To MS NOW host Symone Sanders Townsend, the media has too often “treated culture as this side thing to the politics show.” On “Clock It,” she and co-host Eugene Daniels hope to remedy that.
“Politics is the main, but culture is an aside. And the reality is that culture is leading politics, and this has manifested itself in many different ways,” Sanders Townsend told TheWrap in a joint interview with Daniels. That’s especially the case these days as Donald Trump, a reality TV-star turned president, “has been chasing the legitimacy of the culture his entire life,” she noted.
From Nicki Minaj standing alongside Trump to Bad Bunny bashing ICE, the frequent collision of culture and politics should provide fertile ground for “Clock It,” which premieres on Feb. 12 on podcast platforms and YouTube.
Both Daniels and Sanders Townsend remarked on the controversy ahead of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, which Trump has already decried and claimed his music, along with pregame performer Green Day, sows “hatred.” Turning Point USA is hosting an alternative halftime show performance headlined by Kid Rock in response.
“It looks like it’s about, ‘Oh, they don’t like his music,’ but then you dig into it, and then you have the last year of the attacks on the Latino community, and what we’re seeing with the immigrant community, and frankly, now citizens of this country being pulled into that, whether they’re brown or white or Black,” Daniels said. It’s a topic, Daniels added, that is “meaty,” “nuanced” and “complicated” — in other words, ideal for he and Sanders to bat around.
The phrase “clock it” has existed in cultural circles for decades, stemming from New York’s ballroom culture and the Black and Latin queer communities that populated it. The hosts considered various names for the show, but once it was uttered on one of its two pilots, Sanders Townsend loved it. As did MS NOW President Rebecca Kutler. “She heard it and said, ‘Oh, I love that. Can’t wait to clock it,’” Sanders Townsend said.
While Sanders Townsend co-hosts The Weeknight and Daniels co-hosts The Weekend, the pair are in close communication off-air. “We are literally bringing you into our group chat, our conversations that we are having,” Sanders Townsend said. “The podcast will start off with me, Eugene, running through our group chat, and the group chat is like the ‘news of the day’ stories.” An episode can “run the gamut,” she said, from Minaj to Minneapolis.
The program is a reflection of MS NOW’s continued expansion into digital and podcast spaces, which includes shows by anchors Nicolle Wallace (“The Best People”) and Jen Psaki (“The Blueprint”). Madeleine Haeringer, the network’s head of digital, told TheWrap the podcast was born out of its audience’s desire for more candid programs and was “a labor of love” for Sanders Townsend and Daniels.
“It’s built around their sort of pace and personality,” Haeringer said. “It’s just building on their incredible sense of what’s happening at the intersection of politics and culture, and what it says more broadly is that MS NOW is going to continue to heavily invest in audio and social and all the kind of platforms of the future.”
Trump’s encroachment upon culture during his second term has no modern parallel. He named himself the chairman of the Kennedy Center within weeks of his second inauguration, and he has tried to bend media and entertainment companies to his will under threat of governmental pressure. He has scored millions of dollars in settlements from companies like Disney and Paramount since his 2024 election, and he has sued the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, while recently threatening to sue comedian Trevor Noah.
“He’s trying to arrest the culture,” Sanders Townsend said.
Last week saw the literal arrests of independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort after documenting a protest at a Minnesota church over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The pair were charged under two federal statutes, conspiracy to deprive rights and violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which in part prevents one from interfering with someone’s First Amendment right of religious freedom.
Lemon denied the accusations, and three days after his release from a Los Angeles jail, he sat down with ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, another pop culture target of the president.
Daniels, a former president of the White House Correspondents Association who led the organization through the Associated Press’ battles for White House access, said the Lemon episode was “shocking, but it should not be surprising to people.
“This is a president who has called the press for years the ‘enemy of the people.’ This is an administration who, if they don’t like what you are writing or saying, you are all of a sudden, an activist, right?” He said Trump’s Department of Justice “is going after people he perceives to be his enemies.”
“We are a year into this, right?” Daniels said. “So it could get so much worse before it gets better, especially if people close their eyes.”