MSNBC is coming off one of it's worse months in rankings compared to other cable news networks and via NYT, Phil Griffin, the channel’s president, is trying to excuse those dismal numbers by claiming that breaking news is not what MSNBC really does.
“We’re not the place for that,” said Phil Griffin, the channel’s president, in reference to covering breaking events as CNN does. “Our brand is not that.”The brand, one MSNBC has cultivated with success, is defined by its tagline, “The Place for Politics,” and a skew toward left-wing, progressive political talk, the opposite of the conservative-based approach that has worked well for Fox News.
With a Pew poll from 2012 finding that 85 percent of MSNBC's offerings were opinion and not news, it comes as no surprise, but it also isn't a good excuse for their bad ratings either considering they have been offering political opinion, far left progressive political opinion, and they still come up with double digit losses in May's rankings.
Top that off with the fact that their flagship show, chalk full of nothing but political opinion, the Rachel Maddow Show," delivered it's lowest rated month since it's debut in September 2008.
Also:
MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton and Martin Bashir, landed in fourth place in their timeslots—a marked change from their normal second-place status.
Consider the following.
First via the Pew poll:
In prime time, MSNBC made the key decision to reprogram itself as a liberal counterweigh to the Fox News Channel’s conservative nighttime lineup. The new MSNBC strategy and lineup were accompanied by a substantial cut in interview time and sharply increased airtime devoted to edited packages. But those packages are not what many would consider traditional produced pieces.
A separate Pew Research examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90% of its primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary. And that remains the case with many of its packaged segments. Host Rachel Maddow
,for example, often begins her show with a lengthy segment combining a monologue with video clips that can last for seven minutes or longer
MSNBC decided to be a liberal network. A conscious decision.
Now, look at Gallup from February 2013:
Overall, Americans in 2012 remained slightly more likely to identify as conservative (38%) than as moderate (36%) or as liberal (23%), a pattern that reflects the general consistency in ideological self-reports over recent years.
23 percent of Americans self-identify as liberal, thereby that conscious decision on the part of MSNBC was made to target just 23 percent of the American population, leaving 74 percent of political viewers who go elsewhere to get their political opinions and news.
In the meantime, scandals are rocking the Obama administration and viewers that want that "political" news are going elsewhere to get it rather than the excuse making, justifications and attempts of the liberal opinion givers like Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, etc....to distance Obama from what is going on within his own administration.
This liberal bias at MSNBC, especially during a time of Democratic political scandals, is the main reason we are seeing headlines like Deadline's: "Obama Scandals Bring MSNBC 7-Year Low While Fox News Rises"
Contrary to Griffin's assertions, MSNBC isn't even "The place for politics."