Democracy
Chris Hayes Has Arrived With ‘Up’
In less than a year on television (and with a chirpy voice, a weakness for gesticulation and a tendency to drop honors-thesis words like “signifier” into casual conversation), Mr. Hayes has established himself as Generation Y’s wonk prince of the morning political talk-show circuit… Mr. Hayes has attracted a cult following, particularly among frustrated hyper-educated members of the Occupy Wall Street generation who are seemingly fed up with the partisan bickering that prevails in Washington and passes as political discourse on the airwaves.
Around 11 p.m. on a Friday this past spring, Ted Leo, a singer and songwriter considered something of a legend in New York punk and indie-rock, opened a raucous late set at the Black Cat club in Washington with a curious greeting to his followers.
“I know how hard it is to be here,” he joked to a crowd of about 750, a Gibson hollow-body drooping from his shoulder, “because you all have to be up at 8 a.m. tomorrow to watch ‘Up With Chris Hayes.’ ”
Mr. Hayes, the host of MSNBC’s new morning weekend political talk show, was padding around his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, early the next day when e-mails started popping up from excited friends who had been at the concert. He was getting used to surging ratings and frequent mentions on The Huffington Post. But a shout-out from Ted Leo?
He had arrived.
“It meant the show is known,” said Mr. Hayes, 33, who says he has never met the singer. “He was confident enough to make the joke and think he’d get a laugh.”
Word of “Up w/Chris Hayes” has spread beyond a few hundred punk fans. In less than a year on television (and with a chirpy voice, a weakness for gesticulation and a tendency to drop honors-thesis words like “signifier” into casual conversation), Mr. Hayes has established himself as Generation Y’s wonk prince of the morning political talk-show circuit.
But even with his grad-student sensibility and a program that resembles a dorm-room bull session, Mr. Hayes has attracted a cult following, particularly among frustrated hyper-educated members of the Occupy Wall Street generation who are seemingly fed up with the partisan bickering that prevails in Washington and passes as political discourse on the airwaves.
“He is never doctrinaire,” Mr. Leo said in an interview. Both punk fans and “Up” fans are “suspicious of any authority,” he said, and appreciate that Mr. Hayes “is always willing to challenge his own assumptions, and the received wisdom on both sides of the aisle.”
Like Deadheads or Trekkies, fans of the program cluster under a common nickname: Uppers.
Credit for the nickname goes to Wyeth Ruthven, a public relations consultant in Washington, who coined the #uppers Twitter hashtag as a joke about the program’s early broadcast time last October, a couple of weeks after it began. The term quickly went viral after Mr. Hayes (who monitors his Twitter feed on a MacBook Pro beside him as cameras roll, and often invokes viewer tweets on air) retweeted Mr. Ruthven. Within weeks, hundreds were joining the spirited #uppers debates on issues like gay marriage and industrial farming. Viewers now post more than 6,000 comments every weekend.
Social media, in fact, have played an unusually important role in driving traffic to the program, an MSNBC spokeswoman said. About 45 percent of the visitors to the program’s Web site, which contains complete episodes, linked through sites like Facebook and Twitter. In April, those users spent an average of 51 minutes on the site each visit.
But Twitter is still the hotbed of “Up” fandom. Even so, the program’s feed is not just an online clubhouse for New York media types like Lizz Winstead, a creator of “The Daily Show,” and members of Le Tigre, the too-cool electro-pop band. Cher and Chad Ochocinco have chimed in, too.
