(Updated) "Why Cenk Uygur Left MSNBC" (with video)

UPDATE: Paul Waldman (American Prospect):

"While who hosts which show on cable news is probably of only marginal import to you, something just happened at MSNBC that is actually interesting. Cenk Uygur, who had been hosting the network's 6 pm slot on a trial basis for the last few months, got shown the door, and Al Sharpton will be taking over." MORE...

TheYoungTurks, with video (11:55):

Cenk Uygur (host of The Young Turks) explains why he turned down a new, significantly larger MSNBC contract after hosting a prime-time show on the network that was beating CNN in the key demo ratings.

Howie P.S.: CURRENT TV, does this give you food for thought?

About Keith

Booman:

In short, Olbermann just got Dan Rathered by GE. Scared of losing influence with the Republicans in Congress, GE Executives cravenly did what they do best: protect their bottom line. Suspending Olbermann had nothing to do with drawing "a distinction between the journalistic standards of their news division and the standards of Fox." GE's own record of political contributions makes that very clear. MORE...

Ben Smith:

It's hard to see the Olbermann suspension as entirely different from the Juan Williams firing: An excuse to go after a guy who has legendarily difficult relations with management.

Sargent notes that Joe Scarborough gave some money to a House Republican in 2006 and that Pat Buchanan gives to candidates; Chris Hayes, Olbermann's substitute, has given the occasional political money. MORE...

"The Two Underlying Reasons Keith Olbermann Was Suspended Today" (Steve Krakauer):

Two years ago Keith Olbermann was MSNBC. In many ways, he was untouchable, and knew it. In a New Yorker profile in June 2008, he joked that his boss, Phil Griffin, “thinks he’s my boss.” Around the same time, a high level MSNBC source told me, “He is not central to MSNBC, he is the center of the MSNBC ratings strategy. We hang the entire schedule on him.”

But that’s changed. Now, Rachel Maddow is getting better ratings than Olbermann in the key A25-54 demographic, and Lawrence O’Donnell isn’t far behind. Olbermann is no longer the center of the strategy either – as the network has unveiled a vibrant, massive new campaign “Lean Forward” which focuses on half a dozen members of the MSNBC talent pool.

MSNBC executives – and executives even higher up the ladder – have to feel secure in their position in the cable news battle, even if Olbermann never returns to the line-up. Which brings us to reason number two: Comcast. The imminent merger and ultimate takeover is a tricky business maneuver, that both GE and Comcast have to be aware of. It has the attention of the government, and it has the attention of the competition. The company doesn’t need bad press right now – especially not one that’s political in nature. It also doesn’t help when Olbermann has previously tweeted things like Comcast wanting “to go more liberal” (a claim that doesn’t seem to be backed up anywhere). And on top of all that, this comes as NBC News appears to want to distance themselves from their more partisan cable channel.

Indeed, MSNBC management is striking at two birds with one stone here: Olbermann and, in the contrast, Fox, whose hosts Sean Hannity and Neil Cavuto, not to mention Huckabee, have given to political candidates, as Media Matters was quick to circulate.

The suspension does seem to cut hard, though, against the source of MSNBC's success, its unabashed liberalism in prime time. MORE...

MSNBC: "Is losing good for business?"

Keach Hagey (Politico):

Harris Diamond, the chief executive of the Constituency Management Group of the Interpublic Group of Companies, which does branding among other communications work, said MSNBC’s new tagline made business sense.

“At the end of the day, what we’re seeing with MSNBC is a sort of doubling down on the business level,” he said. “In today’s world, if you look at the three majors, it’s pretty clear that Fox has been really successful in the folks who lean right. MSNBC wants to double down on the folks who lean left.”

The question, from a business perspective, is whether there are enough of liberal viewers to make it worthwhile for the parent company for MSNBC to go the more partisan route.

Paul Levinson, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, believes that’s unlikely for the time being, even with the help of having Republicans in control of the House.

“It’s important to bear in mind that Fox has been successful during most of the Bush administration when it wasn’t in the opposition, as well as in the Obama administration, when it was in the opposition,” he said. “What happened is that CNN is much less successful than it was eight or nine years ago. For whatever reason, nowadays, conservative, anti-Obama viewpoints are much more successful on radio and television than progressive points of view.”

But he added that the Republican takeover of the House creates “a whole new ballgame” in which “anything is possible regarding the media.” MORE...

NY Times--NO FAUX: "MSNBC Presses Obama on Campaign Promises"

UPDATE: John Avarosis points out that MSNBC operates much differently than FAUX:

The very fact that Rachel calls her show "liberal" is far more than FOX has ever admitted about its network being conservative. That's the difference - Rachel and Keith are honest and up front about where they're coming from. FOX is not.

But it's far more than that.

1. Rachel and Keith don't routinely lie.
2. They're not bat-shit crazy.
3. Rachel's and Keith's liberal views are not echoed in MSNBC's news coverage. On FOX, the "news" hosts push the same conservative talking points as the "opinion" hosts.
4. MSNBC doesn't just have three hours of liberal programming in the evening. The NYT fails to tells its readers that MSNBC also has three hours of conservative programming in the morning, with former arch-Republican congressman Joe Scarborough. Kind of relevant, since it means that MSNBC splits its partisan programming 50-50. FOX has no liberal hosts, period, and when they did have one, for one hour (Alan Colmes), he had to share his show with an outspoken conservative who wouldn't shut up.

NY Times:

If President Obama happened to glance at “The Rachel Maddow Show” last Monday, he might have winced.

Ms. Maddow pretended to celebrate the passage of a health care overhaul bill in the House, calling it “potentially a huge generational win for the Democratic Party” — but then halted the triumphant music and called it an “electoral defeat.”

The Stupak amendment, she said, was “the biggest restriction on abortion rights in a generation.” Then she wondered aloud about the consequences for Democrats “if they don’t get women or anybody who’s pro-choice to ever vote for them again.” She returned to the subject the next four evenings in a row.

This is how it looks to have a television network pressuring President Obama from the left.

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

The spectacle of Democrats sniping at one another is not new, but having a TV home for it is. MSNBC — sometimes critically called the “home team” for supporters of Mr. Obama — has even hit upon the theme with a promotional tagline, “pushing back on the president,” in commercials for “Hardball,” Chris Matthews’s political hour.

“Our job is not to echo the president’s talking points,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. “Our job is to hold whoever’s in power’s feet to the fire.”

But is it good business? MSNBC is projected to take in $365 million in revenue this year, roughly the same amount as last year, when the presidential election bolstered its bottom line. Three years ago, before making a left turn, it had revenue of about $270 million a year. MSNBC’s parent company, NBC Universal, is on the verge of being spun out of General Electric in a deal that would make Comcast its controlling entity.

Gary Carr, the executive director of national broadcast for the media buying agency TargetCast, said the opinions matter less than the ratings they earn. With cable’s prime-time opinion shows, “you’re reaching a lot of people,” he said.

It is certainly reaching the White House. Anita Dunn, the departing White House communications director, calls Mr. Olbermann and Ms. Maddow “progressive but not partisan,” and in doing so, distinguishes them from Fox News, which she considers a political opponent. The MSNBC hosts, she said in an e-mail message last month, “often take issues with the administration’s positions or tactics and are never shy about letting their viewers know when they disagree.”

Ms. Maddow said that apart from an off-the-record meeting between Mr. Obama and commentators that she attended last month, she has heard little from the White House.

Mr. Griffin said, “We heard a whole lot more from the Bush White House.”

MSNBC’s liberal points of view have made the channel an occasional thorn in the side of G.E., but the channel has also fostered a diversity of opinions that people like Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, say were lacking in the past.

“There’s been a huge market void for a long time,” Mr. Green said. Speaking of the MSNBC hosts, he said, “They are creating an environment where progressive thinkers and activists can thrive.”

Ms. Maddow, not surprisingly, agrees. “What looks like the middle of the country ought to look like the middle on TV,” she said in an interview this month.

She paused and added, “Maybe that would have helped us make better policy decisions in the country in the past.”

Sitting down to a midnight dinner in the East Village after her program on a recent Thursday, Ms. Maddow had shed her suit for a T-shirt. Four minutes in, a fan asked for an autograph. “You’re doing great work,” he said while she signed her name.

MSNBC’s political tilt — and Ms. Maddow’s ascension to one of the most influential positions in progressive America — are still starkly new phenomena. A Rhodes scholar with liberal radio roots, Ms. Maddow started to host MSNBC’s 9 p.m. hour on the eve of last year’s presidential election, at a time when MSNBC was wrestling with its political identity. New viewers materialized overnight, peaking at nearly two million a night in October 2008. Without an election to drive viewership, her program averaged 880,000 viewers last month.

As her objections to the Stupak amendment (so named for Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan) indicate, much of her work these days involves the Democratic health care overhaul. Ms. Maddow, Mr. Olbermann and Ed Schultz, the channel’s 6 p.m. host, formerly of Air America, have all exhorted Democrats to keep the public option.

Mr. Schultz started a broadcast last month by asking, “Where is the president? I think it’s time to be clear — crystal clear. What does Barack Obama want when it comes to health care in this country? What does he want in the bill?”

Topics often tackled on Ms. Maddow’s program include the relationship between the United States military and politics (something she is writing a book about) and the repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gays in the military.

Representatives for two gay members of the military, Dan Choi and Victor Fehrenbach, approached Ms. Maddow’s producers about coming out on her show, in March and May respectively. Introducing Mr. Fehrenbach, Ms. Maddow intoned that he was about to be fired “in the shadow of these political promises left unfulfilled.”

Asked why she thought the two men had contacted her producers, Ms. Maddow said, “Maybe it’s because I’m gay; maybe it’s because we’ve covered this issue before on our air.”

Other MSNBC hosts have also objected to some of the president’s policy decisions. In April, Mr. Olbermann, the channel’s best-known voice, urged Mr. Obama to hold members of the Bush administration accountable for what he called the “torture of prisoners.”

“Prosecute, Mr. President,” he said. “Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn.”

Ms. Maddow, however, contrasts her channel’s advocacy with the activism conducted, she says, by others on cable news. “We’re articulating liberal viewpoints,” she said at dinner, “but we’re not saying ‘Call your congressman, show up at this rally!’ ”

On her show, she has criticized Fox News for seeming to promote tea party rallies denouncing the administration this year, and the Fox host Glenn Beck, who has promoted a “9/12 Project,” intended, he says, to restore the values that Americans sensed immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I don’t have a constituency,” she said. “I’m not trying to form a — what would it be? — a ‘9/10’ movement.”

Howie P.S.: I guess MSNBC really doesn't want to be the lefty's FAUX; it says so in The New York Times. The article is wrong about one thing though: Ed Schultz has never been part of Air America and if you listen to his show today, I'll bet you ten bucks he says so.

MSNBC: "we now have a progressive flow”

Rory O'Connor:

“I’m a liberal — and I’m not running from that word!” exclaims Ed Schultz, the latest lefty star in the cable television news-and-opinion firmament. Schultz, America’s top-rated progressive radio talk show host, has just finished his first month as host of the eponymous “Ed Show” on MSNBC, which is attempting to duplicate its earlier success in crossing over progressive radio talk show host Rachel Maddow.

Despite the startling success of Maddow and the recent addition of Schultz to an increasingly liberal lineup that also includes MSNBC’s first breakout star Keith Olbermann, getting anyone other than on-air talent like Schultz and Maddow to admit the obvious — that the rising cable net is in the process of re-branding itself as the left-winged equivalent of right-leaning industry leader Fox News – can be difficult. For example, when asked if the decision to hire Schultz was part of a conscious strategy to “move left, MSNBC President Phil Griffin chooses his words carefully.

“The answer is complicated…but simple at same time,” Griffin responds. “The network has evolved a lot in the past few years. We went from doing a little bit of everything to doing lots of politics under Keith from 2003-05. We first began to get traction after the Iraq war started, after ‘Mission Accomplished.’ Then, more and more, politics led the way. When we did well with it in the 2006 elections, we made a decision to become ‘the place for politics,’ as the late Tim Russert dubbed us – and all of a sudden began to take off a little.”

Griffin says that both Olbermann and fellow MSNBC stalwart Chris Mathews “both had a strong point of view about the war — but our strategy then was simply to hire smart people, allow them to have a point of view, and to be authentic. At the same time, we moved even further toward politics and away from trying to be ‘all things to all people.’”

Yes but … Fox News covers politics as well, albeit with a clearly conservative slant. Doesn’t the hiring of Schultz – and Maddow before him — signal that MSNBC is positioning itself as the progressive alternative?

“Well, Rachel did so well as a guest analyst — and was so smart, like Keith – that we asked her to fill in when he went on vacation,” Griffin recalls. “And she held his numbers, which is something that other talent we had on-air at the time, like Dan Abrams, didn’t do. So that made the decision to give Rachel her own show after the conventions really easy … September 8, 2008, was her first day, and almost immediately it was obvious to us that Keith’s audience loved Rachel … so we had flow. But it was more organic than a conscious strategy to go left,” Griffin concludes. “A vision of smart progressives just began to emerge … “

Whether it’s the result of an organic vision or a conscious strategy, however, adding a proudly progressive “populist figure” like Schultz to its lineup means that MSNBC is now providing the largest toehold progressives have ever had on television. Even Griffin admits the cable net now has a “progressive flow,” although he quickly adds, “That’s a little different than saying we consciously chose such a strategy.”

Taking a swipe at Fox, he points out, “We have no daily talking points; we also have [the more conservative-oriented] ‘Morning Joe’ program — so it’s clear we have no political ‘line,’ if you will — but sure, we now have a progressive flow.”

“Hey, I’m encouraged to have and state my opinions,” says Ed Schultz. “I think what we’re doing here is best described as ‘independent/progressive.’ I’m very proud to state that I‘m a liberal – but the independent part means we don’t run from the facts, either.”

Schultz also believes that his sizeable radio audience will, over time, follow him to television. “The cross-promotion is terrific, we’re expanding the brand, my website traffic has already doubled,” he notes. “But let’s face it — not everyone in the country knows Ed Schultz, so it will take some time to develop this. We look at this as a marathon, not a sprint.”

Still, both Schultz and Maddow have already driven MSNBC’s all-important ratings numbers up in the highly competitive cable news environment. In its first full month “The Ed Show” — although trailing both Fox and CNN in the time period — increased MSNBC’s rating by 9% in total viewers from the prior month and a full 15% from a year ago. And although much was made of the fact that Maddow’s show recently drew its smallest audience since she joined MSNBC – some 763,000 total viewers — she still regularly beats longtime CNN star Larry King. True, Maddow’s ratings have cooled since her meteoric rise during last fall’s political frenzy, but her overall ratings last month were still doubling those MSNBC saw a year earlier, when Dan Abrams averaged just 527,000 total viewers in the same time slot.

Does that mean the network’s strategy… er, “vision” to move left is succeeding?

“How do you measure if we’re succeeding?” Griffin asks rhetorically. “Well, ratings are a good start! We’re beating CNN; and we’re also doing great with the high end demographic groups, such as young people aged 18-34.”

Griffin perceives a “media revolution that’s now happening, and we fit right into it. Our audience is web-centric, involved, highly informed, and looking for opinion and analysis.” As a result of serving this new audience, he says, “our ratings are up from a year ago – as well as from 3 months ago — and we did well quite recently with the dueling Obama and Cheney speeches … Meanwhile, CNN has no vision or strategy to speak of. It’s a new world media order here — and we embrace it, we fit right into it.”

Still, the Fox News Channel recently ranked fourth overall in primetime cable ratings, averaging 1.89 million total viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. Fox News, which had regularly been placing second behind USA, has now ranked in the top five cable networks for 20 straight weeks, and its cable news competitors still trail by a wide margin — MSNBC placed 24th in primetime with an average of 747,000 total viewers, while CNN placed 28th with an average of 651,000 total viewers Facing such figures, even Griffin acknowledges that FNC still looms as the 800 pound gorilla in the cable news and opinion space.

“Look, Fox created something unique,” he allows. “It’s an Outsider’s Club for people who felt voiceless. And I tip my hat to Glenn Beck for coming in and just killing right away, as did Rachel. But Ed will need more time and more traditional development than Rachel. It will be a slower build, and we’re still trying to figure it out.

“What happened with Rachel was very unusual,” recalls Griffin. “She was golden, an unbelievable success, in part because there clearly was another audience that felt underserved — left, webcentric, young — and instantly committed to her. They were voiceless, and now there is a voice. She really embodies our strategy of ‘personality, smarts, and politics,’ and that’s a combination will win for us.”

Schultz agrees. “I’m proud to be on this network,” he says. “And sure, there has to be a synergy in your programming, whether you’re on television or radio. If you’re a rock station, don’t play country! If you do talk, don’t play music… That’s just common sense. So we’ll be progressive by remaining true to the issues, and independent by not running from the facts. That means we won’t be in lockstep with liberals, and we’ll certainly criticize Obama where it’s warranted. Viewers don’t want you to walk the fence — they do want a point of view — and that’s what we bring. So be true to the facts — but take a stand!”

Despite the gains going left has won for MSNBC, however, Schultz’ boss maintains he still won’t rush into anything wont rush the transition. “The biggest mistake this network made in past was rushing in, and thinking any good idea would work,” says Griffin. ” We had lots of good talent in the past — but what we needed was a sensibility.”

Now that Schultz has been added to the lineup at 6 pm, Griffin’s most immediate concern is what else to do in primetime, where the valuable ten o’clock slot following Maddow’s program is now devoted to re-runs of Olbermann’s earlier 8 pm cablecast. Can the MSNBC honcho offer any “vision” of what will “flow” out of Maddow?

“Is it necessary that the flow out of Rachel be progressive?” Griffin ponders. “I have a little different perspective. Honestly, don’t know if it will be a progressive — Rachel really came out of nowhere, and I don’t necessarily think her follow-up host has to be limited to that pure sensibility. Clearly it should be someone who is both smart and funny like she is… But I will make one promise: we’re not done yet! This is such a vibrant time in media, and I want to say to Rachel’s audience – and everywhere I go I get stopped, there’s such a connection between her and her audience, she’s helped open a new world of approaches for us — that people who like Rachel will like our new 10 o’clock show host and what we are going to do there. No, I take that back,” he concludes. “Rachel’s audience will LOVE IT! I promise.”