Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [105]
With my show, things got off on the wrong foot because of miscommunication. They started to do the tapings in L.A., but I had an agreement that it would be shot in Minneapolis. I didn’t want to move to L.A. I also felt that most of these types of programs give you only the West or East Coast’s views. Nothing comes from the heartland. And I personally think that the Midwest is the backbone of the country when it comes to common sense.
Very early on, I had to tell MSNBC that they didn’t hire me to be a teleprompter reader. Unfortunately, that is basically what all these news-talk hosts are. All the stories come down from upstairs, even though the hosts pretend that it’s them. People need to understand that Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann, and the rest are not these individual rogues setting their own agendas. Those guys will deny it and say they have artistic freedom. And they may put their little spin on whatever the subject is, but did you ever notice it’s pretty much the same stories talked about on every show? You’re just getting four different “opinions” on the same topic that day.
I know this from personal experience. MSNBC tried to pablum-feed me the subjects they wanted talked about, and I began to fight them on a daily basis. Erik Sorenson might have been the channel’s president, but he was beholden to a leadership cadre that included the president of NBC News—and the man above them both, who used to run the Plastics Division for the network’s owner, the General Electric Corporation.
I didn’t want to discuss the stories they were telling me I had to do. This was after telling me I would have complete artistic control. Now I was supposed to spend my on-air time analyzing the Laci Peterson killing. I said, “Look, there were 15,000 murders in America last year and, as tragic as Laci’s was, she and her unborn baby were only two of them. California may have a big interest in it, but I can assure you that Minnesota doesn’t, other than for National Enquirer-journalism.”
I wanted to do meat-and-potatoes, things that affected people in the big picture. Such as why all our state governments continue to want bicameral legislatures, when a unicameral system would be likely to work much better. Or the situation that was happening in California at the time, where a sitting governor (Gray Davis) was allowed to be recalled by petition, making a signature more powerful than a vote.
The station also had its corporate playlist, a roster of guests that a show’s host is supposed to choose from. Well, I didn’t always want to talk to those people. My attitude was that I’ll create my own playlist. The powers-that-be didn’t like that, either.
The first thing that happened was delaying tactics. Four months after MSNBC hired me, my show wasn’t even close to making a debut. I remember, that June, seeing an article in The New York Times quoting Sorenson. He was still saying, “It is going to be different than all the other shows you’ve seen before. You haven’t seen this format before because we’re literally still inventing it.” He went on to talk about how there had been some unforeseen complications in the planning stage. Since I was six-foot-four and weighed in at 250, the producers were struggling to find a set that could properly accommodate me without appearing like a dollhouse. Supposedly they were having trouble finding me the right chair. Also, since I’d decided to broadcast the program from Minneapolis, this had forced