MSNBC’s experiment with hyper-partisan news anchors is at an end. Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews are being relieved as MSNBC anchors by NBC reporter David Gregory:
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 Gregory would 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.
“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.
(Via Drudge, via the Corner.)
Why is this happening? The background is the success of Fox News:
Executives at the channel’s parent company, NBC Universal, had high hopes for MSNBC’s coverage of the political conventions. Instead, the coverage frequently descended into on-air squabbles between the anchors, embarrassing some workers at NBC’s news division, and quite possibly alienating viewers. . .
The success of the Fox News Channel in the past decade along with the growth of political blogs have convinced many media companies that provocative commentary attracts viewers and lures Web browsers more than straight news delivered dispassionately.
Why is this happening? The background, as always, is Fox News. I’m not privy to any insight information, but it’s pretty clear that MSBNC made a business decision to move left, hoping to do what Fox has done on the right. But they missed something important. Given the biases of the rest of the media, there was plenty of room for Fox to position itself on the right and still do respectable news.
It’s not nearly so easy on the left. To get to the left of the media, MSNBC put Olbermann and Matthews into the anchor chair. In so doing, it moved beyond respectable news, and became an embarrassment.
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