Dear Phil Griffin: Don't betray your mother

[Moses]

www.fair.org/activism/carlson-msnbc.html

ACTION ALERT:
Tucker Carlson to MSNBC?
Struggling Cable Channel Attempts to Outfox Fox

December 22, 2004

Recent news reports (USA Today, 12/20/04; Daily Variety, 12/21/04) suggest that conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, seen currently on CNN and PBS, might find a new home: a prime-time show on MSNBC.

With the departure of host Deborah Norville, MSNBC is reportedly
considering Carlson to fill the 9 p.m. timeslot. His show would lead into Scarborough Country, hosted by former Republican Congressmember Joe Scarborough. This pairing, not balanced by any avowedly liberal or progressive hosts, would arguably make MSNBC's prime-time line-up more right-wing than Fox News Channel.

"The pattern in cable news is to imitate Fox," said FAIR's Peter Hart. "But MSNBC is going beyond that--- it wants to outfox Fox by surpassing Fox's partisanship. Viewers deserve diverse opinions from the media, not an uninterrupted stream of right-wing spin."

This follows a pattern at MSNBC. In 1999, the struggling cable channel added a crew of conservative hosts to its daytime line-up: Oliver North, John McLaughlin and Laura Ingraham. In 2003, MSNBC hired hate radio host Michael Savage for a weekend show; his run ended when Savage expressed some of the bigotry that had seemingly made him a candidate for the job in the first place.

MSNBC's only serious attempt at counter-programming was Phil Donahue's prime-time show. It became MSNBC's top-rated show, flying in the face of industry assumptions about the viability of liberal talk shows. Nonetheless, Donahue's program was cancelled in February 2003 for political reasons. Leaked internal company memos explained (All Your TV, 2/25/03) that Donahue would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war," as his show could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda
at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every
opportunity."

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen explained MSNBC's internal policies in a recent speech (11/12/04):


"In 2002, I was an on-air commentator at MSNBC, and also senior producer on the Donahue show, the most-watched program on the channel. In the last months of the program, before it was terminated on the eve of the Iraq war, we were ordered by management that every time we booked an antiwar
guest, we had to book two pro-war guests. If we booked two guests on the left, we had to book three on the right. At one meeting, a producer suggested booking Michael Moore and was told that she would need to book three right-wingers for balance. I considered suggesting Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our studio couldn't accommodate the 86 right-wingers we would have needed for balance."

In an October interview with Cox News Service (10/27/04), MSNBC vice president Phil Griffin said the cable channel was "breaking the mold.... We're not doing things the same, old way." But if the rumors about Carlson are correct, MSNBC would be following an old routine: lurching further to the right.


ACTION: Ask MSNBC how it plans to balance the possible addition of Tucker Carlson to its prime-time line-up.

CONTACT:
MSNBC
Phone: [phone]
mailto:[e-mail]

[Moses]

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50185-2005Jan30.html

"Rick came in and got the stench out," says Phil Griffin, MSNBC's vice president for prime time, referring to the constant turmoil of the past. "Yeah, he's demanding. But there were rumors when he first came over here and everyone Googled him and all these outrageous things that were said about him. I haven't quite seen that guy."

Other staffers, however, say Kaplan has accomplished little beyond tinkering. Some insiders say he stumbled after the South Asian tsunami by going on vacation without an aggressive plan for live coverage, so that days later the network was airing Deborah Norville reruns on obesity, alternative medicine and surrogate mothers. (MSNBC defends the tsunami coverage as adequate.)

The third-place cable news network had gone through a dizzying array of personas and personalities (John Hockenberry, Alan Keyes, Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, Laura Ingraham, Curtis Sliwa, Michael Savage, "Buchanan & Press," "The News With Brian Williams" and, later, John Seigenthaler) by the time Kaplan arrived. Only recently has Kaplan begun making his mark, luring conservative commentator Tucker Carlson from CNN with the goal of having him replace Norville.

The 6-foot-7 Kaplan has ordered each program to write a mission statement and has regularly questioned whether its segments were furthering those goals. He staged MSNBC's convention coverage at outdoor plazas, and when GOP keynoter Zell Miller angrily challenged Chris Matthews to a duel, Kaplan told the "Hardball" host through his earpiece to stay calm and "not give him the duel he may have wanted. . . . I've never seen such passion in a guy," Matthews says of Kaplan.

Before election night, Kaplan spent days drilling Matthews with flashcards so he could instantly react when projections had to be made. And he barred any pre-scripted game plan, frustrating correspondents who wanted to know what their roles would be. Kaplan has also launched blogs by his anchors and gotten more cable promotion on NBC News shows.

MSNBC, which has a news alliance with The Washington Post, is at a disadvantage because it has few reporters, relying instead on NBC's staff. But Kaplan has persuaded such NBC stars as Andrea Mitchell, Jim Miklaszewski and David Gregory to make more appearances or do expanded versions of their broadcast pieces. On Inauguration Day, Brian Williams and Tim Russert appeared after finishing their NBC coverage, and Williams reported from Baghdad after yesterday's elections.

Kaplan is also moving "Imus in the Morning" next week from its Queens radio studio to the network's Secaucus, N.J., headquarters.

"Countdown" anchor Keith Olbermann says former MSNBC chief Eric Sorenson "didn't get out of his office a lot. Rick's in the makeup room, the control room, on the set. I saw him more in the first week than I saw Eric in the preceding year."

Olbermann says Kaplan suggested that the taped opening for "Countdown" be shorter and punchier, but changed his mind after a week-long effort. The message, says Olbermann: "You can talk me out of bad ideas."

One much-touted change is to offer four new angles each hour on the day's top story rather than what MSNBC calls "recycled" headlines. Kaplan led classes on the new 15-minute format with groups of staffers. "The idea was not to come in here and revolutionize the place because we know that doesn't work," Griffin says.

Mark Effron, vice president for daytime, says Kaplan restored some jobs that Effron had proposed cutting for budgetary reasons. "There's much less of a feeling of being a stepchild," Effron says.

Others say Kaplan can be a micromanager. He insisted that each program put up corkboards with index cards about planned segments so he could see them as he strolled around, and once got angry when a board was moved, staffers say. And he often dominates meetings, they say, sometimes giving off smartest-guy-in-the-room vibes.

Some critics question whether MSNBC is veering to the right by scheduling consecutive hours hosted by Carlson and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough. "They've been so outflanked by Fox, so out-promoted by Fox, they're trying to be like Fox by going with a heavy conservative lineup," liberal radio host Ed Schultz told listeners. [Or, maybe it is a neocon propaganda outlet? -- the Post is a neocon propaganda company]

After years of running ABC's "Nightline," "PrimeTime Live" and "World News Tonight," Kaplan is at heart a producer. In the late '90s he was president of CNN, where he sometimes drew flak for being a personal friend of Bill Clinton's and was tarnished by the retracted story alleging American use of nerve gas during the Vietnam War. Kaplan returned to ABC after being ousted in the management shakeup that followed America Online's 2000 takeover of CNN parent Time Warner.

For the 10 months last year after Kaplan took over, MSNBC's ratings were down 23 percent, to an average of 250,000 viewers. But all the cable networks were down from the audiences attracted by the Iraq war and its aftermath -- Fox News Channel by 11 percent, to 937,000, and CNN by 28 percent, to 486,000. MSNBC prefers to highlight a 60 percent jump in prime-time viewers in the last quarter of 2004 (to 470,000), compared with a 15 percent jump for CNN (to 1,041,000) and a 77 percent rise for Fox (to 2.6 million).

Can that change? Kaplan is unveiling two new weekend shows this week -- "MSNBC at the Movies" and "Entertainment Hot List" -- and is said to be high on the Reagan-Crowley program, which will air twice during the afternoon. So why isn't Kaplan talking to the press? Maybe he's waiting until he has more to brag about.