Under New Management

The effects of MSNBC's redone lineup at the beginning of the Comcast era are already being felt, especially in the ratings. With Keith Olbermann gone, MSNBC's ratings have tumbled, and Lawrence O'Donnell has lost much of the audience that tuned in to Watch "Countdown" at 8 PM Eastern. He was only ahead of Kathleen Parker and Eliot Spitzer by 50,000 viewers this past Wednesday in the 25-54 age range, according to one estimate, and his overall viewership declined over the first three days of the week.

Ed Schultz keeps fighting the good fight for the working man at 10 PM Eastern, but his later time slot and his cut to four nights a week instead of five has to be a detriment to the brand equity he'd built up in the previous two years. Schultz now confirms that his "Psycho Talk" segment is gone per orders from his new bosses at Comcast. He figures that the new bosses - so far, not the same as the old bosses - are smarter than he is, and that this decision is in the best interest of the show. Which brings up the obvious question: If the new management honchos at NBC/Universal are acting in Ed Schultz's interest, why did they reschedule him to a later hour with one fewer weekday?

No one at MSNBC is even acknowledging Olbermann's departure. Rachel Maddow professed ignorance of the situation as it was starting to unfold when she appeared on Bill Maher's HBO show last week. Even the PBS NewsHour - which does media stories and covered Olbermann's recent suspension - didn't bring it up. Right-wingers, smelling blood, are burying MSNBC in scorn and ridicule, throwing dirt on a body that is merely ill rather than dead. (I researched online news and commentary on the MSNBC shakeup for this post. Most of it is smarmy right-wing nose thumbing, with very little objective analysis available.) When Chris Matthews earlier this week blasted Michele Bachmann for insisting that the Founding Fathers eradicated slavery, conservative bloggers and Glenn Beck bashed Matthews, insisting that the clause that made a slave three-fifths of a person was done to prevent the slave states from being overrepresented in the House of Representatives with non-citizens at the expense of the free states. This compromise clause, they charged, was designed to allow slavery to die out in the South by encouraging emancipation for more congressional representation.

I doubt they would have counterattacked this viciously if Matthews and MSNBC were in a stronger position. And besides, the conservative argument is bogus. If 60 percent of all slaves were counted for representation in the House to encourage emancipation and a 100 percent count of blacks, why was an even balance of free and slave states kept between 1820 and 1850 to keep one side from outvoting the other in the Senate? Why was slavery allowed to expand into the territories in the 1850s? Matthews likely would have defended himself yesterday on his "Hardball" show by asking these questions. But his attention was shifted to the unrest in Egypt instead.

Meanwhile, Fox News - the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of American television - is so far ahead in the ratings, it's left CNN and MSNBC fighting each other for a very distant and very irrelevant second place. Here's an example of Fox's dominance as reported by the Kansas City Star: This past Wednesday's edition of "The O'Reilly Factor" drew 3.24 million total viewers, with 910,000 viewers in the 25-54 age range - "nearly," the Star reports, "as many total viewers as MSNBC."

So what does this all mean for liberals? A lot, most of it bad. With fewer progressive voices available in broadcasting and the far right becoming louder and more ubiquitous, some MSNBC viewers are just giving up. "MSNBC doesn't have me as its devoted fan anymore," said one friend of mine. "I watch 'Hardball' online and alternate from Lawrence O'Donnell to 'Parker/Spitzer.' I was never a big fan of Rachel Maddow. Olbermann was the one for me. Now that he is has left MSNBC, so have I."

Me? I will continue to watch Chris Matthews - largely for the entertainment value - and I will especially continue to watch Ed Schultz as he battles against the morons and, in his time slot, Greta Van Susteren. Because even a watered-down, tamed, reined-in Ed Schultz is preferable to a Greta Van Susteren at the height of her broadcasting prowess. We need Matthews and Schultz - and Cenk Uygur and Rachel Maddow - more than ever.

Lawrence O'Donnell? Larry, I love you, but you ought to be writing a column for the Atlantic, not commenting on television.