MS Now? MS No!

As you may have heard ,the spinoff of MSNBC from NBC News and COmcast is just about complete, and what used to be called MSNBC for merely thirty years is to be known as MS NOW.

MS NOW is to operate as a news channel with no support from or synergy with NBC News, and Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell will be among the on-air talent migrating to the "new" channel.  And, I assume, Joe and Mika too.  Who cares?  I've been done with cable TV news since Joe and Mika want to Mar-a-Lago to pay tribute to the leader of der Amerikanisches Reich.  And because the channel is separating itself form NBC News, which became the most prestigious network news division in the country after Bari Weiss put a gun up against CBS News and pulled the trigger, it will have to create a staff of reporters from scratch, and it still won't be as accomplished as the reporting staff of, say, NewsNation.  

MS Now?  Nah, not now.  Maybe later . . . 

Joyless

She was caught having made homophobic insinuations on her blog against former Florida politician Charlie Crist and tried to deflect blame for them to a nonexistent hacker.

She needled Tim Ryan for his ill-fated attempt to challenge Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leadership and more or less accused him of ageism.

She promoted hip-hop as an essential art form to the progressive movement more than anyone she shared air time with on the same cable news channel except Ari Melber.  And her defenses of hip-hop always had a smug and superior undertone to them, as if to suggest that any other form of popular music - say, classic rock - was just a bunc hof hackwork.

She also sounded smug and superior about just about anything else and made viewers feel inferior even when they agreed with her.

And then there was her voice.  You think Kamala Harris has an annoying voice?  This woman had a really annoying voice - the voice of a self-absorbed know-it-all.

So don't expect me to shed any tears over Joy Reid's departure from MSNBC - a channel I don't watch any more - and the cancellation of her show.  Yeah, I know she was canned for trash-talking Trump, but I'm still ticked off at her for for trash-talking Charlie Crist and Tim Ryan and just generally being annoying.

Do yourself a favor, people, listen to podcasts instead.  MeidasTouch is your best bet.

Must Stop Normalizing Bad Cable

I'm done with MSNBC.

After Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski revealed to the world that they had made a journey to visit Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, I stopped watching their morning program, but I continued to tune in to Nicolle Wallace and Lawrence O'Donnell for awhile, as they kept - and keep - continuing to call out Trump effectively.  I also continued to watch some of their weekend programs.  But after a week or two, I got tired of even that, and I started seeking out more alternative independent media on YouTube but kept recording MSNBC programs in case I wanted to go back to them.

I never did.  In that time I was still recording (but not watching) MSNBC shows, I started contemplating how Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had told viewers how Trump was a fascist and then tried to make nice with him,  how the prime-time hosts had conditioned viewers into expecting a Kamala Harris victory in November, how Lawrence O'Donnell had had Simon Rosenberg on repeatedly to mindlessly reassure us how Harris was winning - "I'd rather much be us than them" - how Michael Steele dismissed Bernie Sanders' call to get big money of of the Democratic Party as irrelevant, how David Frum was kicked off "Morning Joe" for his joke about Fox News, how the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network received contributions from the Harris campaign before conducting with Vice President Harris a softball interview that was less of an interview than a conversation, how MSNBC pundits who had been praising the Democrats for a great campaign the day before the election suddenly started excoriating the Democrats for a lousy campaign the day after the election, how Scarborough, after having said in the spring that President Biden was at the top of his game, then, after Biden's early-summer debate with Trump, decided that Biden was through . . . and then I remembered that Jen Psaki, President Biden's first White House press secretary,  turned on her former boss after the debate and joined the decades-long Washington parlor game of always writing off Biden when he was at his low points instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt after he blew his debate with Trump.  

That was it.  I not only deleted the backlog of MSNBC shows I'd already recorded, I canceled all future recordings.  It also became apparent that I was not so much getting news from the cable news channel as I was getting commentary that was accurate in pointing out Trump's failings as a human being but dead wrong in conveying the progress of the 2024 presidential campaign and what the voters were concerned about.  Though, I do recommend MSNBC as a new source if you want to get your mind off foreign events.  In 2024, there was barely a mention of the strains in the British economy that led to the Tories' defeat in the elections in the U.K., no coverage of the issues in France that didn't involve Notre Dame Cathedral, and nothing about the economic struggles in Germany.  I also have a feeling that part of the reason I was so surprised by the fall of Assad in Syria was because there hadn't been much talk about Syria on MSNBC.

I've since returned to watching BBC World News America, having sworn off American mainstream legacy media - even the PBS NewsHour, whose arts and culture stories always seem to be about hip-hop and whose Monday pundit panel of Amy Walter and Tamara Keith can't stop laughing and joking about everything - and I get my commentary from YouTube channels like The Bulwark and Status Coup News.  I can't believe anything that American mainstream legacy media says - least of all MSNBC, which had me and others anticipating a politician (a politician that many in the Democratic Party didn't actually like!) making history in becoming the first black female President, only to see Trump become the first former President since Grover Cleveland and the first Republican former President ever to be returned to office . . . and anticipating a California Jew (Douglas Emhoff) becoming the first male presidential spouse to move into the White House only to see the likelihood of another California Jew (Adam Schiff) moving into the big house.

MSNBC can't be spun off from Comcast and wither away soon enough.

MessNBC

Just when you thought the freefall of Joe Scarborough's and Mika Brzezinski's MSNBC morning show couldn't get worse, the couple got themselves in hotter water when they found themselves apologizing to a competitor news channel known for its friendly coverage of Donald Trump.

Conservative author David Frum joked that Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense and the weekend Fox News host with the spell-checker-unfriendly name, has been so drunk that he was too drunk even for Fox News' liking, which doesn't bode well for his fitness for leading the U.S. military.  A producer told Frum through an earpiece that his commentary was no longer necessary, and Mika Brzezinski apologized to Fox News for Frum's flippant remark.  

Since when does an MSNBC host feel a need to apologize to a rival network that's constantly ridiculing her own?  Uhh, when she knows that the incoming President will have your head if she dares let someone bash his favorite "news" channel?    

Frum, who's no dope, published a piece in The Atlantic suggesting that fear of retribution is driving editorial decisions at MSNBC these days, and he suggested that Brzezinski's apology was an extension of her and Scarborough's efforts to mend fences with Trump, which they did by going to Mar-a-Lago on November 15 to lick his boots out of fear.  Scarborough got upset, claiming that he and Brzezinski went to Mar-a-Lago to get a "read" of Trump as he prepares to return to power.

I think they got a read of how he would govern (or something like it) in a second nonconsecutive term by listening to him blather over the past four years. 

Neither Joe Scarborough nor Mika Brzezinski seem to be able to get the Mar-a-Lago debacle behind them, mainly because they can't admit that they did anything wrong.  Scarborough cited reporters from other news outlets - with Brzezinski coaching him by offering examples in a low-register voice, as if she were Nancy Reagan trying to give Ronald sotto voce coaching on what to tell the press - who spoke on background with Trump, but to this day neither he nor his wife have offered any transcript or videotape of them talking to Trump.  It wasn't a proper interview.  They went there to smooth his ruffled feathers, and now they're trying to stop anyone on their show from ruffling his feathers again by bashing his favorite news channel or his Cabinet selections.

And what about the fear factor that Frum pointed out?  "Let me tell you something," Scarborough said, "you can talk to anybody that's worked in the front office of NBC and MSNBC over the past 22 years tell you I'm not fearful. You talk to anybody who served with me in Congress, they will tell you - not fearful of leadership. Now? Not fearful." 

Paging Queen Gertrude.  Someone is protesting just a wee bit too much.

Anyway, I've given up on MSNBC largely because of these two.  Yes, there are some commentators on the channel who haven't given up on calling Trump to account, such as Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell, but as I said before, it's only a matter of time before either they get cancelled or MSNBC goes down swinging after it's spun off from Comcast as part of a separate company - something that would definitely not have happened if Kamala Harris had won the Presidency last month.  And the sooner Joe and Mika quit or get fired, the better it will be for everyone else involved.  They're dragging down the whole channel, what with other hosts furious with them and with ratings continuing to plummet like a stone.  Maddow is likely to come up with some groundbreaking reporting that exposes Trump as a bigger fraud than we already know he is, but who cares when MSNBC's ratings are so bad that her relatives are the only ones still watching her?

And after Michael Steele's ridiculing of Bernie Sanders on his (Steele's) own show for calling for the Democratic National Committee to root out corporate donors, I'm sort of glad I've found alternative political analysis on YouTube. 

MSNBC: It Was All a Scam

I think MSNBC has jumped the shark.

MSNBC is tanking in the ratings, like most so-called "legacy media" outlets, at the expense of news sources online, some of which barely qualify as sources of news or anything else of value.  But the defections from MSNBC are quite telling.  The fallout from Joe Scarborough's and Mika Brzezinski's November 15 pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to lick Trump's boots is just the tip of the iceberg.

In case you hadn't noticed, MSNBC had been squarely behind Joe Biden's re-election campaign right up to the afternoon of June 27, 2024, before the President stumbled, fumbled and just plain flopped in his debate with Donald Trump that night.  Eager to separate themselves from the train wreck that was Biden's debate performance, MSNBC commentators - including not only Joe Scarborough but also folks like Jen Psaki, who worked for Biden as his press secretary - pleaded with the the President to abandon his bid for another term, certain that he was going to lose.  This was quite different from political pundits like Jonathan Alter and Steve Schmidt (both of whom, in full disclosure, have appeared on MSNBC in the past), who had been saying long before June 27 that Biden should have stood down from a re-election bid much sooner and allowed a primary/caucus contest to determine his replacement.  You actually saw MSNBC hosts suddenly turn on Biden like a weather vane in a windstorm as if they had never had faith in Biden from the start.  

For the record, I had hoped Biden would decide not to run for re-election right after the 2022 midterms,  but when he went ahead, I trusted that he knew what he was doing - and I never believed that his facilities were rapidly failing and that he was being protected by a power-hungry coterie of advisers, as some pundits had suggested.  I was more disgusted at both pundits and top Democrats abandoning him without even giving him a chance to recover.  And many MSNBC commentators, in a first sign of something being rotten in Denmark, continuously obsessed over Biden's age without considering Trump's clearly obvious dementia.

And then came Kamala Harris.  I already mentioned in an earlier blog post last week how the reporting on the Harris campaign was propaganda, but I didn't know just how insidious the influence of Democratic insiders was until I started listening to podcasts with observations from people who know more about the inner workings of MSNBC than I do about how much in bed MSNBC bigwigs were with the Democratic National Committee and the consultant class that rips off Democratic candidates like Harris for telling them what they want to hear.  But maybe I should have figured it out myself; in spite of various danger warnings throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic consultant Simon Rosenberg constantly appeared on MSNBC programs, as well as on his own YouTube channel, repeating the same two meaningless mantras over and over - "I'd rather be us than them."  "We're winning, but we haven't won yet."    

If some consultant has to keep repeating the same canned lines, it's likely more wishful thinking than thoughtful analysis.

The positive, optimistic reporting and commentary from MSNBC was clearly erroneous.  There's nothing wrong with being wrong, but, just as Biden went from being an asset to a liability in the eyes of MSNBC personalities on a Thursday night in June, appraisals of the Harris campaign went from faint praise to damnation on a Wednesday morning as MSNBC commentators who had been applauding the Democrats for running a wonderful campaign were suddenly picking them apart for a cluelessly inept one.  It was like someone excoriating Mrs. O'Leary after the Chicago fire for keeping her cow and her oil lantern in the barn together after having told her before the fire that keeping a cow in proximity to an oil lantern was perfectly safe.  

The coverage of the whole campaign was all wrong.  Although MSNBC did a good job in covering Trump's multiple deficiencies as a candidate, as a politician, as a businessman, and as a human being, it failed to do what was necessary in any election - inform the voters on the issues.  Some MSNBC personalities rightfully decried the horse-race aspect of mainstream-media campaign coverage, but its own coverage was more about the stylistic differences between the two candidates than the pocketbook issues affecting the voters.   None of what the voters were concerned about showed up in what folks on MSNBC - especially guests who appear on numerous programs at different times - were talking about.  Voters not savvy about the issues wouldn't have been much enlightened about the issues, but they would have learned about girl dads and McDonald's photo ops.

And as if all of this weren't dizzying and head-spinning enough, we now learn that the Harris campaign donated $500,000 - in two separate transactions of $250,000 - to the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network nonprofit civil rights group ahead of a friendly interview that Reverend Sharpton conducted with Harris . . . which, by all accounts, would have been a friendly interview even without those donations.

And in case you're wondering why Reverend Sharpton would compromise his journalistic integrity in such a blatant matter, you forget one thing - he's not a journalist.  He's a minister and a civil rights activist.  But he's not a journalist.  He's a public figure who happens to have a show on a cable news channel.

Right, I have to stop watching MSNBC.  In fact, I already have.  Like so many others, I have tuned out as I have lost intertest in watching MSNBC for any genuine insight to the mess that is this post-election period.  I'm angry about how the channel's personalities helped push Biden out after having stood by him and I'm ticked off at how they gave Harris such favorable coverage only to turn on her once she lost.   I'm pissed at how their news coverage of the whole damn presidential campaign was in contrast to what was actually happening.  I can't be bothered with them anymore.

Time to go back to "BBC World News America."   

MSNBSeeYa!

When MSNBC launched in 1996, the last year a presidential-election day fell on my birthday before this year, comedians and conservative pundits laughed at the number of initials in its name, but the cable-news channel was named with a purpose.  The name was a portmanteau of the Microsoft Network (MSN) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) that symbolized how the channel was a joint venture between the two entities.  MSNBC has long since lost its connection to Microsoft; now it's about to lose its ties to NBC News.

Comcast announced that MSNBC, along with CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and the Golf Channel, will be launched into a separate company.  I was going to say that spinning off CNBC - which ostensibly stands for "Consumer News and Business Channel" - and MSNBC is like "The Jeffersons" being spun off "All In the Family," but that would be misleading, because at least those two sitcoms had Norman Lear in common as their creator.  And, they both aired on the same network.  This spinoff is nothing like that.  The new cable company will be completely divorced from NBC News, and therefore the reporting end of the channel will no longer be available to the commentariat end.  Comcast is keeping the parent NBC network and its news department.  Cable channels simply don't make money for media conglomerates anymore; streaming is the wave of the future.

I've been listening to numerous podcasts since the election, and there seems to be a sense of schadenfreude over MSNBC's sudden collapse in the ratings, and not just because of the Joe-and-Mika debacle.  The network built up this narrative that Donald Trump was a mere aberration from the ongoing evolution of American politics and that certain demographics - white women, Hispanic men, politically centrist suburbanites, anti-Trump Republicans (the only anti-Trump Republicans, it turns out, were MSNBC guests) - would hold Trump accountable in the 2024 election and that Kamala Harris would prevail.  I myself realized on the morning after the election that this was certainly not the case, and thanks to these podcasters and Comcast's business decision, I have to concede that what MSNBC reported was not reality but the network's interpretation of it - an interpretation as wrong as the parallel universe MAGA Republicans inhabit.   

MSNBC has largely fallen into disarray because it has relied primarily on getting access to the Washington Democratic establishment that saw things the way it wanted to, not as they actually were.  The information its on-air personalities have gotten from establishment Democrats turned out to be based on wishful thinking more than facts on the ground.  In the end, that access is all that mattered, and the alliance between MSNBC and the Democratic National Committee may very well have been the reason both were out of touch with what was going on on the ground with regard to the presidential election in places like, well, all seven swing states.

The conventional wisdom among liberal podcasters is that MSNBC has so long been the television arm of corporate centrist Democrats that those same Democrats, working in tandem with MSNBC's movers and shakers, sabotaged both of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns in order to directly help Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.  It's more complicated than that, and this theory dismisses President Biden's progressive accomplishments (building infrastructure, lowering the price of insulin, the CHIPS Act, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma) as well as his own alliance with Sanders.  Given how many MSNBC insiders have framed the trajectory of politics, though, it's easy to see how the channel's narrative favored the mainstream Democratic perspective of the issues and the 2024 presidential campaign, presenting on-camera hosts and guests that agreed with each other without getting the perspective of the average voter.

"We were so [into] Harris propaganda that when she lost, viewers were shocked," an anonymous on-air pundit told  The Daily Beast. "It turned into one giant circle j--k and echo chamber. If MSNBC wants to be of service to its viewers, they can’t keep them in fantasy land."

Now that Trump has won and we see MSNBC hosts bowing to him to stay relevant, it's hard to see how MSNBC itself can stay relevant.  Folks like Nicolle Wallace and Lawrence O'Donnell will continue to call Trump out for his lies and his cruelty, but how much good can they do when the channel will be completely untethered from NBC News and the channel's ratings are already in the toilet thanks to viewers realizing that the idea of President Harris was all a mirage?  MSNBC was pretty much the only network that called Trump out during the 2024 campaign while other networks were "sane-washing" Trump's craziness, but who cares when all that matters now is to tread lightly going forward when Trump is once again going to be in charge?  

MSNBC made lots of money for its parent company delivering hopeful commentary (reporting? No one watches cable news for actual reporting) in the fight for democracy and against Trumpism, but now MSNBC and other Big Media outlets have turned out to be like the Wizard of Oz - look behind the curtain, and you realize that there's nothing there.  Comcast is happy to let go of MSNBC and stop spending so much money for its diminishing returns.  When MSNBC - and CNBC, which is less about consumer news and more of a business channel - re-emerge as subsidiaries of a different company, they will most likely have different names, thanks to their divorce from NBC News.  But they will both likely share the same fate.

Oblivion.

And rather than wait for MSNBC's spinoff and inevitable demise, I might just stop watching it much sooner.  After trying to watch less news earlier in the year, I started watching more of MSNBC over the summer and early fall to keep up with the election campaign.  After months of being told that Trump was doomed and that black was white and up was down, I'm ready to declare myself over and out.  Time to go back to the BBC.

Morning Blow

Many political pundits had a 180-degree conversion after the presidential election - not so much toward Donald Trump but away from Kamala Harris.  Before the election, Harris was lauded for her joyful demeanor and her desire to reach out to anti-Trump Republicans, and her campaign received high marks for its positive message and ground game operations.  The day Harris conceded, these same pundits suddenly turned around and lambasted the Democrats for the campaign Harris had led and dissected everything she did wrong.  

Of course, there were warning signs that those of us who were applauding Harris should have seen right in front of our faces.  Elissa Slotkin warned that the Harris campaign was failing to reach out to more voters in Michigan and that the energy on the ground was negative.  Democrats in Pennsylvania complained that the Harris campaign was screwing up with the canvassers they were sending to key counties and cities - like sending Chinese-American canvassers to black neighborhoods.  (Aside: Supermodel icon Paulina Porizkova volunteered for the Harris campaign and canvassed for her in South Philly.  Right.  Send one of the most glamorous and sophisticated fashion models of the past fifty years to canvass in a blue-collar neighborhood dominated by stubborn, ill-mannered Italians.)  And then there was that Trump commercial his campaign ran during NFL games attributing his own policy to provide transsexual surgeries for prisoners to Kamala Harris, which the Harris campaign never refuted.

We were all fooled into expecting a Harris victory.  We failed to see the warning signs right before our eyes.  But on cable TV, many commentators acted like they had actually been expecting a Trump victory all along after actually having bashed Trump regularly, and nowhere was this more apparent than on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." There, host Joe Scarborough, a fierce Trump critic, and his guests, who included Chris Matthews and Donny Deutsch, were excoriating Democrats for giving blue-collar voters short shrift and acting snooty and smug.  And this attitude persisted for the next couple of weeks.

Then the other shoe dropped.  This past Monday, Scarborough and co-host/wife Mika Brzezinski revealed that they had had an audience with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago retreat over the weekend. 

Brzezinski told her and Scarborough's viewers that, in light of Trump's victory, it was necessary to re-open communications with the unscrupulous real estate tycoon, Brzezinski and Scarborough having had a cordial relationship with him before he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and having frequented Mar-a-Lago at the time they began their romantic relationship.

In other words, they were scared stiff of the looming Trump Mark Two administration and went to Mar-a-Lago to seek his mercy.  

Brzezinski said that even though she and Scarborough continue to have "deep concerns about . . . Trump's actions and words," about 76 million Americans did vote for him, so it's "time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him." She insisted that they had told Trump that they would continue to "push back hard" on him when the situation called for it.

"Don't be mistaken: We're not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump," Scarborough said. "We're here to report on him, and to hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times."

What's deeply unsettling is that Joe and Mika would go as far as to prostrate themselves before Trump and surrender their integrity.

Scarborough, whom Trump has falsely accused of being involved in a murder, and Brzezinski aren't so much covering Trump as they are covering their rear ends.  What's worse is that they know what they're doing here.  They have backgrounds as journalists that pre-date their MSNBC morning program.  Scarborough ran a local newspaper in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida when he represented it in the U.S. House; Brzezinski had been a reporter for CBS and was in Lower Manhattan on 9/11.  What they did here suggests what would have happened if Edward R. Murrow had been reporting from Paris instead of London during World War II and had sought a conciliatory meeting with Marshal Pétain.  The couple forfeited their obligation to speak truth to power so Trump wouldn't go after them.  This comes after Scarborough had ridiculed Trump for being a loser whose MAGA allies kept losing key elections each year from 2017 on.  It comes after Brzezinski stood up for the rights of women against the misogynistic Trump and reported on the strides of older women with her "Know Your Value" project.  It's a pity she doesn't know hers.

Conclusion:  Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had to choose between getting into trouble with Trump or dishonoring their profession.  They chose dishonor.  They will get trouble.

And you can count me among the many viewers they've lost.  So what?  Their program, at four hours, is too long, and the third hour is merely a repeat of the first.

Back to the News

Well, it seems I'm going once more into the breach.

Since my January 15 post, I started watching TV news more often, but still not as much as I used to.  I've begun watch the BBC's American newscast again - but not every weeknight, only sporadically, as the broadcast usually concerns itself with one or two stories at the expense of everything else - and while I watch Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC program, I don't watch it every night like I used to, and I'll watch Chris Hayes or Alex Wagner - or Rachel Maddow on Mondays - when I feel like it, and I don't always feel like it.  (And after watching "Deadline: White House" on MSNBC a few times, I've decided that I won't watch it again until Nicolle Wallace finally comes back.)  As always, though Jen Psaki on MSNBC and Ian Bremmer on PBS remain appointment television.  If I want to keep up with the headline news, though, I'll turn to AM news radio.

And - I've actually begun watching "Morning Joe" on MSNBC regularly - mostly for its entertainment value. 😄

What made me wade back into the news media pool?  Well, I have to have some knowledge of what's going on in the world.  Even if the press only does cover 20 percent of it.  

Meanwhile, David Soul, Charles Osgood, Glynis Johns, Melanie, Carl Weathers and Chita Rivera all died in January.  And I suspect that Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett on the PBS NewsHour could only be bothered to report only one or two of those obituaries. 😠  After all, none of these people were rappers.

MSDNC?

Donald Trump recently called MSNBC "MSDNC" as a way of suggesting that the cable news channel is merely an arm of the Democratic Party.  He may be right for once.

With the Israel-Hamas War continuing to rage in the Gaza Strip, Mehdi Hasan, a weekend MSNBC host of Indian descent and a Muslim, had been a extraordinarily vocal opponent of Israel's heavy-handed response to the Hamas attack on Israeli towns on October 7,  and he had grilled a leader of the Israeli Defense Force over the bombing deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza.  I'm using the past perfect tense for a reason; Mehdi Hasan was demoted from MSNBC.

Not canceled.  Demoted.  He still remains at MSNBC as an analyst and substitute host.  But the loss of his weekend program still sucks. 

Hasan spoke truth to power at a time when the Democratic foreign-policy establishment has a hard time absorbing the truth.  The Democratic Party is relentlessly pro-Israel and continued to put the onus on the Palestinians, continuing to blur the line between Palestinian civilians and Palestinian commandos - though, to be fair, Vice President Kamala Harris has sought to distinguish between the two in a postwar reconstruction plan for the Palestinian people that she recently outlined.  Hasan's fairness and toughness wih regard to the Israelis, though, was obviously too much for Democratic centrists, though many progressives - and reportedly, MSNBC staffers - are unhappy (to say the least) with Hasan's dismissal. 

This isn't the first time MSNBC has canceled a host for not towing the Democratic National Committee line.  Ed Schultz, you recall, was canceled in 2015 for speaking out so forcefully for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign at a time when the DNC was tipping the scales for Hillary Clinton to get the Democratic nomination and when many hosts and contributors were showering Hillary with praise, one contributor calling her the most qualified person to run for President since James Monroe two hundred years earlier.  Also, Phil Donahue's MSNBC show was canceled in 2003 in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq just as his dismal ratings were beginning to improve dramatically because of his opposition to the invasion.  Three of the four most recent Democratic presidential nominees, when they were in the Senate in 2002, voted to give Bush the authorization to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein.  Of those three, only Joe Biden became President. 

MSNBC is a clear liberal alternative to Fox News' red-meat Republicanism, and no, a Republican administration wouldn't handle the Israel-Hamas conflict any better.  In fact, a second Trump administration would let it or make it evolve into World War III, which is why it's important to stop Trump from regaining power.  But if the bosses at MSNBC, whose anchors promote the preservation of democratic values, want to avoid hypocrisy, they shouldn't acquiesce to Democratic (note capital letter) values and promote the Democratic party line on everything. Rather, it should promote more diverse points of view, but that obviously can't happen when someone like Mehdi Hasan gets canned for doing his job as a journalist - seeking the truth.

Cable News News

CNN executives would like to forget, as everyone else has, the existence of CNN+.  Ironically, CNN is now airing some of the flotsam and jetsam from that ill-fated streaming service.

CNN is airing Fareed Zakaria's interviews with famous people - Billy Joel and Francis Ford Coppola, to be precise - this Saturday, after they were originally aired on CNN+.  It's apparent that the Cable News Network is trying to salvage the debacle of its streaming channel by airing what was either aired or about to air on it on CNN itself. Whether these special programs will continue to be produced remains unknown, but in the meantime, let's see if they air Jake Tapper's CNN+ book reviews or Eva Longoria's "Searching For Mexico." (Heck, Eva Longoria is so hot, she could do a documentary series called "Searching for Kyrgyzstan" and I'd watch it!)   

Meanwhile, here's something I just found out that happened three months ago - Chris Jansing took over the 1 PM Eastern slot at MSNBC from Chuckles the Clown (also known as Chuck Todd) back in May.  I was unaware of that because I've pared my cable-news viewing down to John King's CNN program at 12 PM Eastern and Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC program at 10 PM Eastern.  (King and O'Donnell are both Boston boys!) This is still welcome news, because I love Chris Jansing and, as you can gather, I can't stand Chuckles the Clown.  Chuckles now hosts his "Meet The Press Daily" show on NBC News Now, NBC's free news-streaming service.  But if you watch Chuckles on NBC News Now, you'll agree that the service is way overpriced.

But the big news at MSNBC is . . . Alex Wagner has her own show again! 😃  It's on Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 PM Eastern, filling the void left by Rachel Maddow when she went weekly.  Starting tonight.

If It's Monday . . .

 . . . it's Rachel Maddow.

You may have noticed that Ravel Maddow's MSNBC show has gone from weeknights to Monday nights only.  (It's still on at 9 PM Eastern.) This is because Maddow has a new contract that allows her to work more on "special projects," including podcasts, that take up much more of her time an leaves less time for her program.

I don't see much of an upside for MSNBC, as Maddow has been one of they network's biggest draws.  In light ofthe tough competition from Fox News, she's probably their only big draw.  But then, fewer people seem to be watching able news anyway, and all three major cable news channels are going to have to produce a different definition for success.  Apparently, Maddow already has.

P.S.    I have been an avid watcher of Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC program at 10 PM Eastern, but I've had to take a break from watching it because all he's been talking about are guns.  I can get that from watching CNN.

Chuckles Is Banished

While Joy Reid's star is rising - as it turns out, as I noted in an appendage to my earlier comments on the subject, she's not giving up her weekend show to concentrate more on her weekday show - Chuck Todd's is falling.

Todd got himself in hot water with many NBC viewers when , as the moderator of "Meet The Press," when Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro was on the program and he claimed that Trump's power to issue executive orders to provide economic stimulus over the heard pf Congress was divinely ordained.  (What is he, a Mormon?)  Todd let Navarro's invocation of the Almighty go unchallenged.

Chuckles the Clown is still, alas, the moderator of "Meet The Press," where he continues to be an embarrassment. (Yet this past Sunday, he tried to grill Pete Buttigieg by suggesting that the Democrats offered no clear policy proposals or and agenda at the Democratic convention, though anyone with half a brain - that is, someone other thn Todd - should have been able to figure out the Democrats' agenda by listening to speakers like, well, Biden himself.)  However, in obvious self-absolution, MSNBC has moved Todd's sister cable program "Meet The Press Daily"  from 5 PM Eastern to 1 PM Eastern, when fewer people are watching cable news, and it's expanded Nicolle Wallace's 4 PM Eastern program, "Deadline: White House," to two hours.  I couldn't be more pleased, because while I obviously do not like Chuckles the Clown, Nicolle Wallace is quickly becoming my favorite ex-Republican White House aide.  She knows her stuff.  Chuckles obviously does not.  More power to her.

And I'm also glad to see Hallie Jackson back at 10 AM Eastern.    

Oh, Joy-Ann!

MSNBC just made it official: Joy-Ann Reid, usually referred to simply as Joy Reid, is taking over Chris Matthews' old weeknight time slot permanently.  Her new program, punningly named "The Reidout," premieres July 20.

I won't be watching of course, as I have had a problem with Reid ever since I heard that she questioned Florida politician Charlie Crist's integrity over his sexual orientation in a mocking matter on a blog and deflected blame for it to hackers, probably the most implausible explanation for incriminating prose since . . . since . . . well, memory of a similar incident fails me, but you can read what I said about it here.  I used to like Reid, as I said before, but her political-correctness spiel and her smugness wore thin over time, and now it's almost threadbare.

When the press noted that Reid was the first black woman to host a show on MSNBC, I was wondering, "Why this black woman?" - for the reasons above. If they wanted a black woman to helm the 7:00 PM Eastern slot, couldn't they have tried to steal away Abby Phillip from CNN?  (My mother wanted to see Ali Velshi get the time slot.)  But it is what it is, and if I watch cable news at all in that hour, CNN's Erin Burnett is my only recourse.   

As for Reid's two-hour weekend morning program, "AM Joy," that's being phased out in favor of her new weeknight gig, with no indication as to who will take over that two-hour time slot.  I vote for Steve Kornacki.  Maybe it's important for someone like Reid to look at the news from a perspective involving race and politics, but we need Steve to look at the news - especially politics - through his expertise with numbers.  (As for Ali Velshi, he has an earlier two-hour weekend time slot.)  As Trump and Biden try to pin down their bases and look for swing votes in what promises to be a tough presidential election campaign, and as COVID-19 will likely ravage the nation long after the last ballot is counted, we need a numbers guy like Kornacki, whom I would have preferred to see replaced Matthews on weeknights, to have a show of his own.  Maybe not for two whole hours, but we certainly need him.

As for the loss of Matthews back in March, I must admit I'm already missing his Winston Churchill references.  

Alexander the Great

Trump has already lied about the seriousness of the coronavirus, saying it was contained (it's never been contained), that it's not different from the flu (it's deadlier), that anyone who wants a test can get one (uh, no. they can't), and that it could be over by July or August (which no one knows, although the virus's ability to spread in hot, humid Singapore is not a good harbinger for the American Northeast in the summertime).

This past Friday, even as Trump saw improvement - yes, improvement - in his overall approval ratings and his approval rating for dealing with coronavirus, Trump told even more lies about the COVID-19 disease, in a press conference, such as how therapies and drug treatments such as hydroxychloroquine are  effective prophylactic measures against coronavirus.  Dr,Anthony Fauci - no longer present at Trump's daily briefings - made it clear that none of this was proven to be true.  Trump also said that you should get tested it you have the sniffles or a sneeze - even though the main symptoms of coronavirus are a dry cough, shortness of breath, and fever.   He did tell one truth - that anyone who doesn't have symptoms of COVID-19 shouldn't get a test.  But he had to say this because there simply aren't enough tests for everyone, as opposed to, say, South Korea, which has the virus under control.  (Trump had also said that the Food and Drug administration had also approved chloroquine for COVID-19 treatment.  In fact, it didn't.)

Having dealt with enough of Trump's blather, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander (above) asked Trump if it was "possible that your impulse to put a positive spin on things may be giving Americans a false sense of hope" by promoting drugs and therapies that may not be effective (and probably aren't).   Trump replied that he didn't think so, adding, "It may work, it may not work.  That’s all it is, it’s a feeling."   

Alexander then asked Trump if he could possibly communicate directly with to scared Americans.  "What do you say to Americans who are scared ,though? I guess, nearly 200 dead, 14,000 who are sick, millions, as you witnessed, who are scared right now. . .. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?"

No one - except those who know Trump inside and out - could have imagined Trump's response.

"I say that you’re a terrible reporter,” Trump said. “That’s what I say. I think that’s a very nasty question."

Dismissing Alexander and his association with NBC News and NBC's parent company Comcast - or "Concast," as Trump calls it - Trump added, "The American people are looking for answers and they're looking for hope, and you’re doing sensationalism," Trump said.  "Let's see if it works.  It might and it might not. I happen to feel good about it, but who knows, I've been right a lot. Let's see what happens."

What's happening is that hospitals are running low on supplies and efforts by politicians such as New York City mayor Bill de Blasio are banging their heads trying  to get the federal government to help them out.

NBC News defended Peter Alexander as a solid reporter who acted professionally.  Which he did.  We need more reporters like Peter Alexander to help us get through this.  

Taking His Hardball and Going Home

Last week, I wrote on this blog that it was time for MSNBC's Chris Matthews to retire after he compared Bernie Bros to the Wehrmacht.  This past Monday, he did just that.  I'm glad to see that Matthews discovered my blog and took my advice.

Okay, Matthews, whom I've always had a love-hate attitude toward, likely never even saw my blog, unless he Googled himself and went through all 170 million results.  But he did in fact retire, thanks not only to his Sanders gaffe but also for a bunch of comments he made to women.  This past Friday, he had to deal with a magazine GQ column from journalist Laura Bassett, who charged that Matthews complimented her appearance by rhetorically asking, "Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?"  At a cocktail party from a single man, that comment might have been appropriate.  But when the supposedly happily married Matthews made that comment to Bassett  just before a televised discussion with her about sexual-assault allegations against Trump . . . uh, yeah, that was more than a little awkward.  In fact, Bassett added for good measure that Matthews "has a pattern of making comments about women's appearances in demeaning ways."

For the record, Bassett is an attractive woman, but that's all I'll say about that.  I may have already said too much.

While all this was going on, Matthews mistook Jaime Harrison, a South Carolina Democrat running for the U.S. Senate there, with Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott, also of South Carolina. Both men are black.  Both of them are also bald, but any fool can tell them apart.  Black people do not all look alike, of course, and Matthews' mistake would have been understandable if this had been a Julie Wolfe-Esmé Marshall situation (two models who look so much alike that when I met Julie Wolfe, I began to tell her that she looked like Esmé Marshall only to have Ms. Wolfe finish my sentence for me), or even if it were a Dom DeLuise-Chef Paul Prudhomme situation.  It was nothing of the sort.

So, on Monday night, after opening his show "Hardball," Matthews - who does not look like Dom DeLuise or Chef Paul Prudhomme - announced his retirement on the air.  And while he finished his sentences - especially the one about how it was time for a new generation more in step with the times to take over at MSNBC and the one about how he was sorry for his demeaning comments about women (none of which involve Julie Wolfe or Esmé Marshall) - he did not finish the hour of his show.  After "Hardball" returned from its first commercial break, Steve Kornacki was sitting in Matthews' place looking as stunned as everyone watching at home must have been.  And so an era ends.  We'll have to wait for a new era to begin; a rotation of different hosts - including, I suspect, the insufferable Joy Reid - will fill in the 7 PM Eastern hour until a permanent host can be found.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. Maybe we should have known something was up when Matthews did not take part in MSNBC's coverage of the South Carolina primary this past Saturday, reducing the gaffe-machine squad to just Joe Biden (who urged people to support Jaime Harrison's presidential bid).

Sorry to see you go, Chris.  Well, not really, especially after that remark on Election Night 2012 about how you were glad we had Hurricane Sandy the week before because it brought about opportunities for good politics.

Hopefully, Joy Reid will follow Matthews out the door sooner or later, and maybe also Chuckles the Clown (also known as Chuck Todd).

The Fall of Chris Matthews

If Joe Biden is like a favorite uncle, then his fellow seventy-something Irish homey Chris Matthews comes across as a friendly uncle who isn't your favorite.  He proved that again on MSNBC this past Saturday night, and despite Matthews' penchant for saying stupid things over the years, this time he went too far.  Even farther than expressing gratitude for Hurricane Sandy occurring just before the 2012 election.

When it became obvious that Bernie Sanders was not only going to win the Nevada caucuses but win big - with at least 47 percent of the vote - Matthews expressed a fear that the Republicans would destroy Sanders with negative ads based on his record and past statements about socialism should he become the Democratic presidential nominee.   That was a legitimate observation, and Matthews should have stopped there, but he went on to say that it was "too late" for Biden or Bloomberg or anyone else to stop him and compared Sanders' Nevada victory over to Hitler's invasion of France.

"I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940," Matthews said, "and the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, 'It's over.' And Churchill says, 'How can that be? You've got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?' He said, 'It's over.'"

So, Matthews not only rendered the Sanders campaign as being morally equivalent to the Third Reich, he equated Sanders - who has relatives who perished in the Holocaust - to Hitler.

It seems that the part of Matthews' brain that was affected by the bout of malaria he got when he was in the Peace Corps has finally atrophied completely. While I would expect similar comments from Chuck Todd, who's never been the sharpest tack in the toolbox (and he made such a comment, referring to Sanders supporters as "brown-shirts"), Matthews, a learned political expert, should have known better.  

But then, maybe he shouldn't have.  Mathews likes to talk up his Philadelphia roots and his middle-class background as proof that he has his ear to the realities of politics, but in fact he's a Washington insider who's been in his bubble so long that he can't breathe when he steps out of it.  Oh yeah, one other thing I can't resist mentioning - Matthews was reporting live from Las Vegas during the Nevada caucus coverage on an outdoor set  when a sudden thundershower drenched him. He was all wet.  And not just literally.

Matthews, as an Irish Catholic, has made a reputation out of lamenting and being embarrassed by conservative politicians of Irish descent for their idiocy.  As a descendant of the Philadelphia Irish, I am embarrassed by and am lamenting Chris Matthews.  Yeah, he apologized, but he's done that so much it hardly means anything anymore.

Matthews is 74.  It's time for him to retire.  Too bad Chuck Todd, at 47, still has many years ahead of him.    

Working Man

A staunch conservative, a prairie progressive, a pro-détente RT America anchorman - Ed Schultz was all of these.

The former MSNBC commentator, who died at 64 of undisclosed causes a few days ago, shifted political positions but never wavered from his working-class base.  He appealed to liberals of all stripes as a progressive talk show host on MSNBC, but he aimed his commentary especially at the working class, and he focused on the labor movement at a time when most liberals would not (and still will not) address labor's concerns.  He always strove to relate to Joe Sixpack, originally as a right-leaning talk-radio host who bashed the elites and then becoming a liberal as he saw how supply-side economics was wreaking havoc on the economy and on the American worker.  He carried that spirit to MSNBC when he joined the network in 2009, and he valiantly kept it up for six years before MSNBC fired him.

MSNBC never really cared all that much about reaching working-class folks, though, and Schultz must have known that; toward the end of his run there, he was doing things to keep his job like defending Beyoncé's stage act ("Feminism is anything women want it to be") - hardly a concern to iron workers who listen to (as well as work with) heavy metal. Former MSNBC host Krystal Ball recently came right out and said that the cable channel dropped him because the working class he was catering to didn't fit its desired demographic.  Coincidentally, she also noted, he was let go right after Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy and went after the same people Schultz pursued.

"I find it really ironic that they took this incredibly pro-working-class voice off the air right before the Trump era when obviously you had a lot of working-class voters who didn't feel like they had a home in the Democratic Party any more," Ball said.  "To me, there was a correlation there between MSNBC not really understanding his audience and not really wanting to court his audience and moving him off the air and then what happened in the Trump era."  Schultz's dismissal from MSNBC turned out to represent another step by the Democratic Party and Democratic media toward Whiggish irrelevance.

Schultz ended his career under humiliating circumstances - as a news personality for RT America, the U.S. channel of Russia Today, a state-supported Russian network.  This led Schultz to downplay Russian influence in the 2016 election (Hillary Clinton, whom he once stood up for, wasn't entirely blameless for her loss, but Ed was convinced that Putin, a man he had once criticized and dismissed as a dictator, was completely blameless for it).  Here's how he analyzed the choice of former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Trump's first Secretary of State:

"Why is [Tillerson's] business relationships and successes with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the business world and in the energy industry, why is that a negative on Capitol Hill?  Isn’t that a positive thing that he knows Putin?"

Tillerson turned out to be an okay guy, but that's beside the point.  Schultz went from Putin critic to Putin cheerleader without skipping a beat.  Was it worth compromising his integrity to stay on something resembling the TV airwaves (RT America doesn't get much distribution on cable television, but it is available online)?       

Perhaps it was.  Schultz was the only person on TV speaking for American labor and the American worker in any capacity, what with Fox going for a conservative white-collar audience and MSNBC and CNN pursuing bourgeois liberal audiences who look down their noses at proletarian types.  I may have stopped listening to him when he belittled Martin O'Malley (and to this day I have no idea why he, of all people, had to be so nasty toward the former Maryland governor), and I may not have the type of job that requires me to take a shower after work (a common Schultz phrase), but I still agreed with virtually everything else he stood for.  I'm only sorry he met his end while shilling for the Kremlin.  RIP. :-(

MSNBC Switch

It suddenly occurred to MSNBC producers and schedule planners that calling Lawrence O'Donnell's show "The Last Word" and giving Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz additional words in the time slots that follow seemed kind of silly, so starting this week, Schultz and O'Donnell have switched time slots.  Lawrence O'Donnell has returned to the 10 PM Eastern slot he started out in, and Ed Schultz is now in the 8 PM Eastern time slot O'Donnell has vacated.  This allows Schultz, a populist with working-calls appeal, to be on for five weeknights a week, with the more polished, buttoned-down O'Donnell on for four weeknights a week, in recognition of the fact the MSNBC begins its laughable weekend documentaries Friday nights at 10 PM Eastern.

This makes sense for MSNBC's viewers, who will be more able to tune into Ed Schultz at an earlier hour.  And by putting him on earlier, MSNBC has acknowledged that his meat-and-potatoes-message rings strongly with a wider audience in this new Occupy Wall Street age.  And O'Donnell, whose commentary has gotten more passionate but has remained as polished as he is, is a strong closer for all of MSNBC's commentators.  But MSNBC's ongoing game of musical chairs with its hosts suggests that, while they're aware of what their mission is, they seem less sure on how to convey it . . . or on who should be conveying it.

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.