Rachel Maddow Interview…
The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson interviews Rachel Maddow about her upcoming 9/11 special with Richard Engel…
“I have started to feel like when I have stuff to explain or report, I want it to be on TV,” Rachel Maddow said.
She was speaking to The Huffington Post about her new documentary, “Day of Destruction, Decade of War,” which she made with her NBC colleague Richard Engel. Judging from the special, Maddow clearly thought that she had quite a bit of stuff to explain and report.
The documentary is uncommonly long for cable television, running for three parts over two nights. It functions as a sort of primer on the expansion of the national security state following 9/11: the explosive growth of the intelligence community, the use of private entities to carry out covert operations and core spying functions, the network of secret (and not-so-secret) military and CIA prisons around the world, the intrusion into everyday American life, the use of torture on detainees and the continued warfare in the Middle East, to name just a few.
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August 31, 2011 at 2:13 pm
The special should be called Terrorists Get Lucky With A Lazy Security Apparatus, Country Hugely Overreacts For 10 Years.
August 31, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Yeah only 3000 people died…clearly we overacted over nothing.
August 31, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Al Qaeda’s ability to catch us so off gaurd was over before Flight 93 entered Pennsylvania airspace. Two endless wars in the Middle East as a result of 9/11 is crazy.
And I didn’t call 9/11 “nothing”, you little jerk.
August 31, 2011 at 3:39 pm
So it’s not actually focused on anything specific, it’s just a 6 hour gripe session about “Random things I hate about Bush that pop up in my head at any given moment.”
Good to know!
August 31, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Or it could be a recitation of the huge quagmire that administration embroiled us in, instead of focusing on the actual bad guys. You’ll enjoy the segment where the Al Qaeda guy says they were decimated, then Bush handed them a second chance by switching to Iraq. Idiocy.
August 31, 2011 at 5:08 pm
“Random things I hate about Bush that pop up in my head at any given moment.”
Yep, that pretty much sums it up, but now it’s in three parts.
August 31, 2011 at 11:13 pm
I may be wrong and of course they’ll keep hammering us until some give-in, but I’m not really hearing a clamoring for a bunch of 9/11 anniversary programming in the circles I run.
From the clip, it looks like the Maddow/Engel thing will be about more than the actual event, so there’s that, but I suspect she’ll get her usual live numbers for at least the beginning of the first installment and for the remainder, her DVR numbers will increase.
Oh, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Longform journalism is always welcome and they may even get nominated for a couple of awards. I just don’t know if there’s a sufficient market for these particular subjects.
IMHO
August 31, 2011 at 11:32 pm
I hear you, Magister. I figured when the 10th Anniversary got here, I’d be wrapped up in it, but it isn’t working out that way. The first seven years were pretty rough, but then the event finally started to find its place ‘in the past’ for me. I guess we all had to gain some acceptance, and get on with our lives.
September 1, 2011 at 12:27 am
@JoeRemi: I haven’t seen the ratings and I didn’t watch, but I suspect the National Geographic thing looking at it from George W. Bush’s perspective will have pulled respectable numbers for the channel, but they had something new and don’t have the news channels’ reach.
While based on the ad, it looks like Maddow and Engel have simply put together a retrospective of 9/11 and the decade since, which isn’t really needed. We know what happened and anything someone may not know will be surrounded by the rest.
September 1, 2011 at 2:10 am
I just ran across a Today Show attempt to list every 9/11 anniversary program. Some of it are reruns, but who do they think is going watch so much?
Again, maybe I’m wrong and history… blah, blah, blah… but I really think they’re misreading the public’s desire to walk this particular memory lane.
September 1, 2011 at 8:35 am
I’ll watch a couple of the “as it happened” docs like I always do, and Maddow’s special..that’s about it. I won’t be sitting around Sunday, 9/11, watching memorials; I’ll be out on my bike celebrating the fact that the terrorists didn’t steal my freedom to do it. I’ll watch the wrapups on cable news Sunday night. I have no intention of drowning in a weeklong dirge of that horrible event.