What does MSNBC do now? After Trump accomplished the Undead thing and retook the White House? After Comcast announced plans to spin off the network (along with others) in such haste that its new company was named “SpinCo”? After Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski went on their show and welcomed our new insect overlords? After its audience vanished?
Nothing.
Stay the course. The audience is exhausted and needs a break. It’ll be back — and Resistier than ever. Suffer the ratings trough. I mean, obviously you have to fire Mr. and Mrs. Scared-Bro. However: Continue their banal but largely benign political coffee klatch show without them and their insistence we all join their MSNVichy. Nobody will remember they were ever there.
Plus, the next money is coming from more fervent opposition to MAGA, not less. Wasn’t the Scarborough disaster (60% of the demo audience gone in three days) instructive enough? Did you not notice CNN going from fact-based criticism of Trump’s madness to hours of cacophonous shouting, and sinking to whatever is the next level down from irrelevance? Did the quarter of a million canceled Washington Post subscriptions not tell you something? Or the exodus from Twitter/X?
What do you think happened to all these news consumers? That they were raptured?
They’re all still there waiting to spend their time and money at the only liberal candy store still open: yours. These other supposed bastions of journalism have left you a near monopoly. And MSNBC only exists today because the last time NBC was handed a near monopoly, your management ancestors said, “A hundred million in profits from Olbermann’s liberal show? I guess we’ll take it. If we have to.”
In the early years of this century, the great minds at GE (then NBC’s parent) were trying to go to the right of Fox by putting on Tucker Carlson, Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham. They were thus too busy to notice that I was putting on Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Hayes. While they were trying to steal Bill O’Reilly away from Fox or, failing that, to transform MSNBC into a literal prison-documentary channel, I kept Rachel from jumping to CNN by giving her $437 out of my own pocket. And the next thing the corporate masters knew, we’d spun them all off into their own shows and MSNBC was profiting a billion a year.
BTW, I’d like the $437 reimbursed, please.
Generation after generation of NBC Executive Idiots viewed politics as nothing more than a soda brand and believed there was some additional audience — undecided or right wing — that they could add to the present one if only they also offered a different flavor called “New MSNBC.” The new flavor invariably turns out to be turnip. Besides, that right wing ruled you out in 1996. Pursuing it results in only one thing: the Scarborough-ing of your present audience.
That doesn’t mean you can’t tweak stuff. Your primetime audience doesn’t want new faces; it wants comfort food — so refresh the menu and decor. Scuttle those daytime shows (which always existed solely to give NBC News execs something to stare at while they pretended to work) and replace them with the morning formula, only with different sets and different titles. Try outsider, big personality hosts like Elie Mystal and Pablo Torre. You could even try for a truce with your prodigal anchor so he’ll be inside the tent peeing out for a change. And now you can finally do something I first suggested in 1998: Change the damn name of the network! Use the acronym “N.E.W.S.” Or “American News Network.” Or how about a nice, self-explanatory “F Trump TV”?
What all this will get you (besides the kind of profits only a monopoly can provide) are non-cash virtues like moral force and ethics and journalism and patriotism and liberty. You may now be the last line of defense for the free press and thus the future of representative government in this country. The bullies don’t stop hitting you because you’re nice to them. They stop hitting you when you knock them out cold.
Put that on MSNBC, and all will be well.
Keith Olbermann anchored MSNBC’s “Countdown” and breaking news and political coverage from 2003 to 2011. “Countdown,” produced with iHeartMedia, is now his daily news and commentary podcast (listen to it at this link).
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