By BRIAN STELTER
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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.
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.
The success of the Fox News Channel in the past decade along with
the growth of political blogs have convinced many media companies that
provocative commentary attracts viewers and lures Web browsers more
than straight news delivered dispassionately.
“In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great
philosophical debate,” Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said in a
telephone interview Saturday. Fighting the ratings game, he added, “the
bottom line is that we’re experiencing incredible success.”
But as the past two weeks have shown, that success has a downside. When the vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin lamented media bias during her speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.”
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.”
The employee, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because
the network does not permit it people to speak to the media without
authorization. (The New York Times and NBC News have a content-sharing
arrangement exclusively for political coverage.)
Mr. Olbermann, a 49-year-old former sportscaster, has become the
face of the more aggressive MSNBC, and the lightning rod for much of
the criticism. His program “Countdown,” now a liberal institution, was
created by Mr. Olbermann in 2003 but it found its voice in his gnawing
dissent regarding the Bush administration, often in the form of
“special comment” segments.
As Mr. Olbermann raised his voice, his ratings rose as well, and he
now reaches more than one million viewers a night, a higher television
rating than any other show in the troubled 12-year history of the
network. As a result, his identity largely defines MSNBC. “They have
banked the entirety of the network on Keith Olbermann,” one employee
said.
In January, Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews, the host of “Hardball,”
began co-anchoring primary night coverage, drawing an audience that
enjoyed the pair’s “SportsCenter”-style show. While some critics argued
that the assignment was akin to having the Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly
anchor on election night — something that has never happened — MSNBC
insisted that Mr. Olbermann knew the difference between news and
commentary.
But in the past two weeks, that line has been blurred. On the final
night of the Republican convention, after MSNBC televised the party’s
video “tribute to the victims of 9/11,” including graphic footage of
the World Trade Center attacks, Mr. Olbermann abruptly took off his
journalistic hat.
“I’m sorry, it’s necessary to say this,” he began. After saying that
the video had exploited the memories of the dead, he directly
apologized to viewers who were offended. Then, sounding like a network
executive, he said it was “probably not appropriate to be shown.”
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Olbermann said that moment — and the
perception that he is “not utterly neutral” — restarted months-old
conversations about his role on political nights.
“I found it ironic and instructive that I could have easily said
exactly what I did say, exactly when I did say it, if I had been
wearing a different hat, and nobody would have taken any issue,” he
said.
“Countdown” will still be shown before the three fall debates and a
second edition will be shown sometime afterwards, following the program
anchored by Mr. Gregory.
The change casts new doubt on what some staff members believe is an
effective programming strategy: prime-time talk of a liberal sort. A
like-minded talk show will now follow “Countdown” at 9 p.m.: “The
Rachel Maddow Show,” hosted by the liberal radio host, begins Monday.
Mr. Griffin, MSNBC’s president, denies that it has an ideology. “I
think ideology means we think one way, and we don’t,” he said. Rather
than label MSNBC’s prime time as left-leaning, he says it has passion
and point of view.
But MSNBC is the cable arm of NBC News, the dispassionate news
division of NBC Universal. MSNBC, “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” share
some staff members, workspace and content. And some critics are
claiming they also share a political affiliation.
The McCain campaign has filed letters of complaint to the news
division about its coverage and openly tied MSNBC to it. Tension
between the network and the campaign hit an apex the day Mr. McCain
announced Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. MSNBC had reported
Friday morning that Ms. Palin’s plane was enroute to the announcement
and she was likely the pick. But McCain campaign officials warned the
network off, with one official going so far as to say that all of the
candidates on the short list were on their way — which MSNBC then
reported.
“The fact that it was reported in real time was very embarrassing,”
said a senior MSNBC official. “We were told, ‘No, it’s not Sarah Palin
and you don’t know who it is.’ ”
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.
Some tensions have spilled out on-screen. On the first night in
Denver, as the fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough talked about the
resurgence of the McCain campaign, Mr. Olbermann dismissed it by
saying: “Jesus, Joe, why don’t you get a shovel?”
The following night, Mr. Olbermann and his co-anchor for convention
coverage, Mr. Matthews, had their own squabble after Mr. Olbermann
observed that Mr. Matthews had talked too long.
Some staff members said the tension led to the network’s decision to
keep Mr. Olbermann in New York for the Republican convention, after he
ran the desk in Denver during the Democratic convention. MSNBC said
that he stayed in New York to anchor coverage of Hurricane Gustav.
But some workers say there were other reasons — namely, that Mr.
Olbermann was concerned about his safety in St. Paul, given the loud
crowds at MSNBC’s set in Denver.
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.”
According to three staff members, Jeff Zucker,
chief executive of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, president of NBC
News, considered flying to the Republican convention in Minnesota last
week to address the lingering tensions.
Up to now, the company’s public support for MSNBC’s strategy has
been enthusiastic. At an anniversary party for Mr. Olbermann in April,
Mr. Zucker called “Countdown” “one of the signature brands of the
entire company.”
Just last year, Mr. Olbermann signed a four-year, $4-million-a-year
contract with MSNBC. NBC is close to supplementing that contract with
Mr. Olbermann, extending his deal through 2013 — and ensuring that he
will be on MSNBC through the next election.
