National Review Online’s Charles C. W. Cooke published a must-read piece Monday on the degree to which MSNBC has retreated into its self-created, extreme-left “alternative universe.” Citing a recent Pew study that compares the reporting bias of the major news networks, Cooke highlights just how radically slanted MSNBC’s “reporting” has become:

Take a quick look at the numbers. A recent Pew study revealed that the supposedly neutral CNN spent 54 percent of its time broadcasting “news” and 46 percent of its time hosting “opinion.” Fox, by contrast, transmits 55 percent opinion and 45 percent news. But MSNBC — well, MSNBC consists of a remarkable 85 percent opinion and only 15 percent news. This has consequences. During the election, Pew added, the ratio of unfavorable to favorable treatment in stories about Mitt Romney on MSNBC was roughly 23-to-1, and the negative-to-positive ratio for Barack Obama on Fox News was 8-to-1.

MSNBC’s 23-to-1 anti-conservative ratio is almost three times worse than the left’s go-to conservative whipping boy, Fox News, which at least comes close to a fifty-fifty news/opinion split. Apparently, MSNBC has essentially thrown news out along with tact and professionalism (see the Baldwin and Bashir debacles). As Cooke says, “‘biased’ doesn’t cut it.”

To watch MSNBC for an afternoon is not so much to be given a slanted account of what is happening here in America, but instead to witness a series of discussions about current events in parallel America II — a rather silly place in which the political center of gravity and all things Good are defined by the preferences of the faculty at Berkeley and the comments section of the Daily Kos and in which anyone who dissents from this position is believed to possess two heads, a black heart, and a pocket copy of Mein Kampf.

MSNBC's increasingly close-minded, “alternative universe,” combined with the recent hosting woes, is doing considerable damage to network’s creditable. But keep it up, MSNBC, and we’ll keep watching your viewership plummet.