Thread by @MattWelch

Don't know how it all got started, but there's a clip being shared widely today of former MSNBC host @MHarrisPerry stating controversially in an April 2013 promo that, "we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents." I was around then.... 1/x

I think MHP was wrong about that. I’m not telling her that right now, I told her back then, in real time, as the first critic she brought on, days later, to explain why that rubbed people the wrong way. Here’s a clip and transcript.
msnbc.com/melissa-harris…
nbcnews.com/id/wbna51543915

You might note that it’s a friendly & empathetic disagreement & real exchange of views, including with future NYC mayoral candidate @mayawiley. That happy (IMO) fact was the *creation* of the very person being dragged today, & her great staff. There's an interesting lesson there.

That show especially, and the old weekend MSNBC morning slot (held down by @davidgura, @chrislhayes, even @SteveKornacki sometimes), was a model of longform, cross-segment news/culture conversation, with people who could amiably yet firmly disagree with one another. It was good!

I loved MHP’s most of all. Went on there a ton 2012-13, then we started The @IndependentsFBN (exclusive contract), some of whose cross-segment, ideologically diverse paneling it influenced (and continues in its own form at @kennedynation). Soon as I was could, MHP brought me back

The best thing about it, nearly extinct on 2022 cable TV, was that it would veer between thoroughgoing explorations of philosophical differences, in an atmosphere of genuine interest between the disagreers, and not just theatrical combat. I learned, and hopefully added a little.

The show talked frankly (often hilariously) about race, including panelists who rarely looked like me, in ways unheard of in pre-Ferguson America. It was almost disorienting, and frequently wonderful. The speech-constrictions we'd experience on such topics later were not there.

A politically incorrect European pal would refer to it as the “Angry Black Lady show,” which I think MHP would find doubly hilarious because A) that’s kinda funny, and B) she…actually wasn’t? There was good humor talking about hard stuff, and also celebrating pop ephemera.

There is a tedious goddamn tendency in the journalistic social media world to crank up the perpetual outrage archeological machine, looking for the worst or most usable snippet from a hated person, brand, or political tendency. But there is an irony in today’s rediscovery of MHP.

Did I convince her that what she said was wrong? Hell no. But, inarticulate as I’m sure I was, she learned more from happily inviting onto her own show someone instinctively against that expressed sentiment (and also the broader point she was making), than she will here today.

Why? Because you are not arguing with her, you are Shaking Your Damn Head at a cable TV promo clip from April 2013. Which is fine, dowatchalike, and so forth, but maybe take a moment to reflect that this is how we talk in 2022, and that the '13 version is now largely unavailable.

Postscript: Thanks to the magic of @ajwimsatt, here is the main clip of me & @mayawiley talking with @MHarrisPerry about that thing she said in April 2013 that people were talking about here in January 2022:

@ajwimsatt @mayawiley @MHarrisPerry Whole episode here: archive.org/details/MSNBCW…