Crossposted from Flopping Aces
Not sure its going to make a bit of difference. Olbermann gets one million viewers a night so he has become the face of MSNBC (Of course O’Reilly gets over three million, but who’s counting?) and being the face of the network the bigwigs thought turning the MSNBC ship way to the left would be a good idea.
They were wrong:
MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.
That experiment appears to be over.
After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregorywould anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.
The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.
While the left loves to criticize Fox News for being a conservative bastion, the network knows how to do it. Real news get the real anchors like Brit Hume and Chris Wallace. Meanwhile the opinion segments get the pundits like Hannity and O’Reilly (No idea why people think of him as conservative). You never see those two hosting a political convention. But MSNBC, in all their wisdom, thought it would be a good to have these yahoo’s pretend to be unbiased while covering the conventions.
With the hot mikes, on-air fueds, and obvious bias that could not be hidden someone in the upper offices have finally seen the light:
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.â€
The employee, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because the network does not permit it people to speak to the media without authorization. (The New York Times and NBC News have a content-sharing arrangement exclusively for political coverage.)
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.
The move, confirmed by spokesmen for both networks, follows increasingly loud complaints about Olbermann’s anchor role at the Democratic and Republican conventions. Olbermann, who regularly assails President Bush and GOP nominee John McCain on his “Countdown†program, was effusive in praising the acceptance speech of Democratic nominee Barack Obama. He drew flak Thursday when the Republicans played a video that included a tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that if the networks had done that, “we would be rightly eviscerated at all quarters, perhaps by the Republican Party itself, for exploiting the memories of the dead, and perhaps even for trying to evoke that pain again. If you reacted to that videotape the way I did, I apologize.â€
Matthews, who has criticized politicians in both parties, drew less criticism for his convention role but became a divisive figure during the primaries when he described how he was inspired by Obama’s speeches and made disparaging remarks about Hillary Clinton, for which he later apologized.
In May, MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in an interview that during live events Olbermann and Matthews “put on different hats. I think the audience gets it. . . . I see zero problem.â€
But NBC News journalists, who often appear on the cable channel, did see a problem, arguing behind the scenes that MSNBC’s move to the left — which includes a new show, debuting tonight, for Air America radio host Rachel Maddow — was tarnishing their reputation for fairness. Tom Brokaw, the interim host of “Meet the Press,†said that at times Olbermann and Matthews went too far.
For MSNBC president Phil Griffin the shift to the left is less ideological and more bottom line. “In a rapidly changing media environment,” he tells the Times’ Brian Stelter, “this is the great philosophical debate…the bottom line is that we’re experiencing incredible success.”
But that success, more limited than “incredible”, is coming at a cost. In recent months, the network has received letters of criticism ranging from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the Bush White House. And since MSNBC is now so closely tied to NBC News, the critics started seeing the two entities as one.
Last month John McCain’s campaign requested a meeting with NBC News president Steve Capus over something correspondent Andrea Mitchell said on Meet the Press. McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis wrote, “We are concerned that your News Division is following MSNBC’s lead in abandoning non-partisan coverage of the Presidential race.”
During the RNC last week, which Olbermann co-anchored from New York, insiders from both NBC and MSNBC opened up to TVNewser, most speaking on background. “It’s a completely untenable situation,” one MSNBC insider said. And, in what now seems prescient, added, “It’s not going to be workable forever, to have two anchors like that. It’s just too bizarre.”
Like I said in the beginning. This will have no effect. The public already understands that the majority of the press is in the bag for Obama and cannot remain unbiased even as they whine that its just “passion!”:
Mr. Griffin, MSNBC’s president, denies that it has an ideology. “I think ideology means we think one way, and we don’t,†he said. Rather than label MSNBC’s prime time as left-leaning, he says it has passion and point of view.
Riiiiiight.
More here.
also:
Obama: “My Muslim Faith” on ABC’s This Week Program
This is what happens when you don’t have a teleprompter!
Yesterday Curt posted the gaffe of where Obama referred to himself as President in a town hall meeting where he said “people ask me… what have you learned since being President.”
And now this choice bit:
Obama: “John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith.”
(A personal note from the editor: I am not attacking the man’s religion as I am attacking his personal dishonesty and his shifting positions:)
Finally:
The Left is Flailing At Sarah Palin>
Some silly partisan hack up in Alaska is doing her best to try and discredit Palin. Anne Kilkenny is a Democrat who supposedly knows Sarah and just wanted the populace to know what a “monster” she is. So she sent out a email that went a bit viral within the lefty ranks and since the tabloid newspaper McClatchy hasn’t met a liberal conspiracy they didn’t like they ran with it and put the email up on their front page.
In the email she makes plenty of accusations about Palin and FactCheck.org went through it all and found it…well, wanting.
We’ve been flooded for the past few days with queries about dubious Internet postings and mass e-mail messages making claims about McCain’s running mate, Gov. Palin. We find that many are completely false, or misleading.
* Palin did not cut funding for special needs education in Alaska by 62 percent. She didn’t cut it at all. In fact, she tripled per-pupil funding over just three years.
* She did not demand that books be banned from the Wasilla library. Some of the books on a widely circulated list were not even in print at the time. The librarian has said Palin asked a “What if?” question, but the librarian continued in her job through most of Palin’s first term.
* She was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a group that wants Alaskans to vote on whether they wish to secede from the United States. She’s been registered as a Republican since May 1982.
* Palin never endorsed or supported Pat Buchanan for president. She once wore a Buchanan button as a “courtesty” when he visited Wasilla, but shortly afterward she was appointed to co-chair of the campaign of Steve Forbes in the state.
* Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska’s schools. She has said that students should be allowed to “debate both sides” of the evolution question, but she also said creationism “doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”
A few of these claims were included in a chain e-mail by a woman named Anne Kilkenny. We’ll be looking into other charges in that e-mail for a future story. For more explanation of the bullet points above, please read the Analysis.
The liberal strategy has always been to throw as much crap at the wall and hope something sticks. Sometimes they get lucky, most often they don’t…for example, the story that Palin is a racist, which was debunked officially today.
They tried to make a gaffe out of a non-gaffe when Sarah Palin stated the truth:
Gov. Sarah Palin made her first potentially major gaffe during her time on the national scene while discussing the developments of the perilous housing market this past weekend.
Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.†The companies, as McClatchy reported, “aren’t taxpayer funded but operate as private companies. The takeover may result in a taxpayer bailout during reorganization.â€
Economists and analysts pounced on the misstatement, saying it demonstrated a lack of understanding about one of the key economic issues likely to face the next administration.
“You would like to think that someone who is going to be vice president and conceivable president would know what Fannie and Freddie do,†said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “These are huge institutions and they are absolutely central to our country’s mortgage debt. To not have a clue what they do doesn’t speak well for her, I’d say.â€
“To not have a clue what they do?” She got it exactly right. Those two institutions are way too big, and they have become expensive to bail out. Where’s the beef in the liberals complaints? Steve Spruiell has more:
In attempting to explain Palin’s “gaffe,” liberal bloggers seem oddly reliant on the past tense:
HuffPo, quoting Andrew Jakabovics: “It is somewhat nonsensical because up until yesterday there was sort of no public funding there.”
Benen: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren’t receiving any taxpayer money.”
Yglesias: “… in fact, they weren’t funded by the taxpayers at all.”
Pandagon: “Sarah Palin believes tat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taxpayer-funded. They weren’t.”
Except, of course, now they are! Just like we always knew they would be! Palin’s point was obviously that 1. Fannie and Freddie have always been a huge liability for taxpayers, because 2. everyone knew that the government would bail them out if they failed, and 3. a McCain-Palin administration would use the government’s new authority over Fannie and Freddie to shrink these beasts down to size and protect taxpayers in the future.
Not to be left out Joe Biden complained that Palin was too extreme on global warming because she doesn’t believe that humans are causing it. Check the link to see how extreme. Oh, and 45% of the public doesn’t believe the man-made fiction either, so how freakin extreme is that again?
And then we have Michelle Obama…..oh, Michelle…how we’ve missed you so.
Obama then moved on to politics, where she first brought up her husband’s vice-presidential choice. “I think it was a really good pick—Senator Joe Biden,†she said, and later added, “People say they have amazing chemistry, and it’s true.â€
Obama continued with talk about Biden when she said, “What you learn about Barack from his choice is that he’s not afraid of smart people.†The crowd softly chuckled.
Yeah, thats it. Sarah Palin isn’t smart. I mean how in the world can she compete with someone who sole claim to fame is that she married a politician?
It’s quite amusing to see the left in a panic. Why could they be so scared? Here’s a few….reasons.
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