Blue Spot

Chris Matthews Advised To Leave MSNBC And Begin Senate Campaign, Report Says | AHN | December 4, 2008

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - NBC anchor and pundit Chris Matthews has been advised to quit his post at the network and begin his campaign for senator of Pennsylvania, according to a report.

Speculation is rife that Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball," wants to challenge Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), one of the most senior members of the Senate, in 2010. The 62-year old political commentator has been advised to resign from NBC "as soon as possible" and enter the race in order to demonstrate that he is serious about his candidacy, Politico quotes some Democratic operatives.

But the report also quotes NBC sources as saying talk of a Matthews' run is a ploy to have leverage during negotiations when his contract expires in June.

Matthews last week met with Democratic State Committee Chairman T.J. Rooney and executive director Mary Isenhour in Washington, D.C. about a possible Senate bid, according to The Patriot-News. He is also said to be looking for a house in the Keystone state.

Matthews, whose journalistic career includes more than a decade working as Washington, D.C. bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner and a David Brinkley Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, has been accused of being biased and favoring then-Senator Barack Obama during the election.

He had repeatedly expressed admiration for Obama's speeches, famously describing the feeling he had during one of them by saying there was "a thrill going up my leg." During the protracted primary race between Obaman and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Matthews had to apologize to viewers and to the former first lady after he came under fire for saying Clinton's support was due to sympathy for her and her husband's infidelity.

Labels: Chris Matthews, Media bias, MSNC

MSNBC Takes Incendiary Hosts From Anchor Seat - NYTimes.com

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.

Executives at the channel’s parent company, NBC Universal, had high hopes for MSNBC’s coverage of the political conventions. Instead, the coverage frequently descended into on-air squabbles between the anchors, embarrassing some workers at NBC’s news division, and quite possibly alienating viewers. Although MSNBC nearly doubled its total audience compared with the 2004 conventions, its competitive position did not improve, as it remained in last place among the broadcast and cable news networks. In prime time, the channel averaged 2.2 million viewers during the Democratic convention and 1.7 million viewers during the Republican convention.

The success of the Fox News Channel in the past decade along with the growth of political blogs have convinced many media companies that provocative commentary attracts viewers and lures Web browsers more than straight news delivered dispassionately.

“In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great philosophical debate,” Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Fighting the ratings game, he added, “the bottom line is that we’re experiencing incredible success.”

But as the past two weeks have shown, that success has a downside. When the vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin lamented media bias during her speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.”

In interviews, 10 current and former staff members said that long-simmering tensions between MSNBC and NBC reached a boiling point during the conventions. “MSNBC is behaving like a heroin addict,” one senior staff member observed. “They’re living from fix to fix and swearing they’ll go into rehab the next week.”

In January, Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews, the host of “Hardball,” began co-anchoring primary night coverage, drawing an audience that enjoyed the pair’s “SportsCenter”-style show. While some critics argued that the assignment was akin to having the Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly anchor on election night — something that has never happened — MSNBC insisted that Mr. Olbermann knew the difference between news and commentary.

But in the past two weeks, that line has been blurred. On the final night of the Republican convention, after MSNBC televised the party’s video “tribute to the victims of 9/11,” including graphic footage of the World Trade Center attacks, Mr. Olbermann abruptly took off his journalistic hat.

“I’m sorry, it’s necessary to say this,” he began. After saying that the video had exploited the memories of the dead, he directly apologized to viewers who were offended. Then, sounding like a network executive, he said it was “probably not appropriate to be shown.”

Mr. Griffin, MSNBC’s president, denies that it has an ideology. “I think ideology means we think one way, and we don’t,” he said. Rather than label MSNBC’s prime time as left-leaning, he says it has passion and point of view.

But MSNBC is the cable arm of NBC News, the dispassionate news division of NBC Universal. MSNBC, “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” share some staff members, workspace and content. And some critics are claiming they also share a political affiliation.

The McCain campaign has filed letters of complaint to the news division about its coverage and openly tied MSNBC to it. Tension between the network and the campaign hit an apex the day Mr. McCain announced Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. MSNBC had reported Friday morning that Ms. Palin’s plane was enroute to the announcement and she was likely the pick. But McCain campaign officials warned the network off, with one official going so far as to say that all of the candidates on the short list were on their way — which MSNBC then reported.

“The fact that it was reported in real time was very embarrassing,” said a senior MSNBC official. “We were told, ‘No, it’s not Sarah Palin and you don’t know who it is.’ ”

Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams, the past and present anchors of “NBC Nightly News,” have told friends and colleagues that they are finding it tougher and tougher to defend the cable arm of the news division, even while they anchored daytime hours of convention coverage on MSNBC and contributed commentary each evening.

Mr. Williams did not respond to a request for comment and Mr. Brokaw declined to comment. At a panel discussion in Denver, Mr. Brokaw acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews had “gone too far” at times, but emphasized they were “not the only voices” on MSNBC, according to The Washington Post.

Al Hunt, the executive Washington bureau chief of Bloomberg News, said that the entire news division was being singled out by Republicans because of the work of partisans like Mr. Olbermann. “To go and tar the whole news network and Brokaw and Mitchell is grossly unfair,” he said, referring to the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

Some tensions have spilled out on-screen. On the first night in Denver, as the fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough talked about the resurgence of the McCain campaign, Mr. Olbermann dismissed it by saying: “Jesus, Joe, why don’t you get a shovel?”

The following night, Mr. Olbermann and his co-anchor for convention coverage, Mr. Matthews, had their own squabble after Mr. Olbermann observed that Mr. Matthews had talked too long.

Some staff members said the tension led to the network’s decision to keep Mr. Olbermann in New York for the Republican convention, after he ran the desk in Denver during the Democratic convention. MSNBC said that he stayed in New York to anchor coverage of Hurricane Gustav. But some workers say there were other reasons — namely, that Mr. Olbermann was concerned about his safety in St. Paul, given the loud crowds at MSNBC’s set in Denver.

NBC Universal executives are also known to be concerned about the perception that MSNBC’s partisan tilt in prime time is bleeding into the rest of the programming day. On a recent Friday afternoon, a graphic labeled “Breaking News” asked: “How many houses does Palin add to the Republican ticket?” Mr. Griffin called the graphic “an embarrassment.”

According to three staff members, Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, president of NBC News, considered flying to the Republican convention in Minnesota last week to address the lingering tensions.

It's about freakin' time. Even if you are a liberal, why would you want a network that is not neutral or objective? Do you really want a Fox News Channel for the left? That's not going to help this country.

H/T to Blue Lyon.

Labels: Chris Matthews, Clueless Pundits, Media bias, Olbermann

MSNBC's meltdown - War Room - Salon.com

Then came perhaps the biggest blowup of the entire week, a nearly 10-minute exchange Tuesday during which Scarborough and David Shuster yelled back and forth. Scarborough concluded the discussion by calling Shuster "Rip Van Shuster" and saying, "Shuster, I have no idea what you're talking about ... Have you been sleeping the past couple months? ... Do you never watch this show? ... You usually sleep through this show because you didn't show up three times in a row ... Somebody got into some bad acid at the protests and this conversation turned terribly wrong."

Not to be outdone, Chris Matthews then got into the act Tuesday. While House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer waited to be interviewed, first Matthews yelled to someone off-camera that he would "wrap in a second." Then, after Olbermann introduced Hoyer, Matthews went after his coanchor, saying, "You made that sound, Keith. I can do the same to you. That's what I thought and I said it."

Finally (at least for now), Wednesday night, after Republican pundit Mike Murphy opined that he believed Hillary Clinton would vote for John McCain, Olbermann said loudly, "Let's wrap him up, all right?"

Add to these incidents MSNBC's horrible decision to position its outdoor set in front of Denver's Union Station, so that both train whistles and screaming protesters frequently interrupt its broadcasts, and you have a television meltdown on your hands. And it comes at an awful time -- right in the middle of one of the network's most important spans of coverage for the entire year.

The Politico and the Wall Street Journal have documented the on-air grudge matches in articles over the past two days. The Politico quotes an anonymous "high-ranking MSNBC journalist" as saying, "The situation at our channel is about to blow up." And the Wall Street Journal quotes former MSNBC host and "CBS Evening News" coanchor Connie Chung, who said, "My reaction to that is: 'Grow up!' They have to just grow up."

Despite all the attention the spats have received in the media, however, MSNBC president Phil Griffin doesn't seem worried. "Look, I want honest, authentic people on our air. I don't want phonies. So if the price of that is every once in a while one of these bubbles up, I'm not concerned," he told the Wall Street Journal. And Griffin told the Politico that "this is our team. They've served us well. We love 'em, and we're going to be at the Republican convention, and it's going to be great. And I don't have any hesitation."

And what about MSNBC's ratings? While it has improved on the ratings front during the convention, it still trails CNN and Fox News overall for convention coverage.

Looks Like Olbermann's arrogance is catching up to him and his co-worker's aren't going to put up with him thinking he's always the smartest person in the room.

And despite Shuster's charges against Scarborough, Joe has been the fairest of the MSNBC bunch. The others can't hide their bias.

Labels: Chris Matthews, Clueless Pundits, Joe Scarborough, Media, Media bias, Olbermann

On Hardball, Matthews discusses Bill Moyers' interview with Rev. Wright. That'll be a must-see tomorrow. It seems like Wright is saying that Obama's recent criticism of Wright's remarks was just political rhetoric. There's no way this will go away if Obama faces the GOP as our nominee.

At the end of the clip, Matthews pays tribute to Hillary. Wow...are we looking at a changed man? I doubt it, but if Hillary keeps winning, maybe we'll be seeing more of this.

Labels: Chris Matthews, Cultural issues, Media, Moyers, Rev. Wright