InStyle USA - 11.2019

(CONTINUED ON PAGE 176)

notes about what’s going on in the world. We

also have a news digest, which is prepared by a

different staffer every day. It’s geared toward

the expertise and interest of me and the staff

at that particular moment. For example,

lately we’ve been covering the mysterious

Russian nuclear explosion that happened at

the beginning of August. My staff goes out

of its way to scour what’s going on with that

and make sure it’s all in there. I also read my

gigantic stack of bookmarks before we go

into our news meeting, which is all hands on

deck, including the interns.

LB: Who is the monologue boss? Do you

write it yourself?

RM: Yes. Sometimes a couple of producers will

be assigned to the A block, which is the mono-

logue block, but then I draft it. Either I type it

or I have a producer come in with a laptop to

record and transcribe what I’m saying. So I’m

either writing it with my hands or writing it

with my voice. Ideally, it should be written by

6:30, but sometimes it’s not done until 7:45 ,

which causes a panic. Then we just have to go

fast. There’s a lot of literal running around.

LB: What calms you when it’s 8:30 and it’s

not loaded in yet?

RM: When my day gets late, it’s not because it’s

taking me a long time to write. It’s

because I can’t stop reading and learning.

There’s a reason why we’re considering 150

potential news stories at our meeting. It’s not

because we’re going to do 150 stories; it ’s be-

cause we need to know what we are consider-

ing and are deliberately leaving out. Acting from ignorance is

a weak position. Acting from knowledge means you have to

put the hours in, you have to have put the work in, and you

have a firmer base on which to stand. I think that makes you

speak louder and clearer.

LB: When did you realize that being able to make a pop-

culture joke onscreen while reporting the news was possible?

RM: I don’t know that it was a deliberate thing. I did make

a decision that I wanted to avoid homogenizing factors in

my work process. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t absorbing

the same information as everybody else and that I wasn’t

watching other people doing my same type of work. Not

because I don’t respect those people but because I don’t

want to seem like them. I don’t read opinion pieces. I try

not to watch a lot of cable news. I try to stay in my own little

silo. And because I’m a goofball, I end up talking about

serious news things in a goofball way. I didn’t know that it

would work. To the extent that it does, that’s a surprise.

LB: It worked pretty much immediately in 2008 when

you came in. What sort of sweet spot was MSNBC during

the Obama years, and how did the tenor change when you

knew that the flip of the table was happening?

RM: It felt like the world turned upside down. So at that point

you ask yourself, “Should we do things in a totally different

way?” It turns out that our internal mantra for a president

without a scandal in eight years [is different for] a president

who comes into office after having paid his $25 million fraud

settlement [for Trump University], which happened right be-

fore he was sworn in. There was a gut-check moment of “Do we

know who we are? Do we know what we’re doing? Yes, we do.”

LB: I actually think it becomes simple: There’s wrong and

indecent, and then there’s right and decent.

RM: You model good behavior by what stories you choose

to tell. If you feel like incivility or lack of fealty to the truth

is a problem, then you model what it is to be decent and true

and prioritize those things.

LB: And that’s how you sleep. Now, going into another

campaign season, your show is the one that every Democrat

worth his or her salt needs to go on. How many have been on

the show so far?

RM: Not all of them, but a lot of them. I want them all to come

on once they drop out. [laughs]

Makeup:

Alisa

Gurnari.