In a must read, The New York Times’ Bill Carter writes about MSNBC’s ratings woes as of late with a nice big picture of Chris Hayes at the top of the article. Oh boy…
At MSNBC they view it as rooting against death and destruction: the last thing the channel wants is more months like the last two, filled with terror bombings, tornadoes and plant accidents.
It’s not all altruism. The destruction MSNBC also wants to avoid is the havoc such news has been wreaking on its competitive standing.
Carter gets Phil Griffin on the record, which I argued yesterday was an absolute necessity at this point.
Mr. Griffin acknowledged that CNN, which has experienced ratings gains near 100 percent in the last two months, shines in periods of intense news interest. But, he said, this will pass.
“You do have to look at the long term,” Mr. Griffin said in May. “In the first quarter of this year, Fox News had its lowest quarter in a decade. A year ago CNN had its worst month ever. I tip my hat to what CNN has done this month, but let’s not be so myopic as to think the whole world has changed.”
And this…
Mr. Griffin acknowledged that with Jeff Zucker, the former NBC chief executive and an experienced news producer from the “Today” show, now leading CNN, the competition is going to increase.
“We have to be aware of it,” he said. “We’ll figure out how to deal with their aggression in our own way.”
The way will be consistent with the political brand — and that could be a risk
“People are just sick of politics,” said one former senior network news producer, who asked not to be identified because of current dealings with another news organization. Mr. Griffin agreed that “dysfunction in Washington” has been a factor in MSNBC’s recent struggles.
MSNBC’s viewers may have especially grown tired of politics because the news has been mostly negative recently toward President Obama, whom MSNBC’s hosts have championed. As another senior producer for news programs at multiple networks put it, “People will watch MSG when the Knicks are hot, and not watch when they aren’t.”
Carter stubs his toe here though…
Unlike CNN and Fox, MSNBC does not have a full roster of its own correspondents, still relying largely on reporters from NBC News like Chuck Todd and Pete Williams. It does not even have a White House correspondent.
So what else is new? For its entire history the network has relied chiefly on NBC correspondents and correspondents from its affiliate service to do its reporting. Nobody was credibly accusing MSNBC of not being a news network its first 10 years (some did but their arguments were lame and ideologically based).
The difference is now those correspondent appearances have dwindled down to next to nothing compared to five years ago. Excepting when there’s big breaking news you rarely see an NBC correspondent on the air unless it’s a political story. For day to day general news you don’t see them now.
In the mornings it used to be that whoever was doing live spots on Today would wind up doing a live hit on MSNBC as well. That’s gone. When was the last time you saw Kerry Sanders in the morning? I can’t remember.
The reports from NBC affiliate service reporters which the network used to rely on to bring news stories in from various parts of the country have dwindled down to a paltry trickle. There are days when there are exceptions but they are few and far between and usually reserved for special occasions like national holidays where people stake out airports to report how jammed up things are or big storms where people report on damage.
In their place MSNBC has substituted talking head POV analysis. And that’s why the network has picked up the “not a news network” label; not because it doesn’t have an in house staff of reporters but because it has severely cut back on news story count length where the stories take about fifteen seconds of B roll on the screen with an anchor voice over and there’s no desire for a satellite report.
In addition, MSNBC has killed off most of its dayside news hours and replaced them with POV hosts doing POV analysis. It’s tough to call MSNBC a news network when so many of its programs eschew general news and focus almost exclusively on politics unless its a big breaking story.
But that doesn’t stop Griffin from trying to spin this development to the best of his ability…
Mr. Griffin offered his own definition of the network: “We are a news and information channel that focuses on politics and what’s going on in the country.”
“To say ‘news channel’ in the modern age is irrelevant,” he added. “E is a news channel. The Weather Channel is a news channel. Politico is a newspaper. They all do news and information in a different way.”
Filed under: MSNBC
