And then things would kind of move back toward the center a little bit.
ANDELMAN: I have to say that I connected to your description of struggling with your bar mitzvah. It was a hellacious time in my life, too. But the shocking thing there was that your rabbi, very shortly after your bar mitzvah, converted to Episcopalian, and that seemed to really have an effect on you and, of course, it’s a recurring theme later in the book. As you look at that now was that really a big deal in your life?
FRAZER: Yes. In fact, I just went to my high school reunion, actually, just October, and there were two or three other people that were there that I hadn’t seen in years that also went to my temple and that had read the book and were commenting about the rabbi. Yeah, it happened about two months after he bar mitzvahed me, and it’s kind of weird to have somebody kind of getting you through the rituals of becoming a Jewish man and then like two months later, he splits to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and he’s converted. So, yeah, it’s a little odd.
ANDELMAN: Does it still bother you today?
FRAZER: Yeah. I still have an aversion. I flipped out for a while. The Zoloft has calmed down my religious aversion, but I can’t really go into any house of worship, whether it’s Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish. It doesn’t matter. I tend to show up for weddings late because the ceremonies kind of freak me out. So a lot of that is attributable to my rabbi or ex-rabbi.
ANDELMAN: And for me, it was always I’d go to those things, and I just fall asleep in them, which grates on my wife terribly. She gives me the elbow because I’m asleep. So it’s a different kind of aversion, but…
FRAZER: Every once in a while there’s like a really long one. Like I went to a Catholic one with my wife, and I always make a go of it and sit in the very, very back row just cause I don’t want to disrupt anything and see how long I can take it. And it was literally…The ceremony was an hour and a half, and I’m like, “What? This is crazy! Where are the appetizers? An hour and a half?”
ANDELMAN: Yeah, all that time with no food.
FRAZER: Exactly.
ANDELMAN: At what age did you realize that not everyone was like you?
FRAZER: Probably 38 or 39, to be honest with you.
ANDELMAN: Oh, really?
FRAZER: Oh yeah, yeah. I just kind of went through life and didn’t think about it too much. I thought that people weren’t like me in that I was polite, and they were rude, which is where a lot of the rage comes from, but that’s certainly not true. But, yeah, it took a long time. And had I not stumbled onto this dermatologist, and like I said, I don’t know why a dermatologist is dispensing Zoloft, I don’t know if I would ever have realized that I had a problem.
ANDELMAN: Do you ever count up how many doctors and therapists and quacks that you went through in the course of this?
FRAZER: No. I still go to some weird things. I went to this thing called Bradiology recently after the book, which just shows that it’s not stunt journalism, where they kind of measure energy, and they see if you’re getting the right minerals and supplements, and they also ask you questions. And it’s kind of odd, but I got something out of it so that’s all I can ask. No, I’ve gone to a lot of them. I’ve also experienced a bevy of illnesses. My colon hemorrhaged at 25, and I had Hepatitis A at 31, and I had prostate problems. And it was all induced by stress because I’ve never been a big drinker, never done a drug in my life, had been exercising five or six days a week since I was 14. So all the stress has just built up in my body and has contributed to these diseases, which is why I’m 43, and I’m much healthier now than I was when I was 23, which is unusual.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: anger management, Ayurvedic, Ayurvedist, Brian Frazer, colon cleansing, compulsive gambling, Hyper-Chondriac, hypochondriac, Jewish mother, Kabbalah, MSNBC, Multiple Sclerosis, Zoloft
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Monday, October 15, 2007
Chris Matthews, "Hardball" host: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally published June 30, 1997
As a political aide to a pantheon of Democratic stars from the last 25 years, including the late Senator Edmund S. Muskie and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill -- as well as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter -- Chris Matthews knows power when he sees it.
And as Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, he also knows bullshit when he smells it.
Combine these attributes with a hard-charging, uzi-sprung delivery, a nightclub bouncer's physical presence, blonde hair, brown eyes and a zealot's demand for truth, justice and the American way and you must be watching Matthews' cable TV show, "Hardball." Seen nightly on CNBC, Matthews, 51, grabs viewers in his teeth for 30 minutes and doesn't stop shaking until he forces them to take one side or another of the day's top political issues.
"This is a program about the contest which is implicit in just about every big story," Matthews says, "whether it is the Republicans against the Democrats, prosecutors against defense attorneys, defense attorneys against the media, whatever. There is usually an omen of the contest in just about every major story. That is why there is conflict and that is why there is a story."
Like "The McLaughlin Group," a show on which Matthews was himself once a frequent panelist, "Hardball" features a revolving cast of political and media savvy commentators who the host jabs and provokes, sometimes into a frenzy. And despite his blue-chip credentials as a former behind-the-scenes Democratic policy maker, Matthews doesn't always take predictable sides in a debate. In fact, it sometimes appears as if he chooses the position most likely to get a rise out of his guests. It makes great television, even if it leaves an occasional squishy area in his own ideology.
"If I were sitting around the dinner table with you, with my family or anybody else," he says, "I would like to think that the voice you heard as the evening wore on would be very similar, very recognizable, from my books and columns and what I do in television. If I am in the company of a lot of conservatives who are all self-satisfied or ideologically secure, I love to challenge them and go to the liberal side of things. But if I am in a group of people where I think that the politically correct point of view is liberal, I will be extremely tough on that view, coming off as more conservative than I am, because I am surrounded by liberals. If I were put on a desert island with a bunch of conservatives, I would quickly adapt my skepticism to the other side of things. I have sympathy for people that tend to be losing, too. I find myself sympathizing with any side that lost a war."
Conservative? Liberal? Opportunist may be the best label for this political manimal.
"If you can isolate the conflict," he explains, "and find out where the contest of wills and wits and tactics and strengths and weaknesses is at work, then you can usually find a different way of looking at a major news story than other people are using."
When Bill Clinton's lawyer suddenly began attacking Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, it opened a delicious can of squirming worms for Matthews. "What's this going to the air about?" he wondered aloud. "Why go to the media? Why resort to a media strategy at this point, what's that about? What about the tactic of leaking and attacking and leaking, what's at work here? Are they trying to discredit Ken Starr, or are they trying to intimidate him into not leaking? What are they up to?"
"Hardball," which debuted in January, is probably on the crest of big things. Matthews masterfully finds fresh edges in even the most well-aged of news stories by giving each an infusion of sports-like energy. It's no accident the show is named "Hardball" instead of "Meet the Week Group" or something equally vague and obsequious.
Does the format work every night? Can Matthews rub his guests and himself into a lather five days a week? For 30 minutes a day, couldn't you?
"It is a heat-seeking program," says the host, "and I think that you can detect the heat (in certain topics) such as the JonBenet Ramsey (murder investigation) or the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh. In politics, you can sense it around the Clintons, especially Hillary Clinton. I think whenever there is a lot of heat and argument about something, it makes a more interesting program, because people are already tuned into it emotionally, and then the question is to give them another look at it from a totally different prism, which is the contest. Not who is right and who is wrong, but who is winning, who is losing, and how are they doing it, how are they managing to compete with each other."
In fact, each edition of "Hardball" opens with a tight camera shot of Matthews' face as he blasts through the day's "Winners & Losers" as he sees them. And each show closes with a personal essay by Matthews, taking viewers further into his heart and sometimes tortured soul.
A Peace Corps veteran, Matthews first worked as a journalist in 1973 under the aegis of consumer activist Ralph Nader. "I wasn't really big on investigative reporting," he recalls. "I didn't really like it. Some people are good at it. Bob Woodward is obviously the best, but I just didn't like doing it."
He quickly turned his back on journalism to work for Utah Senator Frank Moss (D), which eventually led him to a series of prominent appointments with Muskie, Carter and O'Neill.
His TV career kicked off in 1988, with Matthews proffering political commentary, first on "CBS This Morning" and then ABC's "Good Morning America." Along the way he made frequent appearances on "The McLaughlin Group" before being tapped to host a two-hour show on the little-watched NBC cable channel that preceded MSNBC, America's Talking. A year ago, he joined CNBC as host of "Politics," which was on at 8 p.m. EST, and which gave way in January to "Hardball" at 8:30 p.m.
Being on the tube is a way of life in the Matthews household; his wife, Kathleen is a top-rated local news anchor at WJLA Ch. 7, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C.
The 25-year-old Watergate break-in recently helped score major publicity for Matthews both in his twice-weekly column for the Examiner (syndicated by Tribune Media Services) and on TV.
"I will brag a bit: I broke all the stories on the Nixon tapes. All those stories that ran in the Washington Post, I broke four major ones (in the Examiner)," he says. "I broke the story that Nixon organized the surveillance campaign. I lifted it out of the archives at the beginning of last year. He was the one who got the whole stupid campaign going. He ordered the sneaking into the National Archives. He ordered the break-in of the Republican National Committee Headquarters the week after Watergate to make it look like both sides did it. He did all that, and I got all that from the archives and broke all those stories, and in each case, the Washington Post gave me credit."
He gained another coup in June when newspapers nationwide ran a compelling picture of him and former Nixon aide-turned radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy looking out from a terrace at the Watergate Hotel the week of the break-in's 25th anniversary.
Actually, 1997 has the potential of being an even bigger year still for Matthews, with publication of the paperback edition of his second book, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Post-War America (Simon & Shuster/Touchstone) in August. The paperback will include new material based on discoveries Matthews made while researching the latest Nixon tapes.
Matthews' first book, a political primer called Hardball (Harper Collins), was first published in 1988. It is still in print and selling steadily.
Frequent "Hardball" guests -- maybe targets would be a better word -- include Time magazine's Margaret Carlson Newsweek's Howard Fineman, Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, GOP strategist Ed Rollins, disgraced advisor Dick Morris, Michael Barone of Reader's Digest; Fred Barnes, Cokie Roberts, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradley and Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute.
"They are my people," Matthews says, "exciting people to have around and they come loaded for bear."
But when them come loaded with bull, this host isn't afraid to call them on it.
"'The bigger they are, the harder they fall' would be a good motto for the show," he says. "I think I am skeptical of power and most skeptical of the most power. I harbor a good dose of good old American, Irish-American, resentment. Probably makes me a fairly familiar voice. I think I resent people in power and may even envy them some, and I would even admit that. I think that I have a voice which is experienced because I have been there all those years, and I think I have a pretty good crap detector."
Sometimes, Matthews gets his guests all lathered up just in time for a commercial break. But rather than politely waiting for them to finish spinning their message or trying to kindly interrupt the way Ted Koppel or Larry King might, he looks into the camera and talks over them, teasing what's coming up next with the combatants still drawing blood in the background. It makes great television but Matthews swears it's not done with intentional rudeness.
"Maybe that's show biz," he says, "but I do have somebody in my ear saying, 'Break!' Or else I am saying, 'Let's leave the audience asking for more.' The program is only 22 minutes long and each segment really tries to deal with a different contest.
As for his rapidfire delivery and execution, Matthews compares himself to a high-performance race car.
"You have to get around that track as fast as you can," he says, "but you have to drive fast enough to win and not too fast to get killed. McLaughlin's great strength is speed. He says, 'Let's get out of this.' People are very quickly bored today; they want you to move or else they will surf you right off the planet."
Working in print and electronic media, Matthews exalts in the best of both.
"On TV," he says, "you can reach half a million people instantly, and you can revel in a kind of a phenomenon that you can't in print. Print, you can only write the story and describe the event; television, you can be the event. I think it is like the difference between going to a party at someone's house and being mailed a description of the party."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Originally published June 30, 1997
As a political aide to a pantheon of Democratic stars from the last 25 years, including the late Senator Edmund S. Muskie and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill -- as well as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter -- Chris Matthews knows power when he sees it.
And as Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, he also knows bullshit when he smells it.
Combine these attributes with a hard-charging, uzi-sprung delivery, a nightclub bouncer's physical presence, blonde hair, brown eyes and a zealot's demand for truth, justice and the American way and you must be watching Matthews' cable TV show, "Hardball." Seen nightly on CNBC, Matthews, 51, grabs viewers in his teeth for 30 minutes and doesn't stop shaking until he forces them to take one side or another of the day's top political issues.
"This is a program about the contest which is implicit in just about every big story," Matthews says, "whether it is the Republicans against the Democrats, prosecutors against defense attorneys, defense attorneys against the media, whatever. There is usually an omen of the contest in just about every major story. That is why there is conflict and that is why there is a story."
Like "The McLaughlin Group," a show on which Matthews was himself once a frequent panelist, "Hardball" features a revolving cast of political and media savvy commentators who the host jabs and provokes, sometimes into a frenzy. And despite his blue-chip credentials as a former behind-the-scenes Democratic policy maker, Matthews doesn't always take predictable sides in a debate. In fact, it sometimes appears as if he chooses the position most likely to get a rise out of his guests. It makes great television, even if it leaves an occasional squishy area in his own ideology.
"If I were sitting around the dinner table with you, with my family or anybody else," he says, "I would like to think that the voice you heard as the evening wore on would be very similar, very recognizable, from my books and columns and what I do in television. If I am in the company of a lot of conservatives who are all self-satisfied or ideologically secure, I love to challenge them and go to the liberal side of things. But if I am in a group of people where I think that the politically correct point of view is liberal, I will be extremely tough on that view, coming off as more conservative than I am, because I am surrounded by liberals. If I were put on a desert island with a bunch of conservatives, I would quickly adapt my skepticism to the other side of things. I have sympathy for people that tend to be losing, too. I find myself sympathizing with any side that lost a war."
Conservative? Liberal? Opportunist may be the best label for this political manimal.
"If you can isolate the conflict," he explains, "and find out where the contest of wills and wits and tactics and strengths and weaknesses is at work, then you can usually find a different way of looking at a major news story than other people are using."
When Bill Clinton's lawyer suddenly began attacking Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, it opened a delicious can of squirming worms for Matthews. "What's this going to the air about?" he wondered aloud. "Why go to the media? Why resort to a media strategy at this point, what's that about? What about the tactic of leaking and attacking and leaking, what's at work here? Are they trying to discredit Ken Starr, or are they trying to intimidate him into not leaking? What are they up to?"
"Hardball," which debuted in January, is probably on the crest of big things. Matthews masterfully finds fresh edges in even the most well-aged of news stories by giving each an infusion of sports-like energy. It's no accident the show is named "Hardball" instead of "Meet the Week Group" or something equally vague and obsequious.
Does the format work every night? Can Matthews rub his guests and himself into a lather five days a week? For 30 minutes a day, couldn't you?
"It is a heat-seeking program," says the host, "and I think that you can detect the heat (in certain topics) such as the JonBenet Ramsey (murder investigation) or the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh. In politics, you can sense it around the Clintons, especially Hillary Clinton. I think whenever there is a lot of heat and argument about something, it makes a more interesting program, because people are already tuned into it emotionally, and then the question is to give them another look at it from a totally different prism, which is the contest. Not who is right and who is wrong, but who is winning, who is losing, and how are they doing it, how are they managing to compete with each other."
In fact, each edition of "Hardball" opens with a tight camera shot of Matthews' face as he blasts through the day's "Winners & Losers" as he sees them. And each show closes with a personal essay by Matthews, taking viewers further into his heart and sometimes tortured soul.
A Peace Corps veteran, Matthews first worked as a journalist in 1973 under the aegis of consumer activist Ralph Nader. "I wasn't really big on investigative reporting," he recalls. "I didn't really like it. Some people are good at it. Bob Woodward is obviously the best, but I just didn't like doing it."
He quickly turned his back on journalism to work for Utah Senator Frank Moss (D), which eventually led him to a series of prominent appointments with Muskie, Carter and O'Neill.
His TV career kicked off in 1988, with Matthews proffering political commentary, first on "CBS This Morning" and then ABC's "Good Morning America." Along the way he made frequent appearances on "The McLaughlin Group" before being tapped to host a two-hour show on the little-watched NBC cable channel that preceded MSNBC, America's Talking. A year ago, he joined CNBC as host of "Politics," which was on at 8 p.m. EST, and which gave way in January to "Hardball" at 8:30 p.m.
Being on the tube is a way of life in the Matthews household; his wife, Kathleen is a top-rated local news anchor at WJLA Ch. 7, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C.
The 25-year-old Watergate break-in recently helped score major publicity for Matthews both in his twice-weekly column for the Examiner (syndicated by Tribune Media Services) and on TV.
"I will brag a bit: I broke all the stories on the Nixon tapes. All those stories that ran in the Washington Post, I broke four major ones (in the Examiner)," he says. "I broke the story that Nixon organized the surveillance campaign. I lifted it out of the archives at the beginning of last year. He was the one who got the whole stupid campaign going. He ordered the sneaking into the National Archives. He ordered the break-in of the Republican National Committee Headquarters the week after Watergate to make it look like both sides did it. He did all that, and I got all that from the archives and broke all those stories, and in each case, the Washington Post gave me credit."
He gained another coup in June when newspapers nationwide ran a compelling picture of him and former Nixon aide-turned radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy looking out from a terrace at the Watergate Hotel the week of the break-in's 25th anniversary.
Actually, 1997 has the potential of being an even bigger year still for Matthews, with publication of the paperback edition of his second book, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Post-War America (Simon & Shuster/Touchstone) in August. The paperback will include new material based on discoveries Matthews made while researching the latest Nixon tapes.
Matthews' first book, a political primer called Hardball (Harper Collins), was first published in 1988. It is still in print and selling steadily.
Frequent "Hardball" guests -- maybe targets would be a better word -- include Time magazine's Margaret Carlson Newsweek's Howard Fineman, Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, GOP strategist Ed Rollins, disgraced advisor Dick Morris, Michael Barone of Reader's Digest; Fred Barnes, Cokie Roberts, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradley and Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute.
"They are my people," Matthews says, "exciting people to have around and they come loaded for bear."
But when them come loaded with bull, this host isn't afraid to call them on it.
"'The bigger they are, the harder they fall' would be a good motto for the show," he says. "I think I am skeptical of power and most skeptical of the most power. I harbor a good dose of good old American, Irish-American, resentment. Probably makes me a fairly familiar voice. I think I resent people in power and may even envy them some, and I would even admit that. I think that I have a voice which is experienced because I have been there all those years, and I think I have a pretty good crap detector."
Sometimes, Matthews gets his guests all lathered up just in time for a commercial break. But rather than politely waiting for them to finish spinning their message or trying to kindly interrupt the way Ted Koppel or Larry King might, he looks into the camera and talks over them, teasing what's coming up next with the combatants still drawing blood in the background. It makes great television but Matthews swears it's not done with intentional rudeness.
"Maybe that's show biz," he says, "but I do have somebody in my ear saying, 'Break!' Or else I am saying, 'Let's leave the audience asking for more.' The program is only 22 minutes long and each segment really tries to deal with a different contest.
As for his rapidfire delivery and execution, Matthews compares himself to a high-performance race car.
"You have to get around that track as fast as you can," he says, "but you have to drive fast enough to win and not too fast to get killed. McLaughlin's great strength is speed. He says, 'Let's get out of this.' People are very quickly bored today; they want you to move or else they will surf you right off the planet."
Working in print and electronic media, Matthews exalts in the best of both.
"On TV," he says, "you can reach half a million people instantly, and you can revel in a kind of a phenomenon that you can't in print. Print, you can only write the story and describe the event; television, you can be the event. I think it is like the difference between going to a party at someone's house and being mailed a description of the party."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Bill Clinton, Chris Matthews, CNBC, Edmund S. Muskie, G. Gordon Libby, Hardball, Jimmy Carter, JonBenet Ramsey, Kenneth Starr, MSNBC, Ralph Nader, San Francisco Examiner, Timothy McVeigh, Tip O'Neill
¶ 10:34 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Soledad O'Brien, "The Site" MSNBC host: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally published June 16, 1997
This is gonna burst a lot of geek hearts, but Soledad O'Brien, host of MSNBC's nightly cable TV show "The Site", is not one of you. And wait, it gets worse: She's married. Happily.
O'Brien, the cyber-dream date of a generation of guys living in the basement of the science building, may give the impression she's been surfing the Web for years, but the truth is that before she got the job, it was all Greek Geek to her.
"I sort of raised that point quite gingerly when I had my interview with NBC," she admits. "I was sort of like, 'I don't know if you read my resume, but I really am not all that familiar with technology.' "
She hadn't been online at all, let alone being able to know the difference between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. "On a scale of one to 10, technology-wise," she says, "I was probably a two, maybe a three on a good day.
Naturally, the show's producers said, great, that's what we are looking for. (And they wonder why people are skeptical about TV.)
As it turned out, O'Brien's easy manner, natural flair for reporting and quick comprehension of ideas really was perfect for "The Site." It's a show about the Internet that your mother could understand -- and find entertaining. So her lack of hands-on experience was a positive. As "The Site" has grown, so has O'Brien, applying a child's bright-eyed sense of wonder to a dictionary full of colorful new tech jargon, geekspeak, hardware, software and baffling acronyms.
"I find it interesting," she says.
But not all of it.
A recent example of technology overkill came from a viewer who asked if there was software that could program a computer to act as a telephone answering machine.
"Buy an answering machine, okay?" she says, laughing. "Why would you want to spend the day trying to find a software program, install it on your computer -- it makes no sense to me. And I think that is where I am more aligned with our audience. I don't necessarily think technology for the sake of technology is a great thing. There are guys who will say, 'I am trying to get my wife online, and she's not interested.' Well, maybe she shouldn't be online! Not everybody needs to be wired. It's okay.
"More people I know are online," she continues, "and they all go through this honeymoon period and then they crash and say, 'Ugh, this is horrible.' What we try to get across to our viewers is, it is not like doing surgery. It's typing, pointing and clicking. If the people who make hardware and software want to attract the mainstream they have to make it easier for people to use. For example, why do I get error numbers when my system crashes? Why doesn't it just say, 'Soledad, you need to do this, this and this and then reboot'? If you want to get people like my mother to go out and buy a $2,000 computer, you need to make it easier to use. Windows 95 needs to be a little more intuitive. I can't tell you how many files I have saved, but then I end up spending an hour searching for where they have been saved."
"The Site" usually features something happening in society that involves technology, but the high tech is treated as secondary to the human element. O'Brien and her producers work hard at making viewers understand how gadgets, gizmos and software fit into daily life. Or don't. Here's a revolutionary point of view: You don't need all this stuff just because it exists.
"Technology is e-mail, or a Web site," she says. "But through it, people are able to track down their birth parents. Through it, people who have cancer can get a support group. Our show is about people or how society is changing in a technological age, rather than testing three different modems for the hard-core geeks to see which is faster."
O'Brien believes the show works best when it makes people care about technology and it seems relevant to them.
"If you are not in the industry, you need to understand why the Communications Decency Act matters to you. My mother would say, 'Well, I am not even online, why does it matter?' And I'd say, 'Mother, it does matter to you, and this is why.' I am not telling anybody to run out and buy a computer. I couldn't care less if people ran out and bought a new PC or a new Mac. That is not my problem. I want them to understand how technology is changing their lives."
One of the ways "The Site" communicates relevance is through a wise-cracking, computer-generated avatar named "Dev."
"When that segment first started, David Borman, the NBC executive in charge of our show, said, 'What I envision is you sitting at the coffee bar, talking to a virtual reality character. You will not see him.' I imagined my career, eight years of hard work climbing the ladder, going crash because I was talking to a random puppet guy.' But it is probably my favorite segment. The guy who does it is so impromptu and so funny that when I laugh, I am really laughing. We just crack up, and he knows what he is talking about, which makes the segment work. My mother, however, hates Dev. One day she wrote in and said, 'I like your show okay, but what is the story with that vile little puppet man?' And now all the viewers call him that."
Vile Little Puppet Man -- reportedly voiced by the show's tech manager, Leo Laporte -- has a wicked cyber tongue, not hesitating to lash out at the golden hand that keeps him plugged in, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
"It's weird, because we are independently produced by Ziff-Davis (publishers of computer magazines such as MacWeek and PC Week), Microsoft and NBC, and we have absolutely no feedback from Microsoft. None," O'Brien says. "In fact there have been times that we would like to interview someone from Microsoft and they don't even respond to us. So we are not in bed with them in any way, shape or form. But there is still the appearance that this is Bill Gates' channel. Our challenge is just to be journalists. It is easy for me because I am paid by NBC. I have a Macintosh at home which I always talk about, which I love. I really don't like Windows 95. The folks at Microsoft run the chat room for MSNBC, and there is always a question like, 'Do you use Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer?' And I use Netscape like mostly everybody else."
The show is based in San Francisco, just outside of the world computer capitol, Silicon Valley, because it is convenient and cheap.
"We have a limited budget," says O'Brien, who grew up in Long Island, NY. "We are a cable show, and it is much easier for us to get all these big-wigs as they are driving by in their Ferraris on their way from a meeting down to their big homes in Mountainview. This is the place where technology is happening and they literally are happy to stop in.
Because "The Site" is prerecorded several days in advance, O'Brien frequently splits her work week between MSNBC and its parent network, NBC.
On days when she is devoted to "The Site," she arrives at 6:30 a.m. and sometimes doesn't leave the studio until 7:30 p.m., catching up on her voluminous e-mail. (A fan club is in the works.)
Other days, she'll hit the road and tape segments for "The Site," such as a charming piece on the retiree who started answering e-mail inquiries at Xerox and before long found himself completely out of retirement as its webmaster.
And still other days she'll hit the road for the weekend edition of "The Today Show," as she did recently on a Bahamas shark dive.
"They have this theory that since they pay my salary, whenever we are not working at 'The Site,' they want to keep me busy," she explains.
She's much busier on "The Site" now than she was a month ago, when on any given day the show might be new or it might just as easily be a repeat. Now the plans is to telecast new shows pretty much six days a week for the foreseeable future. It will still be prerecorded, however, taped about four days ahead of air dates.
Enough inside production stuff. Let's talk geeks, nerds and webmasters -- oh, my!
"We have such a weird audience," O'Brien says, somewhat bemused. "I think MSNBC and NBC wanted to appeal to a mainstream audience. Yet people who are really interested in technology are geeky people, a desirable demographic from the TV standpoint, men who make $80,000 a year or something. We don't have that many women.
"I get so much e-mail from the geeks, very specific e-mail from them," she continues. "We get lots of e-mail from young teenagers, 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds. 'I watch your show and I am thinking of getting a computer...'"
It's no mistake that MSNBC is promoting the heck out of Soledad O'Brien. At 30 years old, she's already a well-known quantity at NBC, having first produced stories for "NBC Nightly News" and "Today Show" science correspondent Bob Bazell in 1991. She later worked simultaneously as a science reporter for KRON-TV in San Francisco and as the host of "The Know Zone" for the Discovery Channel.
"I am marketable," she says. "Bi-racial. Female. Anchoring a technology show. It is not like there are a lot of people like that running around."
Waitammint. You're female?
"Yeah," she says, "now that the operation is over with."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Originally published June 16, 1997
This is gonna burst a lot of geek hearts, but Soledad O'Brien, host of MSNBC's nightly cable TV show "The Site", is not one of you. And wait, it gets worse: She's married. Happily.
O'Brien, the cyber-dream date of a generation of guys living in the basement of the science building, may give the impression she's been surfing the Web for years, but the truth is that before she got the job, it was all Greek Geek to her.
"I sort of raised that point quite gingerly when I had my interview with NBC," she admits. "I was sort of like, 'I don't know if you read my resume, but I really am not all that familiar with technology.' "
She hadn't been online at all, let alone being able to know the difference between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. "On a scale of one to 10, technology-wise," she says, "I was probably a two, maybe a three on a good day.
Naturally, the show's producers said, great, that's what we are looking for. (And they wonder why people are skeptical about TV.)
As it turned out, O'Brien's easy manner, natural flair for reporting and quick comprehension of ideas really was perfect for "The Site." It's a show about the Internet that your mother could understand -- and find entertaining. So her lack of hands-on experience was a positive. As "The Site" has grown, so has O'Brien, applying a child's bright-eyed sense of wonder to a dictionary full of colorful new tech jargon, geekspeak, hardware, software and baffling acronyms.
"I find it interesting," she says.
But not all of it.
A recent example of technology overkill came from a viewer who asked if there was software that could program a computer to act as a telephone answering machine.
"Buy an answering machine, okay?" she says, laughing. "Why would you want to spend the day trying to find a software program, install it on your computer -- it makes no sense to me. And I think that is where I am more aligned with our audience. I don't necessarily think technology for the sake of technology is a great thing. There are guys who will say, 'I am trying to get my wife online, and she's not interested.' Well, maybe she shouldn't be online! Not everybody needs to be wired. It's okay.
"More people I know are online," she continues, "and they all go through this honeymoon period and then they crash and say, 'Ugh, this is horrible.' What we try to get across to our viewers is, it is not like doing surgery. It's typing, pointing and clicking. If the people who make hardware and software want to attract the mainstream they have to make it easier for people to use. For example, why do I get error numbers when my system crashes? Why doesn't it just say, 'Soledad, you need to do this, this and this and then reboot'? If you want to get people like my mother to go out and buy a $2,000 computer, you need to make it easier to use. Windows 95 needs to be a little more intuitive. I can't tell you how many files I have saved, but then I end up spending an hour searching for where they have been saved."
"The Site" usually features something happening in society that involves technology, but the high tech is treated as secondary to the human element. O'Brien and her producers work hard at making viewers understand how gadgets, gizmos and software fit into daily life. Or don't. Here's a revolutionary point of view: You don't need all this stuff just because it exists.
"Technology is e-mail, or a Web site," she says. "But through it, people are able to track down their birth parents. Through it, people who have cancer can get a support group. Our show is about people or how society is changing in a technological age, rather than testing three different modems for the hard-core geeks to see which is faster."
O'Brien believes the show works best when it makes people care about technology and it seems relevant to them.
"If you are not in the industry, you need to understand why the Communications Decency Act matters to you. My mother would say, 'Well, I am not even online, why does it matter?' And I'd say, 'Mother, it does matter to you, and this is why.' I am not telling anybody to run out and buy a computer. I couldn't care less if people ran out and bought a new PC or a new Mac. That is not my problem. I want them to understand how technology is changing their lives."
One of the ways "The Site" communicates relevance is through a wise-cracking, computer-generated avatar named "Dev."
"When that segment first started, David Borman, the NBC executive in charge of our show, said, 'What I envision is you sitting at the coffee bar, talking to a virtual reality character. You will not see him.' I imagined my career, eight years of hard work climbing the ladder, going crash because I was talking to a random puppet guy.' But it is probably my favorite segment. The guy who does it is so impromptu and so funny that when I laugh, I am really laughing. We just crack up, and he knows what he is talking about, which makes the segment work. My mother, however, hates Dev. One day she wrote in and said, 'I like your show okay, but what is the story with that vile little puppet man?' And now all the viewers call him that."
Vile Little Puppet Man -- reportedly voiced by the show's tech manager, Leo Laporte -- has a wicked cyber tongue, not hesitating to lash out at the golden hand that keeps him plugged in, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
"It's weird, because we are independently produced by Ziff-Davis (publishers of computer magazines such as MacWeek and PC Week), Microsoft and NBC, and we have absolutely no feedback from Microsoft. None," O'Brien says. "In fact there have been times that we would like to interview someone from Microsoft and they don't even respond to us. So we are not in bed with them in any way, shape or form. But there is still the appearance that this is Bill Gates' channel. Our challenge is just to be journalists. It is easy for me because I am paid by NBC. I have a Macintosh at home which I always talk about, which I love. I really don't like Windows 95. The folks at Microsoft run the chat room for MSNBC, and there is always a question like, 'Do you use Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer?' And I use Netscape like mostly everybody else."
The show is based in San Francisco, just outside of the world computer capitol, Silicon Valley, because it is convenient and cheap.
"We have a limited budget," says O'Brien, who grew up in Long Island, NY. "We are a cable show, and it is much easier for us to get all these big-wigs as they are driving by in their Ferraris on their way from a meeting down to their big homes in Mountainview. This is the place where technology is happening and they literally are happy to stop in.
Because "The Site" is prerecorded several days in advance, O'Brien frequently splits her work week between MSNBC and its parent network, NBC.
On days when she is devoted to "The Site," she arrives at 6:30 a.m. and sometimes doesn't leave the studio until 7:30 p.m., catching up on her voluminous e-mail. (A fan club is in the works.)
Other days, she'll hit the road and tape segments for "The Site," such as a charming piece on the retiree who started answering e-mail inquiries at Xerox and before long found himself completely out of retirement as its webmaster.
And still other days she'll hit the road for the weekend edition of "The Today Show," as she did recently on a Bahamas shark dive.
"They have this theory that since they pay my salary, whenever we are not working at 'The Site,' they want to keep me busy," she explains.
She's much busier on "The Site" now than she was a month ago, when on any given day the show might be new or it might just as easily be a repeat. Now the plans is to telecast new shows pretty much six days a week for the foreseeable future. It will still be prerecorded, however, taped about four days ahead of air dates.
Enough inside production stuff. Let's talk geeks, nerds and webmasters -- oh, my!
"We have such a weird audience," O'Brien says, somewhat bemused. "I think MSNBC and NBC wanted to appeal to a mainstream audience. Yet people who are really interested in technology are geeky people, a desirable demographic from the TV standpoint, men who make $80,000 a year or something. We don't have that many women.
"I get so much e-mail from the geeks, very specific e-mail from them," she continues. "We get lots of e-mail from young teenagers, 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds. 'I watch your show and I am thinking of getting a computer...'"
It's no mistake that MSNBC is promoting the heck out of Soledad O'Brien. At 30 years old, she's already a well-known quantity at NBC, having first produced stories for "NBC Nightly News" and "Today Show" science correspondent Bob Bazell in 1991. She later worked simultaneously as a science reporter for KRON-TV in San Francisco and as the host of "The Know Zone" for the Discovery Channel.
"I am marketable," she says. "Bi-racial. Female. Anchoring a technology show. It is not like there are a lot of people like that running around."
Waitammint. You're female?
"Yeah," she says, "now that the operation is over with."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Bill Gates, CNN, geeks, MSNBC, Soledad O'Brien, The Site, Vile Little Puppet Man
¶ 10:29 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Rasha Drachkovitch, "Lockup" executive producer: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1 (VIDEO)
There aren’t many people who want to go to prison. Not on purpose, not by accident, not even if they deserve it.
Loss of liberty, loss of freedom, loss of privacy, loss of choice – and let’s not even talk about the whole idea of showers and toilets.
And yet it’s hard not to be curious about the experience. I’m not talking about Lindsay Lohan or Nicole Ritchie doing a few hours of jail time or even Paris spending a few weeks in the LA County Sheriff’s Hilton.
Rasha Drachkovitch takes film crews where few of us want to go: the most dreaded prisons in the world. As producer of the MSNBC documentary series “Lockup” – now in its seventh season – he has been everywhere from San Quentin to maximum security prisons in Moscow and China.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Loss of liberty, loss of freedom, loss of privacy, loss of choice – and let’s not even talk about the whole idea of showers and toilets.
And yet it’s hard not to be curious about the experience. I’m not talking about Lindsay Lohan or Nicole Ritchie doing a few hours of jail time or even Paris spending a few weeks in the LA County Sheriff’s Hilton.
Rasha Drachkovitch takes film crews where few of us want to go: the most dreaded prisons in the world. As producer of the MSNBC documentary series “Lockup” – now in its seventh season – he has been everywhere from San Quentin to maximum security prisons in Moscow and China.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: documentary, Lindsay Lohan, Lockup, maximum security prison, MSNBC, Nicole Ritchie, Paris Hilton, Rasha Drachkovitch, San Quentin
¶ 9:55 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Rasha Drachkovitch, MSNBC's "Lockup" executive producer: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2 (VIDEO)
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: documentary, Lindsay Lohan, Lockup, maximum security prison, MSNBC, Nicole Ritchie, Paris Hilton, Rasha Drachkovitch, San Quentin
¶ 9:53 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Rasha Drachkovitch, MSNBC's "Lockup": Mr. Media Interview 3 (VIDEO)
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: documentary, Lindsay Lohan, Lockup, maximum security prison, MSNBC, Nicole Ritchie, Paris Hilton, Rasha Drachkovitch, San Quentin
¶ 9:53 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
He's Not Talking to You
"Mr. Bush, you do not own this country!"
-- MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, host of "Countdown with Keith Olberman," on reported plans for the United States to send/sacrifice 20,000 more troops to Baghdad in the coming months. The remark was part of a 10-minute or so "special comment" by Olbermann. These rants are pretty often directed right at the president; if you don't believe it, watch how often Olbermann changes cameras every time he turns and says, "Mr. Bush..."
• "This is palpable nonsense, Mr. Bush."
• "This is not temporary, Mr. Bush."
• "Mr. Bush, your judgment about Iraq — and now about "sacrifice" — is at variance with your people's, to the point of delusion."
• "Because that's what this is all about, is it not, Mr. Bush?"
• "It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time."
• "This is about the planned obsolescence of ordnance, isn't, Mr. Bush? And the building of detention centers? And the design of a 125-million dollar courtroom complex at Gitmo complete with restaurants."
• "First, we sent Americans to their deaths for your lie, Mr. Bush. Now we are sending them to their deaths for your ego."
(Watch the complete clip - or read a transcript - at "Crooks and Liars." And for a completely different view of Olbermann, check out "Olbermann Watch.")
-- MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, host of "Countdown with Keith Olberman," on reported plans for the United States to send/sacrifice 20,000 more troops to Baghdad in the coming months. The remark was part of a 10-minute or so "special comment" by Olbermann. These rants are pretty often directed right at the president; if you don't believe it, watch how often Olbermann changes cameras every time he turns and says, "Mr. Bush..."
• "This is palpable nonsense, Mr. Bush."
• "This is not temporary, Mr. Bush."
• "Mr. Bush, your judgment about Iraq — and now about "sacrifice" — is at variance with your people's, to the point of delusion."
• "Because that's what this is all about, is it not, Mr. Bush?"
• "It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time."
• "This is about the planned obsolescence of ordnance, isn't, Mr. Bush? And the building of detention centers? And the design of a 125-million dollar courtroom complex at Gitmo complete with restaurants."
• "First, we sent Americans to their deaths for your lie, Mr. Bush. Now we are sending them to their deaths for your ego."
(Watch the complete clip - or read a transcript - at "Crooks and Liars." And for a completely different view of Olbermann, check out "Olbermann Watch.")
Labels: Countdown with Keith Olberman, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Olbermann Watch
¶ 7:54 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
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