Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [106]
They sent a special guy down from New Jersey to design the entire show. Then Sorenson flew in, but didn’t even watch it, as far as I know. When he met with us afterward, he said, “I can’t put this on the air.” I could see the handwriting on the wall. Eventually, I agreed that they would scale everything back and I’d go on once a week, Saturdays, at five o’clock in the afternoon. MSNBC made the announcement in the middle of August. The story in The New York Times said this “appeared to be a concession,” that I was “perhaps not ready to be the prime-time star that MSNBC had hoped.” Sorenson did say, truthfully, that I had little interest in topics like the Laci Peterson case or the Kobe Bryant case, but that “the cable audience has certain expectations.”
So I did five weekend shows, at about the worst time slot you could possibly have to draw much of any audience—and I had the second-highest-rated news-talk show on MSNBC. I trailed only Chris Matthews. In fact, they had me guest-star once on Matthews’s Hardball. They advertised that eight times during the week, but never once also said I had a show on Saturday. The network simply refused to promote it.
I’d brought the show to Minnesota, and probably fifty Minnesotans had been hired in various positions—but, no surprise I guess, the Minnesota media ripped me. They called it second-rate, with second-rate guests. One week, I had Gray Davis on live, the governor of California who was getting ousted from his job. Would that be considered second-rate?
The guy the network had selected to create the show was sending back “dailies” of what we’d be doing that week. If we were so far off the mark, at what point wouldn’t they have said, hey, you’re going in the wrong direction? But MSNBC waited until five shows were complete. Then, early in December 2003, my producers and I were brought into a room and told, “We can’t keep putting this on.” End of meeting. Out the door.
They maintained it was too expensive to do the show in Minnesota. It was easier to just keep me on the payroll, along with my assistant, and pull the plug on it. This, despite the fact that my contract was for huge money, well into the seven figures, like a professional sports contract. Dee Woodward, who’d also been my assistant during my four years as governor, was likewise to be paid for three years of doing nothing. Dee told me laughingly, “Gee, governor, when this is done, I’ll be retiring.” I said, “Good for you, Dee, you got a three-year early retirement.”
My contract with MSNBC stated that they had exclusive rights to me. That’s standard in the business. When they hire a personality, they don’t want them to have the ability to then go and join their competition. Now that they’d canceled my show, the contract still had almost three years to run. Unless I chose to break it, I could do books, radio, speaking engagements, movies—but I could appear on no other news or cable show.
In that sense, I guess you could say that MSNBC bought my silence. An outdoor show wanted to pay me to go fishing, but I couldn’t do it because it was on cable. I admit that it would have gotten political—because whenever you go fishing, you talk. I couldn’t even do Bill Maher’s show, because that’s also on cable. I’d been a regular guest before on Real Time, because Maher and I think a lot alike and he’d often bring me on as an ally. I was still under contract to MSNBC during the 2004 election campaign, but they didn’t even haul me out to offer an opinion. Not once.
I could have violated the contract and probably lost my pay. Did I sell out? You’re damned right. If I didn’t, for this kind of money, you would say I was crazy. The point was, I could do it honorably. It was a contractual agreement that both sides honored. Besides, why would I want to go on the Fox Network as a guest—just to get into a fight with O’Reilly—when you don’t even get a paycheck?
TERRY: It was my fault, too. I wanted to make sure Jesse did not break his contract.