The Anti-Fox Gains Ground

[frigidmagi]

NYTimes

On Tuesday night, with a minute to go until the polls closed in the battleground state of Virginia, the MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews received word through their earpieces that the state was too close to call, according to the election analysts at MSNBC’s parent, NBC News.

“I think that’s pretty significant,” Mr. Matthews said, optimistically, as a commercial break wrapped up. Virginia, a state that had voted to elect a Democratic presidential candidate only once in 40 years — Barack Obama in 2008 — was not leaning toward Mitt Romney as some Republicans had predicted it would.

Inside the NBC “Sunday Night Football” studio that MSNBC was borrowing for the night, the stage manager loudly called out, “Here we go.” Ms. Maddow softly repeated, “Here we go,” and reported the news to three million viewers.

When President Obama won Virginia and most of the other battleground states on Tuesday night, ensuring himself a second term as president, some at MSNBC felt as if they had won as well.

During Mr. Obama’s first term, MSNBC underwent a metamorphosis from a CNN also-ran to the anti-Fox, and handily beat CNN in the ratings along the way. Now that it is known, at least to those who cannot get enough politics, as the nation’s liberal television network, the challenge in the next four years will be to capitalize on that identity.

MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC.

But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.

“We’re closer to Fox than we’ve ever been,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, who has been trying to overtake Fox for years. “All of this is great for 2013, 2014 to keep building.”

In some ways MSNBC, which until 2005 was partly owned by Microsoft, is where Fox was a decade ago — in the early stages of profiting from its popularity. The channel receives a per-subscriber fee of 30 cents a month from cable operators; CNN receives twice that, and Fox News at least three times as much.

“When Microsoft was involved with MSNBC, it was viewed as kind of lacking in direction; I don’t think the channel had much leverage raising rates,” said Derek Baine, a senior analyst for SNL Kagan. “Maybe they will have some more leverage on this postelection.”

If Fox sees itself as the voice of the opposition to the president, MSNBC sees itself as the voice of Mr. Obama’s America. Its story resembles that of so many other cable channels. It hit on a winning strategy (antiwar liberalism led by Keith Olbermann at 8 p.m.), added similar shows (like Ms. Maddow’s at 9 p.m., which became the channel’s tent pole when Mr. Olbermann left in 2011) and then sold its audience as something more: a community of passionate, like-minded people.

Many progressives (and conservatives) now view the channel as a megaphone for liberal politicians, ideas and attacks against those who disagree. Such a megaphone — clearly marked, always on — has never existed before on television.

It has all happened rather suddenly. During the presidential election in 2008, Ms. Maddow was so new that she was still getting lost in the labyrinth of Rockefeller Center. And MSNBC was so timid about applying a political point of view that it paired an NBC News anchor, David Gregory, with the outspoken Mr. Olbermann on election night. The awkward pairing symbolized the split in American journalism between those who embodied a political point of view and those who said they did not.

Tensions between MSNBC and NBC News, which sit on opposite sides of that divide, have faded somewhat since 2008. They have stayed in their own lanes, save for a few reporters — Chuck Todd, Andrea Mitchell, Willie Geist — who have successfully crossed back and forth.

On election night, MSNBC had no trace of timidity left; Ms. Maddow led the coverage, surrounded by four other liberal hosts (Mr. Matthews, Al Sharpton, Lawrence O’Donnell and Ed Schultz) and one moderate conservative commentator (Steve Schmidt). The channel leaned heavily on non-NBC reporters, including several from the liberal magazine The Nation.

Over on NBC, Mr. Gregory joined the anchor Brian Williams. Viewers preferred NBC, which attracted an audience of 12 million viewers, far more than MSNBC’s 4.6 million. But they both benefit the same parent company, Comcast, which gained control of NBCUniversal in 2011.

Fears among some MSNBC viewers that Comcast would water down the channel’s liberal streak have not come to pass. Of MSNBC, former President Bill Clinton remarked last winter, “Boy, it really has become our version of Fox.”

Two studies this fall, one by Pew and another by European election observers, concluded that MSNBC’s coverage of Mitt Romney was even more critical than Fox’s coverage of Mr. Obama. Any comparison of the two channels is colored by charges of false equivalencies — “I think that we are more information-based,” Ms. Maddow has said — and reminders that Fox is far more popular.

But MSNBC is becoming like Fox in at least one respect: in the length of time viewers tune in. MSNBC, citing Nielsen data, said the most loyal subset of its audience watched for 139 minutes a day, on average, versus 145 minutes a day for hard-core viewers of Fox News.

What Fox has — and MSNBC does not — is widespread recognition. “Our awareness level, people who can define who we are, is much lower than Fox and CNN,” Mr. Griffin said, blaming years of “branding confusion” before the channel adopted its liberal point of view. Elections should help to change that situation, along with advertising, appearances on other networks (Ms. Maddow was on “The Colbert Report” on Thursday) and additional hours of liberal programming.

In the last two years, MSNBC has added Mr. Sharpton’s show at 6 p.m. and four round-table talk shows, two on weekday afternoons and two on weekend mornings. Mr. Griffin said he wanted to add more political programming on the weekends, replacing hours of prison documentaries that earn solid ratings but muddy the channel’s identity.

Several MSNBC employees, who spoke about programming plans on the condition of anonymity, said the most likely candidate for a new show was the Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein, a frequent substitute for Ms. Maddow. Mr. Klein may start with a weekend time slot, but these people said the 8 p.m. weekday time slot held by Mr. Schultz was also a possibility.

Mr. Griffin, meanwhile, declined to comment on whether the performance of his prime-time lineup would provide a boost to the channel’s subscriber fees. Some of MSNBC’s biggest carriage deals do not come up for renewal for several years, so it will have to wait to profit fully from its recent ratings gains.

By then, the channel will almost certainly argue to cable operators that it has something else in common with Fox News: must-carry status.

[Comrade Tortoise]

(like Ms. Maddow’s at 9 p.m., which became the channel’s tent pole when Mr. Olbermann left in 2011)

That is DOCTOR MADDOW to YOU, BITCHES!

No seriously. She has a PhD from Oxford. Get it right.

Such a megaphone — clearly marked, always on — has never existed before on television.

It is true. It is a liberal megaphone. However, they dont pretend to be anything different. They let you know up front "this is a channel that does political analysis from a progressive bent. We are not even mouthpieces for the democratic party, we are more liberal than them". This is admirable. The fact that said analysis is backed up someone with a PhD in Political Science from one of the best universities in the world is something else that is admirable, because the big Fox anchors are mostly dropouts--either from highschool or college.

I dont have an ideology per se. I act like a socialist, but I am not one. My premises are different, the policies just converge to a large extent. Maximize human happiness and preserve other beings of moral worth while not trampling too much on individual autonomy. I dont give a shit about class warfare--save for the effect it has on human happiness. I dont care about corporate profits. I care about what the means they use to obtain those profits happen to be. Google for example. I have few problems with google even though it is revoltingly well off.

There are of course some social issues that are rage buttons for me...

The point being, when it comes to economic or monetary policy, my guiding principle is "what works?". MSNBC might be a progressive mouthpiece, but that is OK if the progressive policy agenda is one that is supported by a reality which exists external to ideology. It does not matter whether you are a liberal or a conservative. The GINI coefficient has the same effect on crime-mortality-demographic-crime feedback loops.

So, while information mixups happen, I have rarely known NBC anchors or analysts to knowingly lie. When Maddow fucks something up, she does not retract it in a blog post somewhere on the internet, she starts off her show with a public retraction. She is awesome for it.