If I were an historian looking back at the US in the first decade of the 21st century, I’d note the fact that today is the debut of a ‘progressive talk radio’ talk show host on a national media network. Because it’s one more sign, like Olbermann, and like Maddow, that the Internet drives media, rather than follows it.

The debut of "The Ed Show" on MSNBC suggests that deep below the surface of the front page news items, somewhere amid the hum of political blogs, something new has taken shape. Clearly, every media organization has tried to analyze and capture it; very few have succeeded.

Clearly, MSNBC, using the web stats and metrics that the Internet enables, has been analyzing the web hits for episodes of Countdown, Hardball, Maddow, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and has concluded that there’s a potential audience for Ed Schultz on television. That’s a significant social shift from 30 months ago, when Olbermann began to build an audience beyond any expectations or historical precedent on an American television network. Arguably, Olbermann translated the muttered wrath on the blogs into ‘telespeak’, and along with David Shuster’s reporting of the Plame outing, invented a new type of news reporting and commentary that synthesized topics, questions, and opened the acceptable range of television ‘experts’ to something wider than it has ever been.

If I were an historian, I would note that MSNBC is taking a chance on a new host who is probably unknown to most Americans. The new program, heavily promoted on MSNBC’s other outlets, offers itself up as ‘a show aimed at the middle class, and middle class issues’.

Before the Internet, I doubt that a major US television network would have gambled on a ‘progressive teevee news show’.

Judging from the fact that ‘The Ed Show’ begins tonight, it’s a safe bet that those of us on the political left did not realize as we hit the keyboards and clicked on videos that our activities were being statistically analyzed in ways that might drive — rather than simply respond to — programming provided by a major American media network.

In many respects, MSNBC has an advantage in developing new content because — like CNN — it was foresighted enough to buy up a cable channel and thereby get a jump on ‘multipurposing’ content — generating dual revenue streams; one online, one on the television. We’re watching media merge and morph here, and the emergence of a narrative aimed at progressive politics is not something that I heard back in the mid-1990s when I heard multimedia producers predict what was to come. To my knowledge, nothing like Olbermann, Maddow, nor Ed Schultz were predicted.

I suspect that the audience was always there, but it took Kos and Firedoglake and Unclaimed Territory — and the open-minded, tolerant policies those blog founders established, to reveal the deep desire for better information.

Whether Ed Schultz can help meet that need remains to be seen, and personally, I have no idea how the show will do financially or critically. But I’m convinced that we’re seeing television programming respond to blogs, rather than the other way around.

And just for this evening, I’m going to savor that small miracle.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart to Jane, to Christy, to Emptywheel, and to all the smart, witty FDLers who, IMHO, had a key role in driving media to realize that many of us are looking for more than Bill Moyers once a week; that there IS not simply a passive audience, but a co-creating, collaborative, participatory movement among people who desire better information than we’ve had most of the past 28 years.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/30076513#30076513

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