Since facts do indeed have a liberal bias, the programming solution was never to prop up a bunch of liberal figureheads. I would have settled for actual news coverage that didn't embrace "the view from nowhere," as media critic Jay Rosen so famously put it. Both sides don't do it, and false equivalence is not journalism. Take a side! Just allow it to be dictated by actual facts, not some hack from a right-wing think tank. Disclose potential conflicts, don't let your news anchors collect fat checks for speaking to groups they're supposed to cover.
It's really not as complicated as you think -- unless, of course, the real goal is to push the ownership's corporate agenda:
As its afternoon shows hosted by Ronan Farrow and Joy Reid are canceled due to poor ratings, MSNBC is reportedly planning to replace Chris Hayes with Rachel Maddow.
It was hardly a surprise Thursday when ratings-challenged MSNBC announced the cancellation of the poor-performing afternoon programs hosted by Ronan Farrow and Joy Reid after less than a year, with veteran news anchor Thomas Roberts stepping in to preside over the two-hour block from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Until a permanent replacement is named for Roberts’s 5:30 a.m. program Way Too Early, the 6 a.m. Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski will temporarily take up the slack by starting a half-hour earlier. But according to knowledgeable sources at the Comcast-owned cable network, Thursday’s moves were only the opening salvo in a wider programming shakeup.
In the relatively near term, two well-placed sources predicted to The Daily Beast, Chris Hayes will be relieved of his weak-performing 8 p.m. show All In, to be replaced by the current 9 p.m. host of The Rachel Maddow Show, while a talent search is currently underway to fill the prime-time slot to be vacated by Maddow.An MSNBC spokesperson—who tried put a happy face on the demotions with talk of prime-time specials and “multiplatform” national reporting for the still-employed Farrow and Reid--declined to comment on the Hayes-Maddow scenario.
In the longer term, these sources said, the Rev. Al Sharpton—a larger than life personality who attracts a 35 percent African-American audience but continues, after 3½ years of nightly practice, to wrestle with his Teleprompter--could eventually be moved from his weeknight 6 p.m. slot to a weekend time period, as MNSBC President Phil Griffin attempts to reverse significant viewership slides by accentuating straight news over left-leaning opinion.
“Everybody in the food chain from top to bottom understands that the Olbermann era is over,” said an MSNBC source, referring to the glory days during George W. Bush’s administration when incendiary liberal Keith Olbermann regularly attracted a million viewers—many of them seeking refuge from White House and Republican talking points.The MSNBC source said, “Going left was a brilliant strategy while it lasted and made hundreds of millions of dollars for Comcast, but now it doesn’t work any more...The goal is to move away from left-wing TV.”
