MSNBC Shuffles Its Seats

Olbermann and Mathews are out as the hosts of MSNBC's election coverage. Since I didn't watch their coverage, this wouldn't matter to me, except that the New York Times article about it contained some priceless bits of information...

The success of the Fox News Channel in the past decade along with the growth of political blogs have convinced many media companies that provocative commentary attracts viewers and lures Web browsers more than straight news delivered dispassionately.

“In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great philosophical debate,” Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Fighting the ratings game, he added, “the bottom line is that we’re experiencing incredible success.”

But as the past two weeks have shown, that success has a downside. When the vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin lamented media bias during her speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.”

In interviews, 10 current and former staff members said that long-simmering tensions between MSNBC and NBC reached a boiling point during the conventions. “MSNBC is behaving like a heroin addict,” one senior staff member observed. “They’re living from fix to fix and swearing they’ll go into rehab the next week.”

...Mr. Olbermann, a 49-year-old former sportscaster, has become the face of the more aggressive MSNBC, and the lightning rod for much of the criticism. His program “Countdown,” now a liberal institution, was created by Mr. Olbermann in 2003 but it found its voice in his gnawing dissent regarding the Bush administration, often in the form of “special comment” segments.

As Mr. Olbermann raised his voice, his ratings rose as well, and he now reaches more than one million viewers a night, a higher television rating than any other show in the troubled 12-year history of the network. As a result, his identity largely defines MSNBC. “They have banked the entirety of the network on Keith Olbermann,” one employee said.

In January, Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews, the host of “Hardball,” began co-anchoring primary night coverage, drawing an audience that enjoyed the pair’s “SportsCenter”-style show. While some critics argued that the assignment was akin to having the Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly anchor on election night — something that has never happened — MSNBC insisted that Mr. Olbermann knew the difference between news and commentary.

But in the past two weeks, that line has been blurred. On the final night of the Republican convention, after MSNBC televised the party’s video “tribute to the victims of 9/11,” including graphic footage of the World Trade Center attacks, Mr. Olbermann abruptly took off his journalistic hat.

“I’m sorry, it’s necessary to say this,” he began. After saying that the video had exploited the memories of the dead, he directly apologized to viewers who were offended. Then, sounding like a network executive, he said it was “probably not appropriate to be shown.”

...“Countdown” will still be shown before the three fall debates and a second edition will be shown sometime afterwards, following the program anchored by Mr. Gregory.

The change casts new doubt on what some staff members believe is an effective programming strategy: prime-time talk of a liberal sort. A like-minded talk show will now follow “Countdown” at 9 p.m.: “The Rachel Maddow Show,” hosted by the liberal radio host, begins Monday.

A few thoughts, in no particular order...

1. The success of Fox News likely has more to do with the fact that Fox is driven by (a) entertainment value and (b) the fact that conservatives don't have multiple other voices in the television media. NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN all skew liberal in varying degrees.

2. The fact that MSNBC's idea to try and match Fox by putting in place a "liberal" prime-time talk format shows that they're missing the point of what Fox developed. Fox found a market of people who weren't being served by the current dreck being produced by network and cable news. MSNBC seems less interested in competing for Fox's conservative viewers than in trying to steal eyeballs from CNN and the networks by making themselves even more outlandishly liberal. That will likely position them even more outside the mainstream, but at least they'll have a core group of fanatics.

3. I don't particularly care about whether Olbermann and Mathews hosted the election-night coverage, since I was about as likely to watch them as I am to wear a Dallas Cowboys jersey. But I think there's a problem here in that they tried to pretend that they could put aside their beliefs in pursuit of their journalistic duties. It's a common problem that I think the public recognizes and the press ignores. Viewpoint-based journalism has always been the rule (see Cronkite on Vietnam), but the press likes to pretend that they come at the issues with impartiality. That's a thing for folks to believe today, and it's less likely to be believed when Keith Olbermann is hosting election coverage. There's nothing really wrong with bias, but the fact that so many people seem invested in trying to put up a front that no bias exists is what annoys me.

4. As a programming decision, aren't you better off with Olbermann working as a commentator than a host on election night, if you're going to cuff the anchor from taking positions and saying stuff?

5. Dan Patrick carried the old Sportscenter, and Chris Mathews is no Dan Patrick.