With MSNBC announcing that it was looking to fill its 10PM time slot with original broadcasting, two prominent self-avowed liberals are positioning themselves for the post.
Cenk Uygur, of the Young Turks Show, and Sam Seder, who headed a popular eponymous show on Air America, aren't taking the traditional route to the recently announced opening. Rather than rise through the cable news structure, they are using new media tools to organize their supporters and put pressure on MSNBC brass. In Uygur's case, the effort is billed as an election-year style campaign (think: Barack Obama meets "30 Rock.")
"We thought that it would be fun to run it like a political campaign and involve the online community as much as possible," said Uygur. "We're gonna use Facebook, bloggers, and friends in the online community ... In the end, there is only one real voter and in this case the voter is
Phil Griffin. In reality, of course, there is a wider constituency there."
To that end, both Uygur and Seder have Facebook groups touting their rightness for the post, with 4,200 and 2,700 members respectively. The signatories are almost all of a progressive tilt. But they also represent the young, wealthy, tech-savvy demographic that leaves networks and advertisers salivating.
Both hosts know that this, in the end, is their trump card: the promise of transferring (and hopefully expanding) their following from radio and YouTube to a cable outlet. Uygur, for example, has roughly 300,000 viewers on a daily basis and recently passed 65 million views on his YouTube channel. Seder, meanwhile, was syndicated in more than 30 markets when he was doing his regular show, including New York City and Los Angeles. And he makes the case that his format would not only build off the audiences generated by current hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow but -- because of its fusing of news and comedy -- serve as a "bridge" to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/17/progressive-hosts-vie-for_n_167564.html
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