T
he NY Times, in its frequent role of blind cheerleader to the left, called MSNBC’s radical swing into the depths of blatantly liberal broadcasting “bold,” and back when he decided to move Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews to MSNBC’s news chairs, MSNBC president Phil Griffin said “I see no problem” arising from his decision.
But the experiment is over, and it’s generating a lot of words this a.m., with a total of well over 50 news articles and blog posts already showing up at memeorandum.
Before this weekend’s shakeup, while he was still In Denver where Olbermann’s on-camera temper tantrums (here, here, here, here – a lot of tantrums!) attracted much attention, Griffin donned the blinders and told Politico:
“MSNBCdoes not have an ideology. We hire smart people who are passionate about their love of politics and love of news.”
He seems to have forgotten that according to one Phil Griffin [familiar name], MSNBC does have a powerful liberal bias. As he told the NYT last year:
Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.
“It happened naturally,” Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel’s passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m. “There isn’t a dogma we’re putting through. There is a ‘Go for it.’” [...]
But now it has no ideology? Is it just dogma? Going for it? Whatever, we now understand that it was “squabbles” that led to the reassignment of Olbermann and Matthews … even though Matthews wasn’t squabbling.
Announcing the shift today, the NYTimes, bless ‘em, never really comes out and says Olbermann and Matthews are lefties, even though it had carried Griffin’s quote a year earlier. But the network’s media bias is as hard to ignore as GOP delegates chanting “NBC! NBC!” when Sarah Palin talked about media bias.
The question of bias, though, becomes moot when one looks at the convention ratings – and convention ratings are the holy grail of network competition. Despite the change – or more likely because of it – MSNBC remained a distant, distant third in cable convention viewership.
While the liberal swing has helped pick MSNBC’s ratings from the gutter to the curb, it is apparent that Griffin had misunderstood Fox’s formula for success. Fox has become adept at letting its guests broaden the debate and gives them plenty of time to be partisan spokespersons for their cause. The anchors perform the function of giving the guests plenty of line, then jerking them in when they’ve gone too far. The most hardcore conservative of the hosts, Sean Hannity, is balanced by liberal goofball Alan Colmes.
At MSNBC, Olbermann particularly but Matthews too were running and running without with the line without any counterweight until today, when Griffin decided the “bold” experiment had to end.
Ironically, it ended on the day that former Air America host Rachel Maddow is handed an anchor chair by MSNBC. The station is not done being in the tank for Obama, and its effort to carve out a position as a left-wing network isn’t over. Griffin and company have merely decided that until the election is over, ranting Olbermann and leg-tingling Matthews aren’t going anywhere near an anchor chair.
