The New York Times: “MSNBC is behaving like a heroin addict.”

Sunday, September 07, 2008

My colleague Stephen Spruiell did a great cover story on the internal dissent within MSNBC since Keith Olbermann's takeover in the most recent issue of NR. I remember thinking at the time that the topic — another once-venerable institution of television journalism descends into madness — was worthy of the attention of a newsweekly, or Vanity Fair, or GQ or The New Yorker — and that I'm not sure any of the grizzled veterans at those institutions could do a better job at detailing the fights than Stephen did.

The New York Times comes late to the story, but offers some juicy details from inside the troubled network:

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.”...
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...
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.”

When your own senior staff are comparing you to a heroin addict in the pages of the Times, that would appear to be a warning sign that the experiment has failed.

09/07 10:34 PM Share