Strewn across Cenk Uygur’s desk Tuesday are piles of articles on everything from President Barack Obama’s budget proposal to Andrew Breitbart, a guest on his Current TV show Tuesday evening, but as Uygur sits down his eyes focus immediately on two large wedges of yellow cake.
It’s not Uygur’s birthday -- that’s in March. Rather, it is the 10-year anniversary of his talk show, "The Young Turks," a franchise that now encompasses 10 different YouTube channels and a prime time show on Current TV.
The most popular of them all remains the original TYT show, whose channel gets more than 1 million views a day and has more than 300,000 YouTube subscribers.
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Uygur, a native of Turkey and Los Angeles resident, launched the show in February 2002 from his living room, and Uygur has pronounced it the first Internet TV news show.
How does he know this?
“You keep saying it and see if anyone challenges it,” Uygur told TheWrap. “Because if someone else was the first, they say, ‘What the hell, we were the first one.’ No one has done that.”
He pauses, and concedes that actually, someone did do that, but quickly notes that that guy's show ended. So, Uygur admits, he may not have been first, but “The Young Turks” is the biggest and the longest running.
Also read: Current TV's Cenk Uygur: Ronald Reagan Would Be a 'Huge Liberal' Now
Since "The Young Turks" launched it has undergone a start and stop trajectory. It struck a deal with SiriusXM, which Uygur described as “fricking awesome,” but then waited for a while to get on the now-defunct Air America.
In a tribute video, co-host Ben Mankeiwcz says he "always thought it was a day away from collapsing."
The show attracted some notoriety in 2005 for its 99-hour live filibuster of Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination, but didn’t achieve its biggest breakthrough until 2011 when Uygur got his own show on MSNBC at 6 p.m.
That show lasted all of six months, as MSNBC tried to shift Uygur to a less juicy time slot, and he refused. Al Sharpton now occupies that space.
Uygur has not hesitated to criticize MSNBC -- along with all the cable news networks for that matter -- but he hesitates before discussing Sharpton.
He fears he will come off as having sour grapes, but that doesn’t stop him from noting two things.
One, Sharpton didn’t get the show because he had higher ratings, and two, Sharpton has been soft on Obama, as Princeton professor Cornel West has said.
“The only thing I object to, whether it’s Al or anybody else, is when they are blindly loyal to any politician,” Uygur said.
Sharpton has rejected those criticisms, claiming that West needs to check his facts.
