MSNBC has finally figured out that giving the news anchor chair to two political commentators who have been in the tank for Barack Obama since January isn’t really a good idea:
MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.
That experiment appears to be over.
After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.
The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.
“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.
And, apparently, even some of the people at NBC are realizing that the cable networks’ political coverage, which hasn’t been the same since Tim Russert died, is harming the reputation of NBC News:
Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams, the past and present anchors of “NBC Nightly News,” have told friends and colleagues that they are finding it tougher and tougher to defend the cable arm of the news division, even while they anchored daytime hours of convention coverage on MSNBC and contributed commentary each evening.
Mr. Williams did not respond to a request for comment and Mr. Brokaw declined to comment. At a panel discussion in Denver, Mr. Brokaw acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews had “gone too far” at times, but emphasized they were “not the only voices” on MSNBC, according to The Washington Post.
Al Hunt, the executive Washington bureau chief of Bloomberg News, said that the entire news division was being singled out by Republicans because of the work of partisans like Mr. Olbermann. “To go and tar the whole news network and Brokaw and Mitchell is grossly unfair,” he said, referring to the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell.
Perhaps, but NBC News has nobody but itself to blame. Picking Keith Olbermann and Chris “Chill up my leg” Matthews as news anchors is about as unbiased as if Fox News had made Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity the anchors of their election news coverage instead of Brit Hume.
If this means less air time for Matthews and Olbermann, and more air time for guys like Chuck Todd, who comes closer to being the heir apparent to Tim Russert than anyone else at that network, then it will be a very good thing.
