MSNBC'S FOX HUNT

JAMES WOLCOTT

By day, MSNBC is a first-rate news operation. At night, it gets hysterical— witness Michael Savage's self-immolation, Chris Matthews' high-volume interrogations, and Joe Scarborough's Fox-inspired swagger. An NBC in-house study suggests why the struggling news network has followed the worst of the competition, instead of its own instincts

Every world crisis extends a ray of hope into the leaky cellar where MSNBC languishes, pining for release. And each taste of sunlight makes the subsequent darkness more bitter to bear. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, MSNBC rode a ratings surge, only to lag once again into third place behind its cable rivals CNN and Fox News Channel. Another sunbeam graced the cellar earlier this year with the war in Iraq, as ratings rocketed 124 percent. Having been so long forsaken, MSNBC could be forgiven for feeling that perhaps deliverance was at hand. "If credibility needed to be restored, it has been," MSNBC president Erik Sorenson told The Wall Street Journal with chesty pride. "I want MSNBC to be known as the 'straight shooter' channel."

He was as good as his word. MSNBC proceeded to shoot itself in the head. It did everything a Manchurian Candidate in the programming department might have advised to squander that restored credibility, sabotage any semblance of political objectivity, and send the viewers it had attracted during the war skedaddling. The ratings are trending lower than they did before, the gap between MSNBC and its rivals widening. And it's largely because the channel veered in the wrong direction—sharp right. The purpose of this column is not to pick on a perennial underdog for a few cheap laughs (a lot of cheap laughs—that's a different story), but to show how the cablenews wars have degraded, politicized, and polarized TV coverage into dangerous burlesque.

From infancy MSNBC battled an identity crisis. Founded in 1996, when the words "convergence" and "synergy" could be bandied about with a straight face, the channel joined Microsoft and NBC in corporate matrimony, a wedding of new media and old. The moment was propitious for futuristic enterprises. Soon we would all be singing the body electric.

The third millennium was nearing, and a "new era" had dawned in technology, the financial markets, and the economy. Dot-com millionaires barely out of the dorm were puffing on fat stogies, and Wired magazine emerged as the monthly bible of desktop messianism. MSNBC would feed the heads of the MTV generation, help make well-informed citizens of those party dudes and dudettes.

The original MSNBC set, with its sweeping lines and blinking, flashing computer terminals and TV monitors, resembled the captain's deck of the starship Enterprise, ready to warp-drive into the data stream. New media were represented on board by freshly baked hosts such as Soledad O'Brien (now co-host of CNN's American Morning) and regular guests who were hip, multicultural, Gap-ad photogenic, and fluent in geek. The pups did their part. The old dogs, unfortunately, didn't show. The established stars of NBC News mostly failed to lend their crinkly presence to the flight crew. "Right off the bat, they [MSNBC] made a mistake," media strategist and former CNN executive David Bemknopf told CBS Marketwatch. "They promised all their big stars from NBC News would appear. Of course that was impossible." With the experienced warhorses reluctant to converge and synergize, the burden of success fell on the cybernauts, and as went the NASDAQ and the dot-com boom (kerplop), so went MSNBC. Having lost both the Old Guard and the new vanguard, MSNBC had to revise its mission statement, rebrand itself as a non-techie news operation, and periodically restock the talent pool. Under the itchy trigger finger of former NBC president Andy Lack, the channel became infatuated with info hotties, only to chew them up with overexposure. "It was all Ashleigh Banfield all the time," Bernknopf said. "I mean, think about how much time and effort they spent on trying to turn her into a hot celebrity."

Over the years, MSNBC's identity crisis has intensified into a schizoid crack. MSNBC is now the cable-news channel with two brains, one operational and rational, the other glitchy and prone to hysteria. The two brains are News Brain and Chatter Brain. News Brain gathers information, Chatter Brain dispenses opinion. News Brain works the day shift, Chatter Brain punches the time clock at night. During the Iraq war, MSNBC's news unit outperformed any other cable outlet—faint praise, perhaps, given the babysitting service most of the American media provided during Operation Neocon Boondoggle—and the leap in viewership reflected this relative strength. Their performance in periods of what passes for normalcy needs no qualifiers; it's first-rate. They break stories— they were the first to report the deaths of the Hussein brothers—and they keep the soap opera to a minimum. Sam Shane, Lester Holt, Bob Kur, Dawna Friesen, Chris Jansing, Natalie Morales, Forrest Sawyer, Alex Witt, and crew are professionals who still practice the disciplines of broadcast journalism. And there is no glossier newsreader than glamourpuss Christy Musumeci. (Content isn't everthying.)

Unlike their counterparts at Fox, the MSNBC team doesn't chorus administration talking points as if they were kept in Karl Rove's kangaroo pouch, and in contrast to their daytime counterparts at CNN, they don't josh around at the anchor desk like local-news airheads. It must frustrate and demoralize MSNBC's newsies to witness their good work by day being wasted by night—vomited away. It's as if News Brain handed the car keys to Chatter Brain, only to watch it joyride through red lights

and careen into a ditch. Chatter Brain never listens, Chatter Brain is a constant disappointment, Chatter Brain got no sense.

You see, meatballs can tell us a lot about a society.

—Michael Savage, The Savage Nation.

I deafly, News Brain and Chatter Brain could find harmony together, complementing each other like Seinfeld's Jerry and George, Mayberry's Andy and Barney. But under the wrong-way direction of Erik Sorenson (whose Viking-warrior name could be Erik the Unsteady), MSNBC invariably has reached into the sack and dug out Mr. Wrong. Exhibit A: the freakish prime-time experiment with political preacher man Alan Keyes, whose gloomsday harangues on the amusingly mislabeled show Alan Keyes Is Making Sense sent spiders crawling up the walls. Exhibit B: a stink bomb named Michael Savage, who attempted to foment a native uprising each week on MSNBC's The Savage Nation (a title taken from Savage's syndicated radio talk show and best-selling collection of pensees). Based in San Francisco, the city conservatives love to loathe, Savage (real name: Michael Weiner) is a former herbal-products pitchman who discovered his true metier in peddling homemade remedies to rid us of "Turd World" immigrants, naïve do-gooders catering to social parasites (student volunteers who help feed the homeless are slumming for sick kicks—"There's always the thrill and possibility they'll be raped in a Dumpster while giving out a turkey sandwich"), and, the most sinister group seeking to mess with our minds, those accursed liberals ("You liberals should drop dead for what you've done to my country"—his country?). Here is a man ignorant of culture and basic grammar ("Back in college, I remember Sartre and Camus were big in those days.... I had no idea that Sartre was a commie"), and illiterate in his chosen field of communications, managing to misspell the name of radio great Jean Shepherd in his book.

MSNBC IS THE CHANNEL WITH AND RATIONAL, THE OTHER

TWO BRAINS, ONE OPERATIONAL GLITCHY AND PRONE TO HYSTERIA.

THAT SAV FRINGE IS

How could such a sterling acquisition fail?

Just by being himself. On July 5, during a special Fourth of July weekend broadcast, the "Savage Weiner" (as he became known on Internet blogs) committed suicide by sound bite. In a sentence that will forever haunt his conscience, once he retrieves it from storage, he unhelpfully advised a prank caller, who had identified himself as a "sodomite," "Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig." Unable to leave bad enough alone, Savage devoted a segment later in the show to the Supreme Court's sodomy decision, with sluglines on the screen crying, "Court Sodomizes America" and "Sodomy Demeans Our Culture." This special "sodomy and sausage" (his words) edition of Savage Nation ended with its host sampling barbecue on-camera, the "Savage Weiner" dining on a savage wiener. He was fired the following Monday, his photo and biography instantly scrubbed from the MSNBC Web site.

Critics pounced, arguing that MSNBC had only itself to blame for the debacle. What did they expect when they hired this bigoted buffoon? Savage's group smears were a matter of public record. He wasn't about to start wearing a carnation and reciting sonnets. Apart from his AIDS outburst, however, Savage conforms to most of Republican dogma. He's faithful to every article in the modern (neo)conservative hawkish agenda: pro-gun, anti-environment, pro-Israel, anti-French, pro-family values, anti-feminist, etc. Like Rush Limbaugh, he thinks "global warming" is a lot of hooey, and his anti-Arab sneers are indistinguishable from those of Ann Coulter, who appears frequently enough on MSNBC to warrant her own dressing room and bikini-waxer. (A chapter in The Savage Nation called "Crimes of the Democrats" reads like a trial run for Coulter's Treason.) Now that he's been canned, Savage is being dismissed as a fringe kook, but that he was ever employed on cable TV at all shows how the kooky fringe is worming closer to the political center.

Even when MSNBC makes an enlightened gamble, it manages to cough up the football (or meatball). Its hiring of daytime veteran Phil Donahue was an uninspired retread move that might have paid off given patience. Donahue's hokey attempts to bump up every argument with body jazz (Jewish-mother shrugs, rainmaker arm waving) were grating, and his Mario Cuomo brand of liberalism was often smothered with schmaltz. Although the ratings underperformed expectations, they were respectable and the show was finding its niche. When something begins to succeed at MSNBC is the moment to step in and stamp it out. The channel canceled Donahue earlier this year, citing weak numbers, an explanation that industry-watchers found fishy. "While 'Donahue' does badly trail both O'Reilly and CNN's Connie Chung," Rick Ellis wrote on AllYourTV.com in February, "those numbers have improved in recent weeks. So much so that the program is the top-rated show on MSNBC, beating even the highly promoted 'Hardball with Chris Matthews.'"

Donahue's real sin was that he was perceived as a dove in hawkinfested airwaves. In times of peace, this wouldn't be a problem, but America was at war, permanent war against evildoers, and there was no room for pink-pantied appeasers in the steel-cage death match between George "Texas Executioner" Bush and Saddam "Butcher of Baghdad" Hussein. Ellis reported:

Although Donahue didn't know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel.

That report—shared with me by an NBC news insider—gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming_But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors described as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace."

The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

THAT SAVAGE WAS EMPLOYED AT ALL SHOWS HOW THE KOOKY THE CABLE-NE

FRINGE WORMING CLOSER TO THE POLITICAL CENTER. ^ POLARIZED TV

Can't have that. Once battle lines are drawn, it's the patriotic duty of every talk-show host to suck in his puffy gut, stifle his doubts, and learn to cakewalk. To ensure that no tired, out-of-touch, skeptical liberal would ever darken its stationery again, MSNBC signed former Republican congressman and all-around fun guy Dick Armey (it was he who was heard calling gay congressman Barney Frank "Barney Fag") as a commentator the same week it dropped Donahue, and embarked on a scavenger hunt for pink-cheeked hosts. MSNBC looked high. It looked low. Mostly, it looked low. And when that wasn't low enough, it looked lower, draining swamps, scouting the bus depots, recruiting from the mole people. The ideological spectrum at MSNBC has shrunk as the I.Q. range has widened.

Although most of Chatter Brain appears to be a primordial morass, aswarm with superstition and prejudice, it contains a hidden hierarchy, an evolutionary ladder. At the top rung is the cyborg hybrid; at the bottom rungs, the lesser primates. Occupying the top rung at MSNBC is the mercurial Keith Olbermann, who returned to the network after several testy tours of action elsewhere. It's a welcome homecoming. Olbermann is the thinking person's thinking person—quick, imperturbable, commanding, telegraphic in his delivery, enveloped in electrical tension, a Clark Kent with attitude. Pure fuel-cell efficiency, he looks as if he doesn't sleep at night but instead plugs into a recharger. Where other anchors wax folksy in their humorous takes on the news, or act pose-strikingly pensive (Aaron Brown and his thoughtful finger), Olbermann is a throwback to the old school of newsroom cynics, his irony urban, caustic, platinum-edged. He originally left MSNBC nauseated by the nightly Monica-thrash he had to referee. The format of his new show, Countdown—five segments on timely topics—prevents one fit of manufactured hysteria from flooding the full hour. If there is one bit of constructive advice I would offer Keith Olbermann, it is this: Ignore constructive advice.

Chris Matthews, however, is beyond assistance. It's too late to stage an intervention; you can help only those who will accept help. His lucid flashes of insight on Hardball are spaced farther and farther apart as he rides his ego up and away on the beating wings of Pegasus. Chatter Brain's chief chatterbrain, he refuses to govern himself. It isn't that he lacks political knowledge or historical perspective, but that he prefers to be infected by the latest cocktail chatter from inside the Beltway, enjoying the feverish high it gives him, the babbling rush. He seldom listens, too busy interrupting and free-associating. His weekly half-hour syndicated talk show, much more evenly paced and less monopolistic than Hardball, proves that he can keep his tongue tucked when he tries. He just so seldom tries.

Although Matthews took an admirable stand against the Iraq war and has been irate over the W.M.D. kerfuffle, he gets as gaga as Andrew Sullivan and frequent guest Peggy Noonan over that hickory-smoked hunk of masculinity, George W. Bush. One of the more cringe-inducing TV moments in recent memory was Matthews and G. Gordon Liddy sprouting rhetorical woodies over the spectacle of Bush on the carrier deck in his flight suit, his parachute harness showcasing the presidential bulge— or, to use Liddy's inimitable phrase, "his manly characteristic." One guy to another, Liddy put Matthews wise. "You know, all those women who say size doesn't count— they're all liars. Check that out."

Matthews: "And I've got to say why do the Democrats, as you say, want to keep advertising this guy's greatest moment?"

Liddy: "Look, he's coming across as a— well, as women would call in my show saying, what a stud ..."

To borrow a line from the late critic Marvin Mudrick, the two of them should take a cold shower, preferably not together.

Joe Scarborough, MSNBC's newest host, is hoping that Bush's virility mojo will rub off on his own manly characteristic, metaphorically speaking. The montage for his nightly broadcast, Scarborough Country, stitches together shots of Bush in Top Gun gear with shots of Scarborough in flyboy drag, sending the message that these two belong to the brotherhood of the sky. "I'm the hawk's hawk," Scarborough has said. He didn't see actual combat duty any more than Bush did, but, like the president, there's nothing he won't do to pretend to protect the country, as long as there are cameras present—that's the Republican Way. A former Republican congressman from Florida, Scarborough was a brighteyed cadet in the insurgent freshman class led by Newt Gingrich, which took control of the Congress in 1994. Gingrich urged his disciples to demonize Democrats and liberals as sick, deviant, permissive, morally relativistic enemies of the family, and agents of social rot. Scarborough obliged, playing the happy warrior as he whooped it up on Hardball and elsewhere, poking a pitchfork into Bill Clinton. Like Gingrich and a number of his fellow crusaders, Joltin' Joe had secrets hidden in his underwear drawer, however. An "epidemic of ruined marriages swept through the freshman class of 1994," Joe Conason writes in his new book, Big Lies, the casualty toll including Gingrich himself, Oregon's Jim Bunn, and Iowa's Jim Nussle. Keeping a valuable scorecard, Conason writes, "Other freshmen soon joined the list of broken vows, including Jim Longley of Maine, Enid Waldholtz of Utah, and, a year or so later, Joe Scarborough of Florida." Conason's neat recap doesn't do justice to the messy finale of Scarborough's congressional career, which left the body of a young woman lying center stage.

In July of 2001, Lori Klausutis, a 28year-old aide to Scarborough, was found dead on the floor of his district office in Florida. (The congressman was in Washington, D.C.) The preliminary findings revealed no foul play or evidence of suicide, and she had seemed to be in good health. She appeared to have hit her head on the desk, but what caused her fall? The timing of her death was the stuff of pulp novels. As Denis Wright and Chris George wrote in American Politics Journal, "Klausutis's boss, Joe Scarborough, had recently resigned from Congress prematurely and unexpectedly, amid rumors about his marital fidelity and soon after a divorce." The reporters also noted that the murky circumstances of Klausutis's death bore eerie similarities to the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy case, and yet this one received no national notice whatsoever. Could it be because Condit belonged to the forces of darkness—the Democratic Party— and Scarborough was Republican? Condit was a useful club with which to beat up on Bill Clinton again, as Barbara Olson and others joyously did on CNN's Larry King Live; Scarborough wasn't.

After Klausutis's body was discovered, Scarborough's office released a condolence statement. "May God grant Lori's family the grace, comfort, and hope that will get them through this difficult time." But there's a time to mourn, a time to move on, and a time to have a hearty chuckle. On the May 29, 2003, broadcast of Imus in the Morning (simulcast on MSNBC), Imus joshed with Scarborough about the aide's death. "Don't be afraid to be funny, because you are funny. I asked you why you aren't in Congress. You said that you had sex with the intern and then you had to kill her." Scarborough responded, "Yeah, well, what are you gonna do?" That's the kind of devil-may-care tone they're looking for at MSNBC.

THE CABLE-NEWS WARS HAVE DEGRADED, POLITICIZED, AND IT'S THE PAT POLARIZED TV COVERAGE INTO DANGEROUS BURLESQUE. IN HIS PUFF

4Unlike Michael Savage, Scarborough knows how to dress himself and smile without scaring toddlers. You can imagine him mingling in society, as long as society didn't expect too much. He's more moderate than many of his conservative cronies on gay rights, the environment, and corporate responsibility, and doesn't treat pop culture as products of Satan's workshop.

But—his major liability— he still practices the divisive politics that Gingrich taught his marching band several chins ago. Scarborough's Scarborough Country is a Republican-red state of mind where Americans are hardworking, Godfearing, flag-waving, gun-loving, straighttalking, and looking forward to the next county fair. While all of the children of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon are a little above average, the goobers in "Scarborough Country" are all a little slow on the uptake, figments of cartoon populism. The show is a drastic effort by MSNBC to cure what (Roger) Ailes it, with Joe's "Real Deal" editorials mimicking Neil Cavuto's daily diaper-rash complaints about ungrateful allies (those damned French), snooty professors, tax-cut naysayers, et al., and the fighting words of Bill O'Reilly's "Talking Points" editorials. Scarborough acknowledges the copycat comparisons, informing The New York Observer that MSNBC staffers call him "the little O'Reilly." Perhaps they do, one blogger joked, in the sense that Elvis spoke of his penis as "Little Elvis."

Where Scarborough out-Foxes Fox is in the gloating, brazen lopsidedness of his partisanship. "Obviously, Fox is conservative," Scarborough told The New York Observer. "If I can help tip the scales at MSNBC, which is currently more down the middle, I think that's a victory."

He certainly tips the scales on his own show. Even Fox's prime-time lineup presents a more balanced mix of opinion than does Scarborough Country, an hour of uncut Republican propaganda and unpaid political advertising where Democrats aren't the loyal opposition but the hapless obstructionists, or, worse, useful idiots. The slanted booking on Scarborough Country— Scarborough is never chummier than when greeting Saxby Chambliss, freshman senator from Georgia, as a guest (Chambliss defeated Max Cleland by running ads besmirching Cleland, a paraplegic and Silver Star winner who lost three limbs in Vietnam, as soft on terrorism)—is another symptom of the fisttightening grip of one-party rule that has New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman hearing warning sirens. It encroaches everywhere on MSNBC. It's no coincidence that the channel's chief analyst of public opinion is Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who should be wearing a letter sweater and waving pom-poms. It makes me dread what the election coverage might be like in 2004 should we get another cliff-hanging squeaker.

Two conspiracy theories compete to explain the chronic failure of MSNBC to tunnel out of the mine. The first is that the channel is a chapter of the IrishAmerican media fraternity. (It was observed during the Monica Lewinsky madness how brutally the Clintons were booted about by media Irish-Americans such as Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Lawrence O'Donnell, and the late Michael Kelly.) Jack Welch, the former head of MSNBC's parent company, G.E., is Irish Catholic, and Robert Wright, executive officer of G.E. and chairman of NBC, is a graduate of Holy Cross, founded by the Jesuits, a union of cross and shamrock. Only an aging-altar-boy buddy system, mutter the conspiracy buffs, can account for Matthews and Barnicle remaining pets despite Hardball's bottom-scraping ratings (Barnicle, who had his own shortlived show on MSNBC, often subs for Matthews), and for Pat Buchanan getting another wheeze around the track. The other theory, propounded by those of the Ralph Nader persuasion, is that G.E. is flexing its corporate muscle in backing the interests of the Republicans' military-industrial expansion, and that MSNBC's poor ad revenues and ratings are sacrifices the parent company is willing to make to further its agenda, akin to the losses Rupert Murdoch swallows with the New York Post to keep a trained cobra in the media capital. I'm not sure how much credence to grant either theory, as long as so much ineptitude frolics in the world, but I do know this: the split between News Brain and Chatter Brain must be mended and resolved. In the eloquent words of Seinfeld, "A George divided against itself cannot stand," and neither can a cable channel tom between independent reporting and subservient blather.

MSNBC, postponing the inevitable reckoning, keeps hunting for a new savior, an O'Reilly factor. Waiting in the wings, panting like a bull, is former pro wrestler and governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura, whose MSNBC talk-show debut has been postponed so that worrywarts can get the format and set fortresssolid. Considering that the production values of Savage Nation were on par with Al Goldstein's Midnight Blue (its film clips just as moldy, too), it's prudent of MSNBC to make sure that the backdrops don't wobble every time its beefy host shifts a seismic buttock and that the wardrobe doesn't look as if it were chosen from lost and found. Will Minnesota's incredible bulk enhance MSNBC's primetime lineup? From what I've seen of Ventura on his Meet the Press appearances, he's a man who's all talk and no listen, full of himself and impatient with other people's points of view. So in that sense the big galoot's going to fit right in.

IT'S THE PATRIOTIC DUTY OF EVERY TALK-SHOW HOST TO SUCK IN H S PUFFY GUT, STIFLE HIS DOUBTS, AND LEARN TO CAKEWALK.