Has anyone ever answered why MSNBC has Jail stories every weekend?

[hrmjustin]

And it is the same criminals every week. Can't they do some new programs? New themes perhaps?
Help me figure this out please.

[Drunken Irishman]

1. $$$

It's cheap and most people aren't watching news on the weekends anyway, so, ratings are low and the costs high for live programming.

[laundry_queen]

7. Yeah, but what about Friday night?

Damn, it pisses me off. Every other night of the week, they re-run all the earlier shows - which is great for me because I watch them later. Except for Friday. They run the shows once and go straight to the jail shit. I never get to see the Friday shows. At least let the shows repeat on Friday!

[Raine]

35. Same with me, the week-end OK but it makes it

so difficult for me to see the Friday shows. I don't know why they can't repeat them the way they do the other nights. They already have them in the can so it really shouldn't cost them to repeat them.

[baldguy]

2. Ratings & money.

The same reason SciFi shows WWE wrestling on Friday nights instead of - well, sci fi.

[politico12]

3. It is cheap

It is quite cheap to produce

[madinmaryland]

4. Welcome to DU! And it is bankrolled by the Prison Industrial Complex.

[hrmjustin]

6. Welcome my friend.

[shcrane71]

15. Welcome to DU!

[IcyPeas]

5. and it starts on friday evening too on the west coast...

here on the west coast they don't do repeats of Rachel, Ed, Lawrence like they ususally do for us west-coasters. what's up with that?

[Generic Brad]

8. Perhaps they have a captive audience

Sort of like an eye watching itself.

[immoderate]

9. Obey the law!

--imm

[Jamaal510]

18. ,

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[Control-Z]

10. It makes us watch shit like Andrea Mitchell,

come Monday morning, out of the sheer gratitude that lock-up is over?

[romantico]

11. MSNBC

Needs to come up with original programing on weekends. Something like MAD MEN.THE WALKING DEAD.GAME OF THRONES. Yeah, I am sort of kidding but do something where they might actually get ratings. Do a documentary on something other than prisons. Show reruns of the WEST WING. Have Michael Moore bring back TV NATION or THE AWFUL TRUTH. Something like that. Michael Moore doing a weekend show would be great by the way. Bring back Phil Donahue and give him an afternoon show on Saturdays. Do a news magazine show on Sunday afternoons. They should consider doing something like that.

[TheCowsCameHome]

12. Bars are popular on the weekend.

Both sides of them

[sabrina 1]

13. Corporate advertising for the Prison Industry.

If this were a free media, the programming would be about the human rights abuses in the US Prison System and the huge prison population in this supposedly free country.

I don't think there is more obvious proof of the downward slide of this country than a MSM channel using up the entire weekend's airtime to advertise and glorify the Prison Industrial Complex. It should be boycotted imo.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

19. RT criticizes the prison industrial complex.

Last night Thom Hartmann's show talked about Stand Your Ground laws, and how they are basically "an excuse for white people to kill black people."

You won't hear that on the MSM!!!

They talk about the death penalty and innocent people being executed, and every Tuesday they have the Julian Assange Show.

RT is the Russian channel. They have a show with a young lady called The Alyona Show. At the beginning of every show she says, "All of the news, with none of the mercy."

[sabrina 1]

31. I know, I love RT, one of the best news channels I've seen in a long time. It is more like the

European Media used to be. It covers so much news from all over the world, even remote areas we never hear about on our MSM. Also they do some great documentaries. I love their in depth interviews with people from all over the world and all over the political spectrum. They actually let people talk without interruption and there are hardly any commercials.

After watching it for a while, it's hard to watch CNN eg, which seems so shallow by comparison. And after watching commercial free interviews, it's' really hard to take the constant commercial interruptions and with people being cut off every few seconds it seems.

News channels should be commercial free, and obviously it is possible since both Al Jazeera and RT and some of our own Public Stations are able to do it.

I like that they have so many women anchors who are not just pretty, but actually have brains and can ask the questions we always want our news media to ask no matter who the guests are.

They do not go easy on Putin either. I've seen more coverage of the huge anti-Putin demonstrations on RT than anywhere else and criticism of his reaction to them.

The Julian Assange interviews are great television. Especially the one with the new Tunisian president who, I did not know, was a political prisoner himself for his human rights activism. It was really nice to see how much he respects Assange for his work on human rights.

AND best of all, we get to see all the Liberal voices we will never see on our MSM, Bill Moyers, Thom Hartmann, Amy Goodman and some great foreign journalists.

I'm glad we get it on our cable lineup. It was a pleasant surprise as I had mostly given up on TV 'news'. I'm glad you get it too. The more people who watch this kind of programming, the more informed people will be.

[A HERETIC I AM]

14. For the exact same reason Fox puts Bill O'Reilly on every night.....

to appeal to the "prurient interest".


Specifically definition #3

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prurient

[Tom Ripley]

16. To normalize incarceration

[HiPointDem]

22. +1. and to degrade prisoners, make the masses see them as inhuman.

[AJTheMan]

17. I like the prison shows on the weekends.

I wait all week for those to come on. It's such an interesting look into other people's lives. It also helps remind me to be wary of the law. If you want original programming, watch Current TV. Don't worry, Current TV is progressive too -- it was founded by Al Gore and has some truly interesting series. (Like Vanguard)

[ProgressiveEconomist]

20. MSNBC's viewership is a quarter Black and rising, and Black mass incarceration

MSNBC's viewership is a quarter Black and rising, and Black mass incarceration is the biggest historical development of the last generation. Author Michele Alexander argues that mass incarceration has many of the same features of SLAVERY from the American past. Unfortunately, most of the media has missed this huge story because it doesn't affect Caucasians very directly. MSNBC is the big exception, and so we have this DU thread.

The US has 25 percent of the world's prisoners, and half of US prisoners are Black, EIGHT TIMES their share of the population in the age groups most represented in prisons. But the vast majority of white people do not care about this development. It does not affect their families and friends.

Since this is a political bulletin board, here's a story from 2004 about Duke University research on the influence of mass incarceration of Blacks on the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats:

From http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0517/p09s02-coop.html :

"The prison effect on political landscape By Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman / May 17, 2004 DURHAM, N.C.

The US prison boom of the past 30 years - which has nearly doubled the number of state prisons to more than 1,000 and increased the nation's prison population from 218,000 to 1.3 million - has had widely recognized economic, political, and social effects. But one important political effect of the forced relocation of millions of inmates has been largely overlooked: The dilution of the urban black vote to the benefit of rural white communities. A new Urban Institute report shows that inmates tend to come from regions that are demographically distinct from those in which their prisons are located. And because the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as residents of the legislative districts in which they're incarcerated, the relocation of inmates - who are not allowed to vote in 48 states - skews both the distribution of government funds and the apportionment of legislative representation. This is a particularly grievous injustice in an era in which presidential and legislative races are won by razor-thin margins. The distortion in representation caused by enumeration of prisoners tends to favor rural residents, whites, and Republicans, at the expense of urban residents, blacks, and Democrats.

In most states, prisons are disproportionately located in rural areas, yet most inmates come from urban areas. For example, in four state house districts in Connecticut, inmates make up more than 10 percent of the population. Each of these districts has low population and is disproportionately white - except, of course, for the inmate populations. And because of the presence of inmates, these districts effectively get about 10 percent more representation than they ought to.

Similarly, in Florida, statistics show a correlation between gains in representation from the presence of prisons and partisan affiliation of voters. Counties that gain population by importing prison inmates - and thus increase their congressional and state legislative representation - tend to vote Republican. Meanwhile, counties that lose population and legislative representation because a share of their population is imprisoned in other counties tend to vote Democratic."

[HiPointDem]

24. Except those prison shows are exploitative. They're not social justice programs, they're programs

showing incarcerated, mainly black men, as evil.

It's not what black kids should be watching, & if black people are disproportionately watching them (as implied by your 25% viewership figure), it's unfortunate.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

25. It's reality, make of it what you will.

I'd much rather see Melissa Harris Perry, Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow, Martin Beshir, Chris Hayes, Lawrence O'Donnell, Ed Schultz, and Tamron Hall each devote an entire show each week to the historic scandal of mass incarceration in the US. But I haven't even seen Michele Alexander, author of the recent "The New Jim Crow", on ANY of those shows.

Until the rest of MSNBC's lineup starts paying attention to the epic story of our generation, "Lockup" is IMO much better than nothing.

[HiPointDem]

26. nothing done with cameras in peoples' faces is "reality". those shows are racist, and they don't

talk about the "scandal of mass incarceration," they exploit it and demagogue it and give us stories about scary black people.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

27. "Those shows are racist" The SHOWs or the US "Justice" system?

Give me an example of how a "Lockup" show could have covered a theme or incident more objectively and thus "exploited" a situation. Or by "exploit" do you mean simply covering what most politicians and corporations want to remain hidden from public view?

Unfortunately, when some people call something "racist", because it involves people of color in ways they do not even want to think about, they turn away from it and consider the matter closed. They can do this because their own loved ones are not at risk. But others do not have the luxury of simply ignoring racist gulags that have kidnapped massive numbers of friends and family and threaten the next generation.

I've seen many episodes of "Lockup" and have regarded them as windows into a brutal reality of dehumanization for the benefit of corporate interests (93-cents-a-day forced labor, prison construction boondoggles, "service" contracts) and abysmally ignorant and violent prison guards who "earn" more than teachers.

[HiPointDem]

28. they're both racist. "lockup" doesn't "cover" anything. it displays black prisoners to titillate &

frighten the masses, it normalizes imprisonment.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

29. Who's watching "Lockup"? Mass incarceration ALREADY

has been "normalized" in communites of color. IMO the natural audience for "Lockup" is families of the MILLIONS of prisoners in this country, DESPERATE to find out anything they can--during an almost complete news blackour--about the conditions their loved ones may be facing.

[HiPointDem]

30. Yes, it's a great public service MSNBC is performing, you betcher boots.

Incarceration is "normalized" in communities of color like slavery was "normalized" in communities of color.

I find the attempt to compare shows like "Lockup" to the book "The New Jim Crow" as some kind of social expose disingenuous, & frankly sickening. The first is prison porn and bears no relation to the second.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

32. "Disingenuous"? "Sickening"???!!!!--That is a post

that needs DELETION BY ITS AUTHOR.

[HiPointDem]

34. I find the attempt to compare shows like "Lockup" to the book "The New Jim Crow" as some

kind of social expose disingenuous, & frankly sickening. The first is prison porn and bears no relation to the second.

[lookingfortruth]

21. I don't know but would you rather have the Jail shows OR catch the sicko who preys on kids?

[Zanzoobar]

23. Violence porn, titilation.

[Raine]

33. I think they bring in high ratings

go figure.

[pinboy3niner]

36. It's so the news division can have their weekly orgy

Duh!