Five myths about the Keith Olbermann demotion
I've gotten a lot of feedback to my earlier piece about Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews (but mostly Keith) getting bumped off main anchor duty at MSNBC. As you saw last night, David Gregory took charge of the channel's coverage of the 9/11 service forum. Rachel Maddow, the new star of MSNBC, anchored the after-show; Olbermann and Matthews were nowhere to be seen.
Update: I won't be on CNN because a hookup couldn't be arranged from Wichita, where I had to be because of a prior commitment.
And that position is that MSNBC needed to move Olbermann off the center seat in order to get that fig leaf reattached by which it can continue to do news and commentary without damaging its brand or that of NBC News. Doing so, I argued, will actually help Keith as well as MSNBC.
Clearly, though, mine is a minority view, so I thought I would respond to criticisms of MSNBC's move at length. I've dealt with conservative criticisms before, in pieces like this one. Now I'll deal with liberal and progressive criticisms, which I have framed as five myths -- an apt approach, I think, since I am dealing with articles of faith that can and should be challenged.
Myth #1. Olbermann is the equivalent of Brit Hume, yet Hume gets asked to anchor presidential debates -- proof positive that a double standard exists between liberal and conservative journalists.
This is a major tenet of Glenn Greenwald's long attack piece on MSNBC that appeared Monday in Salon. "Everything Brit Hume touches is designed to promote a right-wing perspective," Greenwald writes, "yet he continues to be held out as some sort of legitimate news anchor -- he actually hosted a Democratic Party presidential debate in 2004 -- while MSNBC's promotion of Keith Olbermann is some unique threat to the profession of journalism."
In the course of his usual speed typing (his words-per-day rate is right up there with JoePo), Greenwald didn't pause long enough to consider that the people bestowing legitimacy on Brit Hume by asking him to moderate a Democratic forum were Democrats. (By the way, what was so dumb about that? It got the Dems exclusive treatment by the most-watched network in cable news.)
Also, unlike most journalists of his generation, Hume has actually been selected by the Commission on Presidential Debates to ask questions at a debate. Granted, it was 20 years ago and Hume was still at ABC, but his conservative views were well known in Washington then, as well as to folks like me who read his pieces in The American Spectator. Then as now, however, he was considered a straight shooter (read his debate questions and decide for yourself) and if the Commission ever decides to break the PBS stranglehold on debates, or throw a few more journalists in the mix, it could do a lot worse than Brit.
Related: What's missing from presidential debates: Questions from reporters
In short, the opposite of Brit Hume is not Keith Olbermann. I'll expand on this point below when we talk about Fox vs. NBC culture.
Myth #2. There is a double standard in the way that Fox News is treated and the way MSNBC is treated in the mainstream media. Fox can be as right-wing as it wants to and no one ever calls them on it. But when MSNBC dares to put a single anti-Bush anchor on in prime time, it's accused of injecting "partisanship" into the news.
This oft-repeated criticism reflects a fundamental failure to understand MSNBC's relationship to NBC and the unique problems that it creates for its management.
Bear with me as I chart out the major planets of the cable news universe:
CNN is a traditional, old-school news network with commentary throughout. It began as a low-budget, round-the-clock news gathering network with Sandi Freeman (the predecessor to Larry King) and then "Crossfire" and then a gradual infill of talk throughout the day. Though it constantly solicits comment from an endless stream of analysts and spinmeisters, its best-known personalities -- Larry King, Anderson Cooper, John King, Wolf Blitzer -- are all interviewers whose personal political views are well-kept secrets.
Fox News is the opposite of CNN: a startup network built around commentary, with a smaller, non-traditional, newsgathering force that positions itself as fair and balanced, but definitely outside the MSM. (Incidentally, Reese Schonfeld, the first president of CNN, was a career anti-MSM newsman, always getting involved in startups, and he resisted any attempts to have CNN treated like a fourth broadcast network.) The best-known personalities on Fox News -- O'Reilly, Hannity, Colmes, Hume, Cavuto -- all let you know exactly where they stand, with Shep Smith being the exception that proves the rule.
MSNBC is a cable news startup fused to a traditional broadcast news network. Because of this, it has always struggled with its identity and, since its founding in 1996, has undergone a complete personality change. To wit: In its 12 years on the air MSNBC has shifted away from a network that imitates the CNN model to one that imitates the Fox News model. Its lead personalities were once NBC News interviewers like John Hockenberry or presenters like Jane Pauley. Now its lead personalities are all MSNBC commentators: Matthews, Maddow, Olbermann, etc.
Understanding this sea change is essential to understanding the political problems that MSNBC and NBC News management are working through right now.
Originally MSNBC's relationship to NBC News was less Venn diagram and more kangaroo pouch. It was a fully contained subsidiary of the mother network. Thus it imitated CNN, with heavy emphasis on NBC personalities, straight news gathering and off-peak programs of a documentary or interview nature, often with a technology focus to satisfy major investor Microsoft (the "MS" in MSNBC). When that produced anemic ratings, NBC executives began looking for a Plan B, and they didn't have to look far, because Fox News was taking off.
Between the years 2000 and 2003 MSNBC made the move from the CNN model to the Fox model. Unfortunately, it spent years looking for a commentator prominent enough to act as the face of the network. One reason it took so long is that Fox News had cornered the market on high quality right-wing commentators, leaving MSNBC with the also-rans (Alan Keyes, Michael Savage). Only when Keith Olbermann returned, four years after his initial flameout, and said, Let's try it another way this time, did MSNBC finally start to find its way.
However, success did not significantly alter MSNBC's relationship to the mother ship, and in fact, now that it's successful, it has clearly sought closer ties to NBC News, like it once had. But this is not 1996 anymore. MSNBC has broken with the CNN model and is embracing the Fox model. Unfortunately, it's not Fox. And it's not the anti-Fox. It is a cable news-talk channel that overlaps significantly with a mainstream traditional broadcast news network. That creates problems that neither CNN, with its A-team of interviewers, nor Fox, with its anti-establishment news reporting and commentator mix, have to grapple with.
Everyone at Fox News was on board with what Fox News wanted to do from Day 1. But MSNBC's relationship with NBC News was awkward even when it was following the CNN model. And this isn't the first time this has happened in the GE culture. Recall that another news-oriented channel owned by the same company, CNBC, had tried under its former boss, Roger Ailes, to turn into a 24/7 talk-news channel. Ailes was thwarted, so he went and started Fox News. By 1998, when I reported on the renewal of Geraldo Rivera's CNBC contract for the Observer, there was serious pushback from the news staff, not over Rivera's politics, but his grandstanding and partisanship that seemed so very un-journalism-istic.
(Some people speculate that MSNBC's troubles began when Tim Russert died, conveniently forgetting that Olbermann and Matthews were named co-anchors of the channel's special political coverage -- and that the two men were in hot water with Hillary Clinton's camp for their pro-Obama cheerleading -- long before Russert's death.)
At any rate, Greenwald's argument is a straw man: Keith Olbermann is not "some unique threat to the profession of journalism," he's a unique challenge to the culture of NBC News.
But MSNBC is stuck with NBC just as much as the other way around. It annoys MSNBCers to no end, I'm sure, to hear Fox's Chris Wallace attack them -- as he did in this interview with me at TV critics' tour -- for their "extraordinarily biased" coverage of the election campaign. He did so because he knew he could stand behind the fig leaf. The fig leaf is that while the Fox brand is built on red-meat talk shows, its lead news anchor (Smith) and lead political anchor (Hume) both had reputations for fairness. And he knew that MSNBC had dropped the fig leaf. So long as Olbermann and Matthews were captaining the ship, he could work the refs. That job just got a lot tougher with David Gregory at the helm.
Myth #3. In demoting Olbermann, MSNBC is reverting to its old, bad self, back when it capitulated to the right wing and cancelled Phil Donahue's brave MSNBC program.
Could we please stop these nostalgic reminiscences of "Donahue"? It was a bad show. Don't believe me? Here's something I found on YouTube. Just watch the first five minutes of this interview between Donahue and the Rev. Louis Farrakhan and check off the following as they happen: (a) Donahue screws up a fact and is corrected by Farrakhan, (b) a huge pause makes you briefly wonder if the sound went out, (c) you, the home viewer, are lectured in political correctness by Phil, and (d) you lunge for the stop button.
As a recent promotional tour for the documentary film he was involved in, "Body of War," reminded me, a little Phil goes a long way. The audience agreed. "Donahue" may have been pulling 446,000 viewers at the end and been the top-rated MSNBC program, but its tedious, left-wing Pacifica radio quality content and tiresome anchor did not have any long-term upside for MSNBC.
Donahue's tenure did have one unintended result: NBC commissioned a series of focus groups to figure out how to get MSNBC on track. A few weeks after Donahue got the axe, journalist Rick Ellis got his hands on one of these internal studies, which he described as "an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. ... The harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as 'a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace.'"
But that's not the money part. This is: "The temptation is to chase the audience that is already out there and play to what seems to be working at Fox," the report concluded. "But there is another road, and if we build our unique voices from within, we have a chance to develop a loyal and valuable audience."
And that is exactly what MSNBC went out and did.
Progressives are not entitled to their own TV programs. They must earn them. And as we see from the ascent of Keith Olbermann and now Rachel Maddow -- an Air America host only a few thousand people knew of a year ago -- dissident voices can make their way to the mainstream. (KO is not a progressive, as you'll all discover if Barack Obama is elected president.) Give the conservatives credit for harnessing the power of mass media to get their opinions out. But they haven't always enjoyed this advantage. Nixon backers weren't called the "silent majority" for nothing, and going back further, the great mass orators of the late 19th and early 20th century were almost all progressives of one stripe or another.
If there is progressive or liberal talent toiling away in the minor leagues of broadcasting right now, trust me, someone at MSNBC will find them. (Yeah, like her.)
Final point: Donahue was given six months to make it work at MSNBC. His polar opposite, right-wing commentator and sometime Senate candidate Alan Keyes, got 23 weeks on MSNBC before his show, "Alan Keyes Is Making Sense," was cancelled. (As Phil Griffin noted to me last year, if you have to tell people that you're making sense ...) That was MSNBC back then. Andrew Tyndall, the industry expert on TV news, observed at the time, "If it's not working in a few months, they cancel it and move on to something else." Now that it's tasted success, MSNBC has time to grow talent, as Maddow's development proves.
Myth #4. MSNBC isn't even that left-wing; that's a lie spun by the RNC to force MSNBC over to the right.
Here is an actual email I received this week: "So let me see if I understand this-- Scarborough is a rightie. Buchanan is an ultra-rightie. David Gregory is center-right. Andrea Mitchell is center-right. Chuck Todd-- pretty fair, but his wife is a rightie. Michelle Bernard from the Independent Women's Forum (a right wing group and not independent at all), is center-right. And I could go on. So how have the righties been so successful at framing MSNBC as liberal?"
Again, this conclusion is what happens when you fail to grasp the culture clash going on at MSNBC. Andrea Mitchell, David Gregory and Chuck Todd all work in the Washington bureau of NBC News. If they are doing their jobs, their political affiliations are unimportant.
I'm not arguing that MSNBC can't be a counterpoint to Fox News Channel. I'm not saying that no criticism of MSNBC is disingenuous or hypocritical. I'm saying that if MSNBC wants to take on the Republican Party and Fox News, they will have to do it on terms that don't cause needless troubles for NBC News, because those will have repercussions that have nothing to do with some "right wing double standard" and everything to do with MSNBC's desire to share resources with a powerful member of the mainstream news establishment.
If MSNBC truly wants to be the anti-Fox News, no compromises, then let it break ties with NBC and start from scratch. I'm sure the kids at Current TV will be happy to work for cheap.
Myth #5. This is a way of silencing Olbermann.
From the moment that MSNBC president Phil Griffin decided to showcase Olbermann and Matthews, last weekend's reversal was probably inevitable. The fact that the two anchors (aka Statler and Waldorf, thank you "Daily Show") quarreled on the air with each other and other MSNBC talent simply accelerated the move.
I think it's impossible to view the on-air sniping as anything but a sign of the tensions created by having two commentators in the role traditionally set aside for non-commentators. Olbermann's role at MSNBC, like Geraldo's old role at CNBC, has disturbed the NBC news culture, as evidenced in the unattributed remarks that leaked out of 30 Rock.
But the most obvious reason to make the change is that it was obvious Olbermann should be wearing one hat, not two. I know the left is treating this like a demotion, but in reality it's a reassignment that will help him and MSNBC in the long run. He will be able to sit to Gregory's left and dole out his usual mix of tough commentary and acerbic analysis of the news without worrying about playing traffic cop. And by the way, it didn't hurt MSNBC in the short run, either: The base has been excited, as they say, and Maddow's debut actually beat "Larry King Live" its first night out.
