The Trouble With MSNBC
I basically agree with the standard liberal take on MSNBC’s decision to boot Keith Olbermann from anchoring duties during major political events — see Greenwald — but as Atrios observes “he makes Tom Brokaw uncomfortable.” And much as we may not like this, it’s worth appreciating that MSNBC’s in a really problematic spot not just because of Brokaw but because of the broader tie to NBC News.
I think they’re recognizing at MSNBC with the success of Countdown and the looming Rachel Maddow show that the smart move for the network is to become a progressive-friendly alternative to a cable news landscape dominated by Glen Beck and Sean Hannity. At the same time, however, MSNBC is necessarily going to be a little brother to NBC News. But while progressive branding is smart for MSNBC, it’s not smart for NBC’s Nightly News or for Meet The Press. But on big occasions, MSNBC wants to be able to take advantage of high-profile NBC News personalities. This sets them up for a lot of dilemmas that wouldn’t exist for a cable news channel like Fox News or CNN that doesn’t serve as a co-branded junior partner to a broadcast news operation.
54 Responses to “The Trouble With MSNBC”
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September 8th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Excellent point, Matt. The problem for NBC is that MSNBC is only going to be a bigger player in cable news by becoming more progressive-friendly. So do they spin it off, or do they continue to try to walk a sort of tightrope?
September 8th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I think the takeaway is that CNN is the one that should move decidedly left and leave the mushy middle to the big three and their affiliates (incl. MSNBC).
September 8th, 2008 at 11:35 am
He had to go, he’s a partisan shill. Did you hear him Thursday? McCain stops speaking and the first thing Olbermann says is that the speech had some big moments, but also some big stumbles, like when McCain misplaced a comma. A comma? That will really hurt his electoral chances.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Choosing Olberman as anchor was a mistake. Much as we have issues with Matthews, he’s viewed as more balanced and probably would’ve been better at it. And Olberman WAY overplayed his hand. Could be great as lefty counterweight on those execrable panels with Buchanan etc. Wonder if he’ll make those kinds of appearances in future.
Tweety must be PISSED.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:47 am
He had to go, he’s a partisan shill. Did you hear him Thursday?
So, are you generally in favor of dumping “partisan shills” from the news networks? If so, it would really clear the airwaves at Fox, CNN, and the pundit spots on every evening newscast and all the Sunday gab-fests. We could replace about 3/4ths of TV news air time with actual reporters and honest commentators.
Overall, I’ll take an honest partisan over a self-deluding media aristocrat like Brokaw any day. He distorts coverage and comments in favor of McCain not because of ideology, but because he apparently loves the guy. If you can’t criticise your friends when they stumble and lie on national TV, either resign or recuse yourself from the story.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:56 am
I don’t have a problem with them removing Olbermann from that position, but its insane to take Matthews out. He’s very enthusiastic and insightful, and great at filling up all those minutes. Olbermann is better at running a preplanned show, but not as good in the anchor position for political events, primarily because he is not as knowledgeable about politics. Also, the chemistry between him and Matthews was not good.
Gregory is not a good choice. He is bland, uninteresting, and kind of goofy.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I haven’t watched them as a team since the primaries, but during some of those appearances, it looked quite a few times like Olberman wanted to just beat the snot out of Matthews.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I love Keith, and I’m IN love with Rachel. But there’s a difference between being “progressive-friendly” and being a shill for the left. During the dem convention it seemed pretty obvious to me that MSNBC was going over the line. The last thing we need is another faux news station, left-leaning or not.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
The standard left-liberal take is correct, but it’s not for nothing that Olbermann’s been fired from every other cable news network and ESPN.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
MSNBC is co-owned by the largest defense weapons contractor in world history and the world’s largest computer software maker.
Is that a factor? Maybe –
Also Brokaw is grateful to McCain for pitching his book “Greatest Generation” for years.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Olbermann having issues or no, no smart progressive should apologize for this move. Not because it’s justified, but because it shows that NBC is still supine in the face of right-wing criticism, and that’s only going to embolden them.
NBC keeps on forgetting the cardinal rule with this sort of thing: complaining about individual people and stories is only a tactic. The strategy is to continue the media’s shift rightward.
They aren’t going to stop doing it if you’re proving the strategy successful!
September 8th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
I wouldn’t say Fox News is seperate from their TV channels. Brit Hume and the other hacks frequently appear on Fox TV on sunday mornings.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Actually, the problem with General Electric is that they aggressively intervened in the Democratic nomination process to select the weakest and most conservative major candidate available.
This was not an accident.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
To use a neoconism – Matthews is ‘objectively’ for Obama (except when in McCainmancrush mode) – but ’subjectively’ he is a menace to democrats.
Matthews invented the most stupid slander against Dems – ie “the mommy party”
That was picked up by everyone.
Matthews is also a lazy guy who tells people that Obama’s mom and grandmother were Muslims – Then he refuses to correct himself.
Matthews also has no idea what Obama wrote in his first book – but he lied and said he read it. Indeed Matthews has been mocking Obama’s community service for a year or so -
September 8th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Petey:
Give it up. Hillary is just as liberal(or not) as Obama. Next time, get Sherrod Brown to run.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
It is natural enough for liberals to be upset over this announcement, but it is not clear that Olbermann cannot be more effective as pundit than anchor. The current objection to him from the right is that he is the anchor and on his show says things that they find outrageous. Now he can say things that the find outrageous during the political coverage.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Can we all admit that Olberman’s special comments have become a bit of a joke?
September 8th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
“Give it up. Hillary is just as liberal(or not) as Obama.”
This is incredibly true if you don’t care about issues. In fact, if you don’t care about issues, HRC reads as less liberal than Obama.
But General Electric cares deeply about issues.
There is a reason they’ve covered politics more intensively than any other organization since Jack Welch took over. They’ve got a lot of skin in the game.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
BTW I wish CNN would get a clue and dump Wolf Blitzer. Yeah, he was great during Desert Storm, but jeez, listening to him drone on with his vapid remarks is painful. And his “ONLY on CNN” shtick got tiresome like six years ago.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Do you think Welch would let MSNBC report that PCBs in the Hudson river are as harmful as environmentalists say?
Most issues w/GE are too complicated for Tweety to understand – so he might not even know the significance of a GE related story if he was told to back off.
Welch would just have to contextualize the issue as something Joe Sixpack hates liberals for and that would set off cues for Matthews and Barnicle yada yada yada
September 8th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Petey, what conspiracy are you peddling now? Did you feel the need to come up with a new one to go with Matt’s new digs? Sorry, the trust fund scumbag’s new digs?
September 8th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
The total ad revenue for cable news is about 1.4 billion annually. MSNBC gets about 13% of that, call it 200 million. CNN and FOX split up the rest. In the context of Microsoft’s annual revenues of 51 billion or GE annual revenues of 172 billion, in what way is it “smart” for MSNBC to broadcast content that could result in outcomes at cross purposes with what GE and Microsoft pay for lobbyists and direct support of candidates?
It is smart for MSNBC the same way it would be smart for GE and Microsoft to increase profits by ending their expenditures on lobbying and campaign contributions.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Petey, what conspiracy are you peddling now? Did you feel the need to come up with a new one to go with Matt’s new digs? Sorry, the trust fund scumbag’s new digs?
It’s not new. He’s been on the “GE controls the world” hobbyhorse for quite some time now.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Sure, Keith as an anchor doesn’t work so well. But it’s okay to have Pat Buchanan on the air 24/7?
September 8th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
they aggressively intervened in the Democratic nomination process to select the weakest and most conservative major candidate available.
Wouldn’t the candidate with a known zipper (or should that be baby-onesy?) problem have been the weakest candidate? Seriously Petey, if we’d all followed your advice we’d be looking at a bigger landslide than ‘72 right now.
September 8th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Buchanan is good on MSNBC if you can look aside his politics – His reactionary insights are often accurate indicators of how an issue will play. He is just so much smarter than Matthews and all the others (Todd is bright and Maddow is too) and he has a vast institutional memory. Soft on Hitler? Maybe. That’s a problem, but it really doesn’t mean too much on MSNBC. If anything, his revanchist politics serve to make Republicans look out of step.
Sometimes Pat is just brilliant when he really groks the politics of a situation.
Incidentally – on the say Geogia attacked Russia – Pat was virtually the only person on TV that was willing to clarify the false timeline of events the WH was broadcasting. CNN and CNN international were describing different wars because CNN domestic was afraid to report the complicated narrative.
September 8th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Shorter Petey: There’s shit coming out of my ears, I’m so full of it!
The anchoring of the conventions didn’t work. Simple as that. You can have that pairing for primary nights, but conventions are propaganda exercises, and they magnify basic responses. An actual liberal media would have covered the RNC in MST3K style, shouting ‘that’s fucking retarded’ over the speakers. While Olbermann came close at times, that didn’t happen.
But Gregory? He has covered himself in nothing but ordure as a presenter. As have Brokaw and Mitchell and even Chuck Todd when they’ve been given ‘hours’ to run on MSNBC, Hey, why not put Noron in charge? She’s professional enough, because she’s been swooning over the Palindrone for the past week, and taking any criticism of her personally.
Sure, Keith as an anchor doesn’t work so well. But it’s okay to have Pat Buchanan on the air 24/7?
Or Michelle Bernard, Stealth Wingnut, whose day job — six-figure salary at a wingnut welfare think tank — now goes unmentioned?
September 8th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Barely a week after Rick Davis publicly berates NBC the network caves. So McCain and Co. know they can intimidate at least one of the once-major networks. Next up is ABC, which will be keel-hauled after their inevitable “sexist” interview with Palin this week.
NBC blew it. They rolled over. Yes, McCain will keep an Enemy’s List longer than any predecessor. He will tap their phones, wreck their credit, ruin their lives. He’s a tyrant and the press knows it.
Instead of speaking truth to power — especially crazy power — the major media is cowering. Last one out please get the lights.
September 8th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
IF YOU AGREE WITH NBC? THEN YOU NEED TO GET THE HELL OFF THIS WEBSITE RIGHT FRIGGIN NOW!!
September 8th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Olbermann wasn’t/isn’t effective. His compaints about Palin’s speech (’she broadcast troop movements’) were half-hearted and stupid. He’s essentially a mushy liberal whiner.
September 8th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Next up is ABC, which will be keel-hauled after their inevitable “sexist” interview with Palin this week.
They’ll have it both ways: get Charlie Gibson to softball it, then condemn it for the base.
September 8th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Olbermann is really kind of sad. He *is* Bill O’Reilly. Colbert’s parody is at least funny to watch. With Olbermann you get the temper tantrums. The small-minded nit picking. The whining, the narcissism. The 5th grade sarcasm in the “World’s Worst”.
Jon Stewart should be slamming Olbermann’s childish antics a lot more than he is. Perhaps it’s that the core audience of the two shows is largely the same, and TDS viewers eat that Countdown stuff up.
That said, I hope MSNBC isn’t caving to McCain. Gregory should be just as demanding as Matthews was.
September 8th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
This is not big news. Its only going to be for the “anchor” time. The two will remain as analysts, and probably just or more prominent than Brokaw et al. Like a newspaper, I think its best to separate out the opinion from the news — and while the way to do this on TV is different I think the coverage lost some of its luster because, even as a liberal myself, it wasn’t fair. That said, I agree with one of the earlier posters here who said that Brokaw and other get wrapped up in their personal relationships with the politicians.
Then there’s the problem of the partisan analysts. Mostly they’re just hired hacks. They don’t say what they really are thinking (aka real analysis). They are just spouting off the party line, as seen with the Mike Murphy/Noonan gaffe regarding palin.
September 8th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
So, are you generally in favor of dumping “partisan shills” from the news networks? If so, it would really clear the airwaves at Fox, CNN, and the pundit spots on every evening newscast and all the Sunday gab-fests
Certainly. I’d go beyond that – I’d be in favor of a moratorium on surrogates for the campaigns – the Lindsey Grahams and McCaskills of the world – going on Sunday talk shows. I think a bloggingheads.tv format, where you have really bright people with defined ideological preferences but who aren’t essentially working for the candidates, would be way more informative. The state of televised political analysis is just insanely bad these days. Take CNN. After an event, they bring in strategists from either party to debate what just happened. In Castellanos’s case there’s a little honesty at times, but most of them are just reciting the campaigns’ talking points. Then Gergen’s there for the bland Washingtonian perspective. And they’re all making these ridiculous, uninformed claims about what ‘ordinary folks’ want to hear. Why don’t they bring in a Ruy Texeira, a guy who’s actually studied these matters, to talk about that?
September 8th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I actually watched MSNBC less than the other networks because they had Olbermann anchoring and understand the decision. I don’t watch FOX News because I think they’ll be discussing events in an echo chamber that doesn’t reflect the broader views of everyone else watching or have particular relevance to the national debate. It’s not because I disagree with their views. If MSNBC has an out-and-out Democratic team of Olbermann, Maddow, and Matthews, balanced by mostly irrelevant paleo-con Buchanan, I do not trust them either, even though I largely agree with Olbermann and Maddow on most things. I turned to CNN mostly as a result and apparently, given the ratings, I wasn’t alone.
September 8th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Let’s face it, this is coming from Bill O’Reilly. Keith Olbermann routinely makes fun of BillO, O’Reilly cannot take it but also has made a rule for himself never to mention Olbermann. So O’Reilly has been attacking NBC for months as a surrogate for Olbermann.
September 8th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I don’t mind Olberman and Mathews being taken out of the anchor’s chair. I love Olberman but there were some truly awkward moments last week. Maybe it was those two not working well together, maybe it was just an inherent difficulty in presenting that convention. I don’t know but I’m willing to let somebody else take a shot at anchoring as long as Olberman gets to keep calling bullshit on the Republicans in primetime I’m ok. But David Greggory? Being boring is not being objective.
September 8th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
i’m an olberman fan but he’s primarily a writer and announcer and was clunky as an anchor; definitely not at his best. those long leading questions, meant to elicit responses of, “you’re so right, keith,” are fine on “countdown” where the talking heads are there to amplify the show’s essential keithiness but, during the conventions, they just overwhelmed and negated the the interviewees. there’s more i want to hear from todd, williams (not so much brokaw), fineman and the politicos who stop by than, “you’re so right, keith.” there was a fair, not necessarily evil, reason to make the change.
September 8th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I don’t see any consiperancies here at all. It’s all market driven as are most things. They need to increase viewers and obviously felt Matthews and Oby weren’t getting it done. It’s as simple as that.
September 9th, 2008 at 5:28 am
“He’s been on the “GE controls the world” hobbyhorse for quite some time now.”
General Electric doesn’t control the world. But they’ve been the dominant voice in the Washington policy discourse for a couple of decades now.
Unlike the other news organizations, General Electric doesn’t run their political coverage as a business. They run it as a loss leader to protect their corporate interests in the financial services and healthcare businesses.
Disney, CBS, NewsCorp, and Time-Warner all get more than 90% of their money from media and entertainment. General Electric gets less than 10% of their money from media and entertainment.
GE stands alone in their rationale for covering politics – they’re all about influencing the policy debate to help their core businesses. And helping their core businesses involves fighting a long-term battle against universal healthcare and Social Security, the core elements of the Democratic agenda.
September 9th, 2008 at 5:54 am
Both Olberman and Matthews serve to bring a 360 view on many poilital issues. They also support our democracy which the likes of Fox’s Hannity and O’Reilly would hijack if alternative views are not offered up to America.
As for Brokaw, as a much venerated anchorman, he truly is disappointing in how openly he is tipping his hat in favor of McCain. To refer to Palin’s vitriolic spew at the convention as “very impressive” invoked a collective “you’ve got to be kidding” response and leads me to question his objectivity and frankly how well he will now serve NBC or Tim Russert’s legacy.
September 13th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
In my opinion Keith Olbermann is a fesh burst of spontaineity in news coverage. Anyway, anyone republican that inanely says that Olbermann should be off the airwaves or political conventions is a hypocrite. After all, Fox is the emblem of unfair biased media coverage. So if anyone wants to take issue with Olbermann- I say they take on Fox first. At least MSNBC allowsrepublicans to have their say. Fox? No Hannity and Colmes doesn’t count.
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