Maddow: ‘To Make a Living, We Have to Choose What We Are Going to Talk About’

HAYES: “That habituates something in us that makes it harder to focus. And we’re seeing — I mean, your point about focus here is so important about the political effects of it, because sustained focus is a kind of power. And there — you know, Donald Trump wants attention on the ice raids, which is why Dr. Phil’s there. They didn’t want attention on suspending HIV drugs being given out and shutting down veteran suicide prevention. But the battle isn’t — we don’t have battles in public discourse that are debates. Like, notice what happened today. Was there debate? Did they rise to say, ‘Actually, we think it’s not good to spend federal money on veteran suicide prevention?’ ‘Well, no. Here’s why we think we do.’ We didn’t debate it. It was just a war over who was going to pay attention to what, was it going to be paying attention to these cuts or what they were trying to direct us towards?”
MADDOW: “Yes. And that — and in the news environment, like, for what we, you and I do as a living, to make a living, we have to choose what we are going to talk about. That is the most powerful part of our job. For me, it is the most intellectually stimulating and rewarding part of our job. But that is absolutely the competition in which all Americans are engaged in terms of what you look at, what you believe is true, what is worth spending time with. And I feel like it’s more scientific. Like, we sort of feel like it’s stuff that we encounter and it’s stuff that we see and it’s stuff that scrolled by. I feel like the thing that your book taught me is how much this is a professional science of getting us to turn our head and getting us to stop paying attention to one thing and start paying attention to another. It makes me feel like we’re being experimented on by scientists who didn’t get our consent.”