{"id":264,"date":"2009-11-16T03:12:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-16T11:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=264"},"modified":"2009-11-16T03:12:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-16T11:12:00","slug":"is-msnbc-the-faux-noise-of-the-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2009\/11\/16\/is-msnbc-the-faux-noise-of-the-left\/","title":{"rendered":"Is MSNBC the Faux Noise of the Left?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The right wing, especially the GOP Reichsministry of Propaganda, aka Faux Noise<\/em>, claims that MSNBC, not them are the politically motivated TV Station.  The New York Times published an interesting article this morning on MSNBC shows that take a progressive stance.<\/p>\n

\"rachel-maddow\"<\/a> If President Obama happened to glance at \u201cThe Rachel Maddow Show\u201d last Monday, he might have winced.<\/span>
Ms. Maddow pretended to celebrate the passage of a health care overhaul bill in the House, calling it \u201cpotentially a huge generational win for the Democratic Party\u201d \u2014 but then halted the triumphant music and called it an \u201celectoral defeat.\u201d <\/span>
The Stupak amendment, she said, was \u201cthe biggest restriction on abortion rights in a generation.\u201d Then she wondered aloud about the consequences for Democrats \u201cif they don\u2019t get women or anybody who\u2019s pro-choice to ever vote for them again.\u201d She returned to the subject the next four evenings in a row.<\/span>
This is how it looks to have a television network pressuring President Obama from the left<\/strong>.<\/span>
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 \u201cthe distance between Obama\u2019s rhetoric and his actions.\u201d <\/span>
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<\/strong>.<\/span>
\u201cI don\u2019t think our audience is looking for unequivocal \u2018rah-rah,\u2019 \u201d said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat. <\/span>
The spectacle of Democrats sniping at one another is not new, but having a TV home for it is. MSNBC \u2014 sometimes critically called the \u201chome team\u201d for supporters of Mr. Obama \u2014 has even hit upon the theme with a promotional tagline, \u201cpushing back on the president,\u201d in commercials for \u201cHardball,\u201d Chris Matthews\u2019s political hour. <\/span>
\u201cOur job is not to echo the president\u2019s talking points,\u201d said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. \u201cOur job is to hold whoever\u2019s in power\u2019s feet to the fire.\u201d <\/span>
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\u2019s 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.<\/span>
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\u2019s prime-time opinion shows, \u201cyou\u2019re reaching a lot of people,\u201d he said.<\/span>
\"keith_olbermann\"<\/a> It is certainly reaching the White House. Anita Dunn, the departing White House communications director, calls Mr. Olbermann and Ms. Maddow \u201cprogressive but not partisan,\u201d and in doing so, distinguishes them from Fox News, which she considers a political opponent.<\/strong> The MSNBC hosts, she said in an e-mail message last month, \u201coften take issues with the administration\u2019s positions or tactics and are never shy about letting their viewers know when they disagree.\u201d <\/span>
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.<\/span>
Mr. Griffin said, \u201cWe heard a whole lot more from the Bush White House.\u201d <\/span>
MSNBC\u2019s 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. <\/span>
\u201cThere\u2019s been a huge market void for a long time,\u201d Mr. Green said. Speaking of the MSNBC hosts, he said, \u201cThey are creating an environment where progressive thinkers and activists can thrive.\u201d <\/span>
Ms. Maddow, not surprisingly, agrees. \u201cWhat looks like the middle of the country ought to look like the middle on TV<\/strong>,\u201d she said in an interview this month. <\/span>
She paused and added, \u201cMaybe that would have helped us make better policy decisions in the country in the past.\u201d <\/span>
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. \u201cYou\u2019re doing great work,\u201d he said while she signed her name. <\/span>
MSNBC\u2019s political tilt \u2014 and Ms. Maddow\u2019s ascension to one of the most influential positions in progressive America \u2014 are still starkly new phenomena. A Rhodes scholar<\/strong> with liberal radio roots, Ms. Maddow started to host MSNBC\u2019s 9 p.m. hour on the eve of last year\u2019s 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. <\/span>
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\u2019s 6 p.m. host, formerly of Air America, have all exhorted Democrats to keep the public option. <\/span>
\"ED-SCHULTZ\"<\/a> Mr. Schultz started a broadcast last month by asking, \u201cWhere is the president? I think it\u2019s time to be clear \u2014 crystal clear. What does Barack Obama want when it comes to health care in this country? What does he want in the bill?\u201d <\/span>
Topics often tackled on Ms. Maddow\u2019s program include the relationship between the United States military and politics (something she is writing a book about) and the repeal of the \u201cDon\u2019t ask, don\u2019t tell\u201d policy toward gays in the military.<\/span>
Representatives for two gay members of the military, Dan Choi and Victor Fehrenbach, approached Ms. Maddow\u2019s 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 \u201cin the shadow of these political promises left unfulfilled.\u201d <\/span>
Asked why she thought the two men had contacted her producers, Ms. Maddow said, \u201cMaybe it\u2019s because I\u2019m gay; maybe it\u2019s because we\u2019ve covered this issue before on our air.\u201d <\/span>
Other MSNBC hosts have also objected to some of the president\u2019s policy decisions. In April, Mr. Olbermann, the channel\u2019s best-known voice, urged Mr. Obama to hold members of the Bush administration accountable for what he called the \u201ctorture of prisoners.\u201d <\/span>
\u201cProsecute, Mr. President,\u201d he said. \u201cEven if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn.\u201d <\/span>
Ms. Maddow, however, contrasts her channel\u2019s advocacy with the activism conducted, she says, by others on cable news. \u201cWe\u2019re articulating liberal viewpoints,\u201d she said at dinner, \u201cbut we\u2019re not saying \u2018Call your congressman, show up at this rally!\u2019 \u201d<\/span><\/strong>… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <NY Times<\/a>>
Almost every morning I listen to Joe Scarborough interviewing Pat Buchannan on MSNBC.  Chris Matthews, host of Hardball, is more of a neoliberal than a leftist.  Daytime has hard news without a political slant.  So MSNBC has commentators from across the political spectrum, unlike Faux Noise <\/em>that presents only one point of view, that of the extreme rabid right.
What has the GOP\u2019s panties in a bunch is that before Olbermann, the right had an MSM exclusive.  Even taking Maddow, Olbermann and Schultz into account, the MSM is still skewed to the right.  Watching CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC, I saw far more talking heads supporting  Stupak-Pitts and opposing a court trial for KSM than I did taking the opposite view.  So to answer my own question, MSNBC is not the Faux Noise<\/em> of the left, because they are more fair and balanced than Faux<\/em> ever dreamed of being.  I\u2019m thankful that in the ocean of right wing media, we have Maddow, Obama and Schultz, a breath of fresh air at last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The right wing, especially the GOP Reichsministry of Propaganda, aka Faux Noise, claims that MSNBC, not them are the politically motivated TV Station.  The New York Times published an interesting article this morning on MSNBC shows that take a progressive stance. If President Obama happened to glance at \u201cThe Rachel Maddow Show\u201d last Monday, he […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}