Msnbc's Doomed 'Experiment'

By Brent Bozell III

The executive suite at MSNBC is the last hardened corner of America to concede that maybe Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews are nowhere close to the textbook definition of detached, "straight news" anchor. Their decision to abandon what was tenderly called their anchoring "experiment" only acknowledges that the idea was a bust: MSNBC was regularly coming in dead last among the commercial cable-news and broadcast-news network covering the conventions.

NBC News is coming to the realization that Olbermann and Matthews aren't only suppressing MSNBC's ratings on election and convention nights, they're ruining whatever credibility NBC's brand retained. When the boos really kicked in during Sarah Palin's acceptance speech in St. Paul, the delegates started chanting "NBC! NBC!" as the foremost example of partisan excess from an "objective" source. It's gotten so bad that old NBC warhorse Tom Brokaw is decrying how these men have "gone too far." This is shocking stuff coming from an anchorman who gave a Reagan-trashing interview to Mother Jones magazine in his Eighties heyday. More.