Thank you Rebecca Dana.
I just read your year-and-a-half old article about MSNBC and its President, Phil Griffin. Material like this doesn\’t always age well. But not only is this highly entertaining today, it is far more entertaining now than when you wrote it.
Why would I say this? These two paragraphs, from the middle of the article, provide the answer – especially the last part, which I have put in bold print:
“Philis the perfect distillation of the television mentality,” says oneformer MSNBC employee, “which is: whatever the audience wants.”And, actually, no one at the network knows much about his politics;he\’s probably a Democrat, but it\’s just not something he caresmuch about or discusses with ease. “[Fox News President] RogerAiles is a lifelong TV guy,” says Chris Hayes, MSNBC\’s new 8 p.m.anchor, “but he\’s also a political consigliere. Phil is not.Whatever his politics are, they are not woven into the DNA of whatwe\’re doing.” Put another way: Fox News is a TV network thatsucceeds because of its ideological slant. MSNBC is a TV network thathas an ideological slant because that\’s what happened to succeed.
AndMSNBC is more successful now than it has ever been. At the end ofthis presidential election, it drew an average of 1.5 million viewersto its weekday prime time lineup. (The numbers have fallen since.)Fox still gets more than two million a night, but Griffin,optimistically, believes he can beat Fox by 2014. It\’s a cockinessthat has funneled down. In a recent staff meeting, one of Griffin\’sproducers coined a new term for Fox News: “Loserville.”
I would say you can\’t make this stuff up…
… but claiming that no one knew Phil Griffin\’s politics, that his politics are not woven into the DNA of what MSNBC is doing, and my all-time favorite, “MSNBC is a TV network that has an ideological slant because that\’s what happened to succeed”, means I can\’t. Because if that isn\’t making stuff up, what is?
For the record, here are the latest (3rd quarter 2014) ratings for each cable news network:
Fox: Total: 1,777,000, 25-54\’s: 309,000
CNN: Total: 553,000, 25:54\’s: 185,000
MSNBC: Total: 552,000, 25-54\’s: 143,000
Whoops. That doesn\’t look like an MSNBC win to me. It looks more like Fox still predominates vastly over MSNBC. It also looks like CNN, which had been way below MSNBC, has now pulled even in total, and well past it in the coveted 25 – 54 demo.
And what about Chris Hayes, whose insights are featured in the above excerpt? His ratings at 8:00PM, the start of prime time, are killing the shows which follow – especially Rachel Maddow\’s 9:00PM show, which is now generating a fraction of the audience it used to.
As of this past Thursday, Hayes had a virtually nonexistent 75,000 viewers aged 25-54, compared to 167,000 for CNN\’s Anderson Cooper and 335,000 for Fox\’s Bill O\’Reilly.
One other thing, Chris: if MSNBC\’s ideological slant is only there because it is successful, and Fox, which has the opposite slant, is enjoying multiple times the success of MSNBC, wouldn\’t it logically follow that Phil Griffin and the MSNBC lineup be replaced with political conservatives?
If your analysis is correct, Chris, that should happen any day now.
Personally, I predict the announcement will come about three days after hamas and hezbollah make a joint announcement that they have renounced Islam, become members of the Lubavitcher sect of orthodox Judaism, and are moving all their operations from Judea, Samaria and Gaza and Lebanon to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
