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.

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.