Inflexibility

Remember just last week when Mitt Romney was ridiculed in the press last week for his anger over President Obama's remark to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, inadvertently caught on an open microphone, that he could be "flexible" over nuclear weapons after the U.S. elections because Russia isn't considered an enemy anymore? Not so fast, buster! Other Republicans - and outgoing Independent-Democratic senator Joe Lieberman - have sided with Romney.  They still consider Russia to be a highly suspicious power, what with the aid the Russians have given Iran and their support of Syria . . . and, you know, some of the former Soviet republics and former Warsaw Pact countries (including, ironically, Poland) still don't trust them. House Speaker John Boehner angrily demanded an explanation for President Obama upon the President's return from Korea for his remarks to Medvedev. Obama has insisted that he only meant that he could negotiate over nuclear arms in better faith once election-year politics were no longer complicating the issue, and of course the Republicans are not buying that explanation. They think he wants to sell out America.

Meanwhile, psychologists who make a living writing books that try to explain why inflexible people destroy themselves will have their hands full trying to explain Keith Olbermann. The clown prince of liberal punditry was just fired from Al Gore's Current TV channel, and not because no one was watching Olbermann's "Countdown" - because no one watches anything on Current TV. Olbermann was fired for breach of contract, along with - among other things - failing to show up for work refusing to help promote the network, and also having less of a say in which shows preceded or followed his own. Geez, even Charlie Sheen never complained about what came before or after "Two and a Half Men" on CBS.

Disagreements between Olbermann and Current TV over coverage of the Iowa caucuses pretty much set the events in motion that led to Olbermann's dismissal. His own inflexibility was not the result of politics, national or office, but his own self-righteous arrogance. It has also resulted in Olbermann re-entering the job market for only a year or so after his similar prima-donna antics at MSNBC got him fired from that network, but with much fewer prospects than before.

Eliot Spitzer, late of CNN - possibly the only cable channel with lower ratings than Current's - has replaced Olbermann.

This growing inflexibility among both politicians and the media figures who cover them is why we have an insufficient health care law, why we have an ideologically charged Supreme Court, and why that same Court is likely to overturn that same law in June.

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.

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.

Lean Backward

Keith Olbermann unexpectedly ended his association with MSNBC last night, ending his commentary show "Countdown" after a run of nearly eight years. No one, least of all Olbermann himself, is saying why his contract with MSNBC was terminated, and Comcast, which just acquired NBC/Universal and its cable networks, is denying its takeover had anything to do with it.

"Countdown" was MSNBC's most popular evening show, and cancelling it makes about as much sense as Volkswagen discontinuing the Jetta in the United States to improve U.S. sales. But then, maybe Olbermann, who had crossed the fine line between impudence and insubordination repeatedly in the past, decided he had to finish the show before it finished him. Not only does it leave his Fox News arch-nemesis Billo the Clown (also known as Bill O'Reilly) still standing despite Olbermann's jabs at him (they were on opposite each other), but it denies MSNBC a clown of its own. Olbermann was the only deliberately hilarious pundit MSNBC had. Rachel Maddow goes more for wit than for outright hilarity, and Chris Matthews is only unintentionally funny. (Hah!) And I don't expect O'Reilly will be losing sleep over the fact that his fellow Irishman Lawrence O'Donnell, whose journalistic style is more suitable for an article in The New Republic than for cable television, will be taking over the 8 PM Eastern Time slot with "The Last Word."

Seems we forced MSNBC to put him back on the air during his last suspension for nothing, eh?

Olbermann's departure shows just how difficult it is to get a consistent progressive voice on American broadcasting in an age when commercial television and radio is under the ownership of non-progressive business conglomerates and public television and radio is "made possible by" the same. Rush Limbaugh debuted on nationally syndicated radio in 1988; the liberal network Air America has come and gone in that time. Limbaugh's only been joined by Hannity, Beck, and other successful reactionary talk radio hosts since he went national (and the nation went gaga). Billo the Clown will likely remain on Fox - with a growing audience - long after a new show to replace Olbermann's (if such a show is ever created) is itself canceled.

Liberal media activist groups advocate working for media reform. I advocate getting a life. Because if you work for media reform, you're as likely to enjoy success against the right as Lawrence O'Donnell is against Bill O'Reilly.

MSNBC, which only recently appeared to achieve some sense of stability and consistency, is in free fall once again. No wonder that cable news channel mostly shows sensationalist documentaries on the weekends. At least we can count on them being there.

Welcome Back, Welcome Back, Welcome Back

He's a buffoon, he got himself in trouble, he got kicked off television, but now he's back.

But enough about Conan O'Brien. :-D Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's resident jokester, is also coming back tonight. I'm pleased to report that his suspension from the cable news channel has been been cut short by popular demand. Viewers have spoken, and they've made it clear that they do not want Olbermann taken off the air for donating $7200 to three Democratic congressional candidates.

Besides, Keith should be commended for distributing his money equally - $2400 for each candidate.

By the way, in New Jersey, the amount of money Olbermann donated to political campaigns is exactly how much money you need to have earned in a year to qualify for unemployment insurance. If Olbermann can afford to give that much money to politicians like Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva, folks who make it their life's work to insure that people have jobs secure and well-paying enough that they don't have to worry about qualifying for unemployment benefits, more power to him.

Keith Olbermann returns to the MSNBC airwaves tonight. He's already apologized to his fans for the "drama" this episode caused, and he's likely to have more to say about it on "Countdown" this evening.

Yeah, we tease him a lot, 'cause we got him on the spot. But welcome back, Keith, we always could spot a friend. :-)

Olbermann Overload

Yesterday I reported courtesy of boldprogressives.org that Rachel Maddow brought up the issue of her partner Keith Olbermann and his suspension from MSNBC for making campaign donations. What boldprogressives.org didn't tell us, though, is what Maddow actually said. In a story where Olbermann is drawing a lot of support for his principled actions, Maddow was, how shall we say, more admonitory. She pointed out that Fox News is notorious for donating money to politicians as Olbermann had done but that Fox News has different rules than MSNBC. Fox, she said, is a political outlet, while MSNBC is a news outlet with different standards and thus has different rules.

If so, that doesn't make Olbermann's infraction all that serious. All he did is what he does in his commentary on "Countdown" - support liberal causes. At the crux of the onion ring in this issue, though, is MSNBC's identity. However much the network positions itself as a liberal alternative to Fox, they also try to adhere to standards of impartial journalism. They have to. They share resources and on-air talent with its sibling broadcast news organization, NBC's obviously nonpartisan news department. And msnbc.com, a separate company altogether, wants to maintain an impartial bent as well. That MSNBC could go ahead with a politically liberal ad campaign and yet try to maintain a sense of impartiality makes a lot of people at the cable news operation uncomfortable. But then, as MSNBC has more viewers and initials in its name than CNN has, it's a problem CNN would gladly take on. (Anyone watching "Parker/Spitzer?" Anyone?)

The one thing that hurts Olbermann in all this is that he rails against Fox News's owner Rupert Murdoch doing what he himself just did, giving money to politicians. But $7200 in campaign donations from a private citizen working for the press compared to the millions given by someone who owns the damn press seems to be an unfair comparison. Some have said that MSNBC can only be hurt by all of this incoherent brand positioning and the fact that its most highly rated on-air talent has been benched. Actually, I think it could help them, because this is all generating controversy, and controversy is what drives ratings and interest. As the Rolling Stones proved forty-five years ago, any press - even bad press - is good press.

I hope Keith comes back on. Because, quite frankly, I don't want to watch "Parker/Spitzer."

Tears Of a Clown

Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's resident clown, committed an infraction that proved to be no laughing matter. When it was discovered that he contributed money to two Democratic House candidates in Arizona and the (alas, failed) Senate campaign of Jack Conway in Kentucky - $2400 each, for a total of $7200 - MSNBC suspended him indefinitely for doing so. Although the channel's two most visible conservative commentators, former congressman Joe Scarborough and veteran political operative Pat Buchanan, have contributed money to Republican candidates, Olbermann's apparent crime is that he donated the money without prior permission from his bosses. As he gave the money about five days before Election Day, it seems he couldn't wait that long.

Needless to say, MSNBC's viewers - yes, there are some! - see this punitive action as the equivalent of swatting a mosquito with a baseball bat, and they are demanding that Olbermann be re-instated on his show "Countdown" immediately. A petition being circulated by BoldProgressives.org, having been signed by 200,000 people (including me, in full disclosure) received coverage from the New York Times, and Rachel Maddow declared on her show that MSNBC was feeling the public's outrage.

This is a positive sign for those who appreciate Olbermann's passionate and incisive commentary and all of those who believe that such punishment hardly fits something that barely constitutes a crime. Who do you think would Olbermann, as a private citizen, have given money to? It's not as if he ever pretended to be a nonpartisan reporter. He's a commentator, for Pete's sake! Why does he need "permission" to help candidates he believes in?

If MSNBC president Phil Griffin doesn't bring Keith Olbermann back soon, than he's the worst . . . person . . . in the world!