You Can Call Him Al

About this time last month I reported that Al Sharpton was substituting for Cenk Uygur on the nameless 6:00 PM Eastern one-hour time slot on MSNBC. What I didn't know at the time was that, while Sharpton was hosting temporarily, Uygur was permanently absent. MSNBC let him go.

Uygur had been under fire for his barbs against President Obama for being too willing to compromise with an increasingly inflexible Republican establishment in Washington. Reports have circulated that MSNBC president Phil Griffin told Uygur to tone down such attacks, Uygur refused, and Griffin fired him to appease the Democratic party leadership. MSNBC insists that they merely wanted to move Uygur to another time slot, and that Uygur left rather than accept another assignment. Whatever the reason, Uygur is gone, and Sharpton has since been made the permanent on-air host for the still-unnamed show that is sandwiched between Chris Matthews's "Hardball" at 5 PM Eastern and the repeat of "Hardball" at 7 PM Eastern.

I have two thoughts about this. First of all, Sharpton was apparently seen as a reliable host because he's close to the Obama White House and can be counted not to say anything negative about the President - even when the administration is wrong. It's something of an abdication of journalistic integrity when you have an on-camera host who looks at politics in such an absolutist fashion - that Obama should always be defended, even when he's not living up to the promise of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Secondly, Al Sharpton isn't really a journalist or a commentator; he's an ordained minister and a civil rights activist. He is opinionated, and that's a good thing to be when you're a political commentator, but he doesn't have the kind of journalistic or political background that someone like Matthews has, or even the political and media background that Lawrence O'Donnell has, except for maybe his radio show. It's not just Sharpton as a commentary show host I have a problem with. Guest hosts for other MSNBC shows have included other well-known liberals with no professional media background. Rachel Maddow was once substituted by . . . Howard Dean? The doctor and former Vermont governor? But Dean was merely a fill-in host. Sharpton is now the permanent host of the 6 PM Eastern hour, and his early-prime perch suggests that he has the background of a Tom Brokaw or a Max Robinson. He doesn't.

Don't get me wrong. I like the guy. I like him a lot more than I did in the late eighties and early nineties, and few people miss the Al Sharpton of that period - or his wardrobe. But why compromise the MSNBC brand with a fellow who will speak no ill of his favorite public officeholders? He's like Cameron Crowe was in the seventies when he wrote for Rolling Stone, writing positive, critique-free pieces on rock stars and never acknowledging that rock stars were human and sometimes made a bad record. (Some of them never made a good one.) If Sharpton allows that Obama can screw up periodically (and the President is going through a very long screw-up period right now) he does both himself and the President a favor via tough standards and tough love.

Full disclosure requires me to state that my friend and fellow Drew University alumnus, MSNBC contributor Karen Hunter, is professionally associated with Reverend Sharpton. (She helped him write his book "Al On America.") So I say all of this knowing that she won't be in much agreement with my comments. But wait - Karen Hunter is a journalist and a Pulitzer Prize winner. If MSNBC wanted a new host for the 6 PM Eastern hour, Karen Hunter, with her media experience, would have been a perfect choice! After all the sociologists and political operatives who have been MSNBC contributors and have played the role of MSNBC host from time to time, why not give a newsperson on this news channel a commentary show on the news?

All right, so if it's going to be Sharpton hosting the show between first and repeat runs of "Hardball," could MSNBC at least give his show a name? "The Al Show?" "Sharpton Tonight?" Any name would be better than a lack of a name.

Cable News News

Remember when the Cable News Network was the most trusted name in news? The best source of unbiased reporting in commercial television? Well, CNN is still a reliable news source, but no one cares thanks to the more partisan successes of MSNBC and especially Fox. In response to its low ratings, the once-vaunted cable news channel has re-arranged the deck chairs on its sinking ship, with more of an emphasis on reporting than on commentary. It's not the CNN is tone-deaf to the trends that favor punditry. It's that they obviously haven't done punditry well enough to compete with the partisan news channels.

Gone is Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former new York governor. His old partner Kathleen Parker left a while ago, because Spitzer was seen to better as a solo act. But, apparently, not much better, as viewers still found the show boring. Thus, it's been canceled. If I were Chuck Todd at MSNBC, I'd be worried. His show, "The Daily Rundown," started out with a female co-host - Savannah Guthrie - but now features just Chuck Todd, along with a panel of pundits who join him at the end. And the show has only gotten more ridiculous.

For now, at least, Anderson Cooper's "AC360" will air at 8 PM Eastern on CNN and repeat at its current time slot, 10 PM Eastern. Spake Gloria Vanderbilt's son, "I'm looking forward to the new time slot and am (and am?) excited to share AC360 with a new audience at 8 P.M., while still connecting with my regular viewers at 10 P.M."

He's kidding, right?

In the fall, CNN is starting a news program to be hosted by former CNBC personality Erin Burnett at 7 P.M. Eastern, with John King's show moved up to 6 P.M. Eastern. None of these folks are partisan pundits - which is what CNN wants to make clear.

Over at MSNBC, things seems to have settled down for the moment. Ed Schultz is settling into his 10 P.M. Eastern slot comfortably, and after a hiatus, he brought back "PsychoTalk," a segment of outrageous statements made by (mostly) Republican politicians. In between the time Schultz dropped his segment under pressure from MSNBC bosses and the time he brought it back, he had a segment called "The TakEDown," which was really "PsychoTalk" with a different name.

Cenk Ugyur has done a pretty decent job in the 6 P.M. Eastern hour, but there's a reason his air time doesn't have a name; it isn't really a show. It's just a block of time Uygur - or anyone who happens to be available (Al Sharpton has been substituting for Ugyur recently) - fills between the original and repeat airings of Chris Matthews's show.

Keith Olbermann's new show on Current TV? I haven't had much time for that, though commenting on that will require a separate blog entry.

Cenk In the Armor

MSNBC is making changes faster than I can keep up with them. They revamped their entire evening schedule literally less than an hour after Keith Olbermann joined the ranks of the unemployed, not only rescheduling Lawrence O'Donnell's televised op-ed magazine but Ed Schultz's show as well. Some MSNBC viewers learned about it later than others, and I'm afraid I'm among those who were not entirely in the loop.

O'Donnell is permanently replacing Olbermann in the 8 PM Eastern slot, although everyone knows that nothing at MSNBC is really very permanent. Ed Schultz - who celebrates his fifty-seventh birthday today, by the way - now broadcasts at 10 PM Eastern, but his show has some blatantly obvious changes. Gone are the call-in and text message polls, the "Psycho Talk" segment that rivaled Olbermann's "Worst Persons" segment for accuracy and hilarity, and the "Rapid Fire Response" segment. I'll miss the last one the least; Schultz would have two commentators on, a liberal and a conservative, and they would respond to three separate topics in the span of five minutes. Sometimes Schultz couldn't get to all three topics; other times he would only have two, and he wouldn't even get to both. Besides, "Rapid Fire Response" sounded too violent, and Schultz was calling it "Rapid Response" in the last two weeks of his show's 6 PM Eastern slot in the aftermath of the Giffords shooting (though the accompanying graphic still used the word "fire" in it).

Ed Schultz recently insisted that his bosses have not told him to tone down his rhetoric. After seeing Ed last night, it's obvious that no one needed to tell him. After Olbermann, folks on MSNBC are going to have to watch what they say . . . very carefully.

And by the way . . . if Ed Schultz is on at 10 PM on weeknights, doesn't that mean he isn't on at 10 PM on Fridays, the time MSNBC begins its useless weekend crime documentaries?

In the meantime, Cenk Uygur, a Turkish-American commentator who, like Reince Preibus, also has a spellchecker-unfriendly name, is taking over Ed Schultz's old time slot. It's not called the "The Cenk Uygur Show" or "The Early Word With Cenk Uygur;" it's just filler for Uygur to occupy for the time being. But Uygur is as sharp and as biting as Schultz is, so I wouldn't be surprised if the 40-year-old "Young Turk" is on his way to bigger and better things.

And so MSNBC is once again re-arranging its chairs even as Fox News maintains a consistent talk show lineup that continues to outperform MSNBC in the ratings. With Olbermann (who also celebrates a birthday today, his fifty-second) gone, the ratings gap will likely continue to be a problem. And while Comcast denies that its takeover of NBC/Universal was a factor in Olbermann's departure, many liberals opposed to the takeover aren't so sure about that.

I was actually lackadaisical toward the Comcast takeover, because I didn't see any difference between that company and General Electric pertaining to NBC/Universal. But Al Franken, the Democratic junior senator from Minnesota, obviously had misgivings about the whole deal, and he said as much. If Olbermann's departure wasn't a result of it, it certainly was an unfortunate coincidence.

In the meantime, Cenk Uygur looks like a star to watch. Lawrence O'Donnell, alas, looks more and more like someone who does his best work behind the camera (as "The West Wing" proved), not in front of it.