What’s Wrong with MSNBC: The Mainstream Drift of Cable’s Failed Progressive Experiment
Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty
On the night of the New York primaries, not long after interrupting Donald Trump’s victory speech to announce the network’s projection in the Democratic contest, disgraced former Nightly News anchor and now MSNBC paterfamilias Brian Williams slipped, perhaps inadvertently, into the idiom of regret. Though it was his penchant for embellishment, his unquenchable thirst for approval, that landed Williams in hot water in the first place, his strained sense of humor has only blossomed since his transition to the cable news channel, particularly during the long, slack stretches of election night—as if the excesses of the current campaign were simply another cameo on 30 Rock, another late-night yarn to spin.
That Williams, of all people, should allude to the sense of disappointment that follows when the music finally stops is almost too fitting, for he is the folksy, avuncular figurehead of MSNBC’s abandonment of the left-leaning experiment that began with Keith Olbermann’s Countdown in 2003. “There’s that expression,” he told the panel, referring to Hillary Clinton’s insurgent challenger, Bernie Sanders: ”’Staying too long at the fair.’”
More than a year after anemic ratings first compelled the network to reconsider its progressive complexion, MSNBC is no longer the liberal counterweight to FOX News. In fact, with the exception of the primetime bloc of Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell, which increasingly resembles a vestigial tail of its recent evolution, the network is scarcely distinguishable from CNN—and that’s the central problem. Gone are The Ed Show, with its uncommon focus on organized labor; The Reid Report, with its sustained coverage of race, racism, and police brutality; and Melissa Harris-Perry, the incisiveness and inclusiveness of which so thoroughly eclipsed the Sunday morning shows that its namesake’s abrupt departure from the network, in February, became a minor political firestorm of its own.
(MSNBC announced last week that Joy Reid will take over Harris-Perry’s weekend-morning timeslot as of May 7, though few details about the format of the program have been made public.)
Even in its least impeachable firing, of the defiantly uncharismatic Ronan Farrow, MSNBC relinquished an hour that often drew attention to LGBT issues more controversial, and to some more pressing, than equal marriage. Left in their wake: A shifting ensemble of forgettable daytime anchors, a trio of analysts (Chuck Todd and Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin and John Heilemann), and Chris Matthews, a desiccated foghorn of vanishingly little political acumen and even less tact. If you listen hard enough during the sturdy, foreign affairs-centric hour she hosts in the middle of this maelstrom, you can almost hear Andrea Mitchell scream.
Audiences are culpable in these changes, of course: Had MSNBC’s progressive slant been a ratings smash, the liberal brio that continues to mark All In with Chris Hayes and The Rachel Maddow Show would have remained the house style. Nor is coverage of their ideological tenor prima facie more astute or informative than the alternatives. But in the course of a campaign that has tested the mettle of the major broadcast outlets, and ultimately found each wanting, it’s worth asking what the transformation of MSNBC—which once covered stories its 24-hour brethren would have never deigned to touch—means for the future of TV news.
Of the most recent presidential election, in 2012, I remember most forcefully not Clint Eastwood’s empty chair or Barack Obama’s poor performance in the first debate, but Maddow’s post-mortem, which acknowledged the cocktail-hour glow of the Democratic triumph in order to cast the events of that year in appropriate perspective. Her A-block that night, extending more than 16 minutes, was Maddow, and the old MSNBC, par excellence—progressive, certainly, but fastidious about the facts, annotating the consequences of political posturing as a professor might a densely allusive text:
“Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is, legitimately, President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was a attack on us. It was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And U.N. election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism. Listen. Last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats, for very obvious reasons. But it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole.”
Where Olbermann was pugnacious and arrogant, aping the style of conservative rivals Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, Maddow is mostly self-effacing. (Eight years after The Rachel Maddow Show’s debut, she still opens most interviews by asking guests what she missed, or misconstrued, in the introduction.) Her approach is that of the newspaper columnist, or indeed of the Oxford-trained debater, marshaling information—historical context, recent reporting, polling data, the occasional wry anecdote—into argument. Even in tackling one of her pet subjects, Maine’s shambolic Republican governor, Paul LePage, she evinces little interest in inside-the-Beltway shorthand: A recent segment on LePage’s inhumane approach to his state’s opioid addiction epidemic featured an in-depth assessment of the growing use of Narcan to combat overdoses nationwide, and of state-level steps to make it available without a prescription.
Liberal “bias” aside, if the goal of broadcast journalism is to leave viewers more knowledgeable about current events than when they turned on their televisions, Maddow, Mitchell, and Hayes—whose All In is the most reliably substantive hour on the MSNBC schedule—are the last of the network’s hosts still attempting to clear the bar. Three days after the New York primaries and two days after the death of Prince, their coverage offered refuge: Mitchell interviewing a Financial Times editor on the economic consequences of the Brexit; Hayes discussing Trump advisor Paul Manafort’s work for “the torturer’s lobby” and the consequences of anti-transgender laws in North Carolina and Mississippi; Maddow setting the table for the two-year anniversary of the implementation of the policy that poisoned Flint.
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