Breaking news before the lib media, Drudge had this story posted before it was available on the New York Times site.
"MSNBC Takes Incendiary Hosts From Anchor Seat"
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.
"Perceived shift to the political left"?
I think "perceived" should be replaced with "obvious."
Like other mainstream media outlets, MSNBC already leaned to the Left. Lately, the channel went off the deep Left end.
“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.
Executives at the channel’s parent company, NBC Universal, had high hopes for MSNBC’s coverage of the political conventions. Instead, the coverage frequently descended into on-air squabbles between the anchors, embarrassing some workers at NBC’s news division, and quite possibly alienating viewers. Although MSNBC nearly doubled its total audience compared with the 2004 conventions, its competitive position did not improve, as it remained in last place among the broadcast and cable news networks. In prime time, the channel averaged 2.2 million viewers during the Democratic convention and 1.7 million viewers during the Republican convention.
...When the vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin lamented media bias during her speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.”
That was a glorious moment when the delegates chanted "NBC."
I'm sure that had to bother the NBC execs. Talk about a wake-up call!
In Cedarburg on September 5, where John McCain and Sarah Palin held their first rally following the convention, the crowd was openly hostile to the press, loudly booing the busses carrying the members of the media.
After what they did to Sarah and her family, and how they belittled conservative women like Sarah, I think people were fed up. They were no longer going to be silent. They were mad as hell and letting the press know that they weren't going to take it anymore.
In interviews, 10 current and former staff members said that long-simmering tensions between MSNBC and NBC reached a boiling point during the conventions. “MSNBC is behaving like a heroin addict,” one senior staff member observed. “They’re living from fix to fix and swearing they’ll go into rehab the next week.”
MSNBC needs more than a stint in rehab.
The NBC News division has to shut down the MSNBC drug house.
...NBC Universal executives are also known to be concerned about the perception that MSNBC’s partisan tilt in prime time is bleeding into the rest of the programming day. On a recent Friday afternoon, a graphic labeled “Breaking News” asked: “How many houses does Palin add to the Republican ticket?” Mr. Griffin called the graphic “an embarrassment.”
Here's the screen grab of that embarrassment:
Disgusting!
While I applaud MSNBC's move to oust Olbermann and Matthews, I don't consider their replacement, David Gregory, to be a fair and balanced journalist.
As biased and Left-leaning as he is, Gregory is an improvement.
Having hacks like Olbermann and Matthews anchoring hard news was a terrible idea, not a "bold experiment."
On Friday, September 5, Matthews was on The Tonight Show, campaigning for Barack Obama again and dissing the Republicans.
Matthews lectured the audience:
Everybody in this room and everybody in this country has got a test coming up in two months. We gotta decide who we think is gonna lead this country into the 21st century and we only get one shot at this. And we better get it right. We better not do it on the basis of stupidity or prejudice or fear. We ought to pick the smartest person we can find to run this country because it's high stakes stuff.
Matthews has delivered similar speeches on The Tonight Show. In an appearance on the show in July, Matthews couldn't have been more biased.
Matthews declared:
[Obama] has seen us as the world sees us. I just think it's inspiring. I admit it, OK? You can call it what you want. I was inspired by it and I said so at the time. And I took some heat for it, but I'd rather be honest and say what I feel than sit there like some kind of statue and say, 'Oh, that was noteworthy.'
You know, I mean, I'm a frickin' American. I do have a reaction to things. I do react emotionally to my country. I care about this country. I want to look out for it. It's my job. I'm not just some umpire. I take a side -- us. That's who I'm rooting for.
It was ridiculous to put Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews in the anchor chairs for election coverage.
When Olbermann trashed Republicans during their convention for a video about 9/11 and Islamic terrorism, he was doing hard news coverage.
After the video, Olbermann said:
I'm sorry, it's necessary to say this and I wanted to separate myself from the others on the air about this. If at this late date, any television network had of its own accord showed that much videotape, and that much graphic videotape of 9/11, and I speak as somebody who lost a few friends there, it, we, would be rightly eviscerated at all quarters, perhaps by the Republican Party itself, for exploiting the memories of the dead and perhaps even for trying to evoke that pain again. If you reacted to that videotape the way I did, I apologize. It is a subject of great pain for many of us still and was probably not appropriate to be shown. We'll continue in a moment.
That was so out of line.
There is no question that it was the right decision to remove Olbermann and Matthews from their roles as anchors.
However, I think it's too little too late. It will be a long, long time before MSNBC and NBC will be able to undo the damage done to their credibility by these extremely partisan "journalists."
I think the news division is a joke.
The problem goes beyond Olbermann and Matthews.
When John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate on August 29, NBC cut into regular network programming to carry the breaking news.
Brian Williams told viewers that McCain had selected the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his VP. He said something to the effect that she has been governor for just two "short years," commenting on her experience.
There are big problems at NBC, and they run deep.
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