In an article earlier today on Breitbart, columnist Joel Pollak posted a link to a piece on Real Clear Politics by Carl M. Cannon titled, "Time to Pull the Plug on MSNBC," where Cannon offers a detailed indictment of MSNBC's vitriolic programming. Cannon claims that Martin Bashir's recent, despicable comments toward Sarah Palin, and Ed Shultz calling Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut" in 2011, are not rare Freudian slips, but by-products of MSNBC's central directive: bash Republicans.
First, Cannon gives a history lesson as to how MSNBC descended down this dark path, mostly laying the blame on Fox News' success.
The eventual runaway commercial success of Fox News Channel left rival cable networks scrambling to adjust. Fox’s roster of talk show hosts was undeniably conservative. The same was true, said critics, of its news reporting. Although Fox executives asserted they were presenting a “fair and balanced” report, occasionally they would concede that they see themselves as the counterweight to an overwhelmingly liberal media establishment.
From there, Cannon explains that once Phil Griffin took over as President, they adopted the slogan "Lean Forward" and proceeded to clean house of their token conservative voices, hiring the likes of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Martin Bashir, Ed Shultz, and lastly Al Sharpton. The brilliant maneuver in branding, of course, worked successfully as MSNBC slipped by CNN in the ratings, but it came with a hefty cost in controversy.
Griffin likes to tell people MSNBC is not the mirror image of Fox, and he is right, but not in the way he means. It’s worse.
An analysis of programming on the three main cable news networks by the Pew Research Center in November and December of 2012 found that Fox and CNN distributed airtime pretty evenly between reporting and opinion. CNN featured more news gathering than opinion (54 percent to 46 percent), while the Fox News Channel reversed this ratio.
MSNBC was the outlier. Fully 85 percent of its airtime was devoted to commentary -- virtually all of it left-leaning -- while only 15 percent went to news reporting. Even allowing that this approach is driven by business considerations (news gathering being more expensive than bloviating), there are a couple of intrinsic problems with this approach.
The first is that relentless partisan criticism invariably leads to name-calling. It’s like a drug addiction -- you need more and more. Once you’ve called George W. Bush stupid a hundred times, audiences want something a little different, so you graduate to “worst president in history,” and finally, as Olbermann often did, a demented war criminal. Sometimes on that network, conservatives are labeled “Hitlerian.”
Finally, Cannon talks about the recent incident with Bashir. While Cannon does accept Bashir's apology, he states those comments will continue to come from MSNBC if they don't clean up the act.
On MSNBC, conservatives are racist, sexist, homophobic, and moronic. That would be dubious enough, except that it turns out that if you view so many of your fellow human beings this way it spills out at the edges. You make sexist comments of your own, homophobic comments, dumb comments. You race-bait in the editing room.
Bashir's apology, you see, was only the latest at MSNBC.
Cannon goes on saying that progressive journalism with NBC wasn't always so vitriolic, citing the works of Frank McGee, John Chancellor, and Tom Brokaw back in 50's and 60's.
Their politics surely skewed liberal, but they told their stories with shoe-leather reporting that required physical courage when they went to the Deep South and good humor when going into the hornets’ nest of Republican politics.
The column finishes with Cannon saying MSNBC would do well if they learned from the past and went back to the old days.
