-By Warner Todd Huston
In a sort of schizoid report on MSNBC, The New York Times both admits that the now second place cabler is liberal, yet on the other hand claims that it the first such example in television history. For The Times, Brian Stetler makes the outrageous claim that there’s never been such a liberal “megaphone” on TV before.
“Many progressives (and conservatives),” Stetler writes, “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.”
Apparently Mr. Stetler is blissfully unaware about the extreme liberal bent of ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and CNN!
I call this report a little schizoid because MSNBC and its fans have for years claimed that the station isn’t “liberal” but is just reporting “the facts.” And while Stetler is celebrating the fact that MSNBC is openly liberal, he’s trying to deny that such bias exists in the rest of the Old Media.
In fact, we can contrast Mr. Stetler’s praise of the extreme and open liberalism of MSNBC with recent comments from the cable network’s own chief, Phil Griffin. Only a year ago Griffin claimed that his network wasn’t that liberal at all. In 2011, Griffin claimed that his network didn’t lean nearly as much to the left as Fox News does to the right.
This would be news to Pew Research that recently labeled MSNBC’s political coverage as the most biased on TV.
Down in the article, even as MSNBC is still swamped in the ratings by Fox News, Stetler puts a happy face on the Network’s dismal ratings claiming that MSNBC is somehow just like Fox in that it has similar ratings as Fox did early in its own history.
Finally, there was one amusing bit of news in the piece, though not news broken here. Stetler gives print to the rumor that loud mouth Ed Schultz is about to be fired and replaced with Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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