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Cable Channel Nods to Ratings and Leans Left
On “Hardball With Chris Matthews” on MSNBC, the host, left, speaking with Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief. The program has been increasingly critical of President Bush. By JACQUES STEINBERG
Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.
Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.
During the nine months she spent on “The View” before departing abruptly last spring, Ms. O’Donnell raised viewership notably. She did so while lamenting the unabated casualties of the Iraq war and advocating the right to gay marriage, among other positions.
Under one option, Ms. O’Donnell would take the 9 p.m. slot each weeknight on MSNBC, pitting her against “Larry King Live” on CNN and “Hannity & Colmes” on Fox News.
But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.
Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.
“It happened naturally,” Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel’s passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m. “There isn’t a dogma we’re putting through. There is a ‘Go for it.’”
Fox News consistently denies any political bias in its programming. But whether by design or not, MSNBC is managing to add viewers at a moment when its hosts echo the country’s disaffection with President Bush.
The channel has done so much as Fox News did beginning in 1996, when the president was Bill Clinton, a Democrat. On some nights recently, Mr. Olbermann has even come tantalizingly close to surpassing the ratings of the host he describes as his nemesis, Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, at least among viewers ages 25 to 54, which is the demographic cable news advertisers prefer. Most of the time, though, Mr. O’Reilly outdraws Mr. Olbermann by about 1.5 million viewers over all at the same hour, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Still, as its most recognizable face, MSNBC has marshaled behind Mr. Olbermann, who on July 3, in an eight-minute “special comment” at the close of his show, addressed President Bush directly and called on him to resign. Two months later, the channel chose Mr. Olbermann to serve as the principal host of its coverage of a major prime-time address by Mr. Bush.
Mr. Olbermann’s “special comments” — more than 20 in the last 12 months, and nearly all of them first-person editorials that find some fault with the administration — have helped increase the ratings of his program by 33 percent in just the last year, to about 773,000 viewers a night, according to Nielsen. With those ratings, Mr. Olbermann’s program surpassed “Paula Zahn Now” on CNN, which was canceled last summer.
Mr. Olbermann comes on after “Hardball” with Mr. Matthews, whose longtime opposition to the war — and to what he describes as Vice President Dick Cheney’s outsize role in the administration — has become only more pointed since he took on the title of managing editor of his broadcast over the summer.
Since then, he has talked, both on the air and off, about the “criminality” of the Bush White House, as epitomized, he says, by the role of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the vice president’s former chief of staff, in the C.I.A. leak case. Mr. Matthews’s overall ratings have edged up in the process, though not on the scale of Mr. Olbermann’s.
Even Joe Scarborough, once a conservative congressman from Florida who stood behind President Bush during a campaign rally in 2004, has seemed to have a change of heart about his fellow Republicans in recent months, as is obvious to viewers of “Morning Joe,” his new morning show on MSNBC. In recent weeks, he could be heard praising Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s outreach to the military and her husband’s accomplishments as an ex-president, sentiments that, he acknowledged, had surprised even him.
In a telephone interview yesterday morning, hours before the news of the O’Donnell negotiations surfaced, Mr. Scarborough sounded more like Mr. Olbermann than vintage Newt Gingrich.
“I’m just as conservative as I was in 1994, when everyone was calling me a right-wing nut,” he said. “I think the difference is the Republican Party leaders, a lot of them, have run a bloated government, have been corrupt, and have gone a very, very long way from what we were trying to do in 1994. Also, the Republican Party has just been incompetent.”
Asked if Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews in particular provided an outlet for the opinions of viewers unhappy with the current administration, Mr. Scarborough said yes.
“While I don’t agree with a lot of the things those guys say night in and night out,” he said, “I think it’s very important that those disaffected voices have a place to go when they think somebody out there needs to be speaking truth to power.”
Which is not to say that all of the channel’s hosts speak in one voice. On that same day last month when Mr. Scarborough spoke warmly of the Clintons, for example, he also referred to Democrats generally as “stupid people” and “morons.”
In an interview Friday, Mr. Matthews, who was once an aide to Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the former Democratic speaker of the House, recalled that his criticisms of the Clintons in the mid-to-late 1990s made him an outcast within the party, and are still echoed in his skepticism about Mrs. Clinton today.
“I really do take on people with power,” he said. “Deceit is what drives me crazy, either by Bill Clinton or the hawks in this administration.”
That said, in a separate interview last week, Mr. Olbermann acknowledged that for MSNBC’s nighttime lineup to ultimately work, viewers needed to be able to follow at least some common themes from one show to another. He likened himself and his fellow hosts, collectively, to the menu of a hamburger restaurant with several variations of the same dish.
“If you go into a burger place, and you go in there for the fish, you might want the fish occasionally but it’s probably a mistake,” he said. “Could you be utterly different politically and succeed in this format? You’d basically be throwing your audience away.”
