Oh, Chris!

At eleven o'clock yesterday morning, CNN's Brian Stelter announced that Chris Wallace was leaving Fox News effective immediately, with no plans other than to seek "new challenges."

Then, before Stelter's hour as host of CNN's "Reliable Sources" was up, he announced more breaking news: Chris Wallace was joining the Cable News Network's new streaming service, CNN+, which goes on the "air" in 2022.

Known for his combative questioning of public figures like his dad Mike was, Chris Wallace had long been to Fox News what Jim Cantore is to The Weather Channel; he was the only shred of legitimacy his channel could claim.  Now, with Wallace moving on to work or an offshoot of a real news network, it's becoming obvious that Fox News should rebrand itself Fox Talk.  Wallace had of late been asking tough questions of Republicans on his cable program and on his Sunday morning talk show on the Fox broadcast network (which still has no nightly newscast, thank God for that) and was increasingly showing more journalistic integrity than liberals had once given him credit for.  Now, like Shepard Smith before him, Wallace realizes Fox is no place for a real journalist.  He knows that if he wants to do hard news like his dad did, he can't stay at Fox.  He'd have to be an entertainer like his dad had once been.  But then, his dad had only been a game show host; what Tucker Carlson does probably shouldn't be called entertainment.  Unless he ever does it in an open-air stadium in Rome.

Good fro Chris Wallace.  He'll so just fine on CNN's new streaming service.  As for Fox News, well, sure, they still have Bret Baier.  But he won't be much of a fig leaf, just as no one at The But The Weather Channel could ever compensate for Jim Cantore if he ever leaves.

Crazy Like a Fox

Sean Hannity did something shocking Monday night.  He urged his viewers to get the COVID vaccine.

This is a game changer, as Fox News "personalities" have largely been responsible for spreading misinformation about the COVID vaccine since it was first made available in December 2020.  This is likely due to something else that emerged that same month - the Delta variant, first in India, and later in the rest of the world.  Hannity, who must have seen the latest COVID case and death numbers, finally saw the light.  He made it a point not to urge people to listen to President Biden - there are some prejudices that the right will never abandon - but he did tell his viewers to do the research and look at the the results of the different versions of the vaccine to see how effective they are. 

"Please take COVID seriously," he said. "I can’t say it enough. Enough people have died. We don't need any more death. Research like crazy. Talk to your doctor, your doctors, medical professionals you trust based on your unique medical history, your current medical condition, and you and your doctor make a very important decision for your own safety."

Oh yeah, it's not just Hannity saying this.  Two hosts of Fox News' morning show "Fox & Friends," Brian Kilmeade and the unfortunately surnamed Steve Doocy also urged viewers to get the jab, with Kilmeade comparing resistance to the COVID vaccine to diving off a cliff and Doocy being more to the point on the consequences.  "If you have the chance, get the shot. It will save your life,"' Doocy said.

And if that's not enough, another Fox News star, Geraldo Rivera, lashed out at those who won't get the vaccine out of personal freedom, saying they disregard those getting the shot and exercising their personal right not to die. 

Well, all right.  All right.  Good for them.

It doesn't take much for vaccine-resistant folks to change their minds.  Just a dangerous viral mutation.   President Biden wasn't going to go after Fox News commentators for spreading misinformation about the COVID vaccine - he would only stir up a hornet's nest of anti-Biden rhetoric at a time when he doesn't need it - but he obviously didn't have to.  I think we can expect Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham to follow suit . . . and they'll find some Orwellian method of convincing their viewers that they had faith in the vaccine all along and never meant to suggest otherwise.  Especially Carlson.  He's good at those Jedi-style mind tricks.  

Martin O'Malley Takes a Run To Fox . . .

. . . and hides himself away.

Martin O'Malley, the Democrat other Democrats love to ignore, has disappeared from MSNBC of late, but he's still on TV.  But it doesn't look the same . . . the way it did before.

That's because O'Malley has been going on Fox News.    

The would-be 46th U.S. President has been spending the last couple of weeks debating and defending his specialty topic, immigration, with the likes of Tucker Carlson, who rejected as stupid the idea that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were refugees on their flight to Egypt, and Martha MacCollum, who tried to inject the case of Kate Steinle (who was accidentally killed by an immigrant) into the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals issue. O'Malley is a skilled, knowledgeable politician who can give as good as he gets, but he's wasting his time trying to argue with preppie snobs like Carlson and bottle-blondes like MacCallum.  He'll get the TV exposure that MSNBC no longer seems to be giving him (did Phil Griffin tell his talent at MSNBC not to waste precious air time talking to him because he's yesterday's news?), but his argument will always be cast in a negative light by the conservative pundits over at Fox, and he won't win any converts; no one watches Fox News to get their minds changed by a former Democratic governor.

Okay, okay, okay, he thinks he's got a pretty good case.  But going on Fox News is out of place.  He looked all right before, trying to persuade fellow Democrats and fellow liberals to consider him for the Presidency, which, even for him, is definitely easier than trying to get Fox News's right-wing audience to agree with him.

I've heard it all before . . .

I hope O'Malley recognizes the folly of hanging out with Carlson and MacCallum and goes back to his place - MSNBC, where he can build himself support for 2020.  Because at Fox, they, they, they don't wanna know his name.

Even less so than the liberal pundits who made fun of him before.

Don't Lean On Me

Remember that episode of "Mad Men" where Don Draper pitches what he thinks is a surefire ad campaign to Conrad Hilton for his hotel chain, only for Mr. Hilton to reject it because he didn't get the moon? And Mr. Hilton then walks out, never to return? Someone at MSNBC should have done the same after its ad agency pitched the new MSNBC campaign that has just started.

MSNBC is running a series of incoherent television ads showing pictures of famous Americans, famous American moments, and pastimes as different as Latin dancing and demolition derbies to celebrate the "diversity" of our country while a voice-over reads an atrocious paraphrasing of the Declaration of Independence. When I first saw one of these ads, I asked myself, "What the hell is this?"

Oh yeah, the ads - which you can't tell what they're for even twenty seconds into them - end with MSNBC's logo and its new slogan . . . "Lean Forward."

And I thought Volkswagen's "Fahrvergnügen" ad campaign sucked.

"Lean forward?" Isn't that what you do when a nurse needs to give you a shot in your rump? Or when you stand above a toilet when you have to puke?

This ad campaign isn't making anyone puke, because people are too busy laughing their rumps off to be indisposed. Fox News, despite its utter lack of integrity, is very good at selling itself. Although "We report, you decide" and "Fair and Balanced" are the two biggest lies in advertising history, they're effective because each slogan communicates a simple direct idea. "Lean Forward" communicates nothing. And compared to the TV spots for MSNBC, the new campaign's print ads are not much better, showing MSNBC on-air personalities in casual poses that suggest they're not going anywhere, never mind leaning in any direction. "The Place For Politics," MSNBC's old slogan, wasn't so wonderful either; MSNBC is supposed to report news as much as it offers punditry (and it does), and there are many places for politics, like in Congress or an insurance office. But from a point of message and branding, "Lean Forward" is irredeemably asinine.

I don't know how this slogan was dreamed up, but I'm guessing that some hotshot ad man proposed a slogan that suggested forward movement to complement MSNBC's liberal bias, but that "Go Forward" sounded like a car company slogan and "Moving Forward" already was one (it was taken by Toyota, itself going through image problems these days for different reasons), so "Lean Forward" - like leaning Democratic or leaning Republican - was a perfect fit. Right. It fits MSNBC as perfectly as a 28-inch-waist pair of pants would fit William Bennett.

Sean Hannity has already ridiculed this MSNBC slogan on his own blog, but more noteworthy is that Jon Stewart has skewered it even more wittily on his TV show. Stewart summed up the ad campaign's incoherence by playing a tape of MSNBC president Phil Griffin explaining the positive message of the slogan, and then showing clips of Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Dylan Ratigan, and even the clownish Keith Olbermann delivering pessimistic, decline-and-fall rhetoric about the direction the U.S. is moving in. (And Stewart didn't even mention the channel's sensationalist weekend crime documentaries.)

MSNBC insists it's not a propaganda arm for the Democratic party, which is why MSNBC personalities sometimes criticize the Democrats despite their support for the party's basic agenda. So, even though I'm an avid viewer of MSNBC, I'm reacting just as critically to this new ad campaign. MSNBC deserves better than what their ad men are pushing. It is a reliable news source, with on-air personalities that have strong identities, and they finally have a lineup that has a sense of permanence (though the jury's still out on Lawrence O'Donnell's show). Plus, the channel already has a solidly loyal audience. The channel's liberal on-air personalities may be preaching to the choir, but there's a lot to work with in order to make the choir bigger. The bosses at MSNBC have the opportunity to promote their strengths effectively, and this new ad campaign is not the way to do it.

And no, again, it is not true that MSNBC has more initials in its name than it has viewers. That would be true of CNN.

MSNBC's Weekend Problem

Recently it was reported that the most watched cable news channel in 2009 was Fox News, a finding that must be scaring liberals. It bested MSNBC by a wide margin. The big loser, though, was CNN, which remained in third place. Ratings for MSNBC produced mixed results; though more people watched Fox, MSNBC gained among viewers in the 25-54 age demographic. Rachel Maddow's show has become appointment television, and Ed Schultz has cultivated a core audience of his own. But facts are stubborn things. For all of Keith Olbermann's lampooning of Bill O'Reilly as "Billo the Clown," O'Reilly's show has been highly rated, usually attracting more viewers than Olbermann in the same time slot, and even Rachel Maddow has faced tough competition against that other Long Island Irish fascist on Fox, Sean Hannity.

Fox's higher ratings don't necessarily meant that the country is tilting more rightward; it could easily mean that conservatives, feeling that their ideology is under siege, are tuning in to Fox more frequently. The political faction out of power normally rallies together and stirs up trouble, and it's been that way since newspapers sympathetic to Thomas Jefferson regularly assailed the administration of John Adams. MSNBC is actually doing pretty well overall, but it has one Achilles heel that makes it seem less like a serious cable news channel than even Fox.

I'm talking about MSNBC's weekend programming.

MSNBC always airs documentaries, usually on prisons, murders, and domestic abusers, on Saturdays and Sundays. The channel, like the fabled middle class Ed Schultz is trying to represent, pretty much takes the weekend off. Occasional updates from Christina Brown are as much news as you get from MSNBC on the weekends, except when they come from Milissa Rehberger. Naturally, the channel also goes in to hibernation on holidays, as it did on Christmas Day a couple of weeks ago. Therefore, MSNBC was the last channel to get in on the attempted airline bombing over Detroit, and the channel seemed just as slow to react as President Obama was while in Hawaii.

And some of MSNBC's commentators actually had the nerve for chastising Obama.

MSNBC has always frustrated me with their weekend programming. I don't like their sensationalist documentaries, and I never find out what's going on in the world when I tune in on Saturday or Sunday. It sounds trivial, but if cable television news had been around in 1941 or 1979, and if MSNBC then had a programming format like the one it has now, they would have been out of the loop during, respectively, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Iran, both of which happened on Sundays.

If MSNBC wants to be taken more seriously as a cable news show, they should have weekend news and talk shows and not just show those stupid documentaries, many of which are reruns of "Dateline NBC." They don't even show reruns of "Meet the Press" anymore on Sunday evenings, and they've had little if any weekend news programming since Tim Russert died. Even its loyal weekday viewers now have to go somewhere else for breaking news on Saturdays and Sundays.

It is not true that MSNBC has more initials in its name than it has viewers. It is true, however, that MSNBC has more initials in its name than it has weekend news reports.