MSNBC Drops the Ball

You can't cover the story obsessively for three hours (or more) a night for months on end -- including countless hours speculating on whether they can get to 60 votes in the Senate -- and then not cover it when they get to 60 votes just because it's a Saturday.

And I can't imagine this would have cost them a lot of money. You had an anchor in the chair. Tell her to stay. Same goes with Russert's kid who was on Capital Hill.

 

What do you expect from a network that still thinks George Bush is President.

 

Now you've done it. Starman is going to scold you.

 

Another news story they're missing out on: the blizzard that's driving the Mid-Atlantic region to its knees1. Reagan National just announced that all runways are closed until 0600 tomorrow. Between that and the health-care "deal" there's surely enough going on today to merit shitcanning a rerun documentary about transgender people.

1Funny how the same kind of weather with even colder temperatures in the intermountain West is not considered newsworthy. Apparently it has to inconvenience pampered network TV news executives before it breaks the surface.

 

2much ... it's not considered as newsworthy because a) fewer people are affected and b) the states in the intermountain West are much more prepared for such an event. It's newsworthy because a storm like this doesn't hit this area very often. It's old hat in Wyoming/Utah/Colorado/northern Arizona.

 

Well, seeing as we're still digging out from the rubble left by . . .

 

C'mon. Let's leave this to beating up on MSNBC and not prove Starman right.

 

That.

 

2MCM other than your strident rebuttal of my post above, what proof do you offer that MSNBC should be taken at face-value as a news network, which I presume you believe should be patterned after, I dunno, CNN circa Gulf War One?

I mean for instance, you assert that MSNBC covered the story obsessively for three hours for months on end each night, but I would counter that they didn't cover a thing: They provided 3 hours of editorializing from both ends. Having some pundit talk to another pundit amidst a swirling dose of motion graphics onscreen does not equal news coverage, IMO.

MSNBC is a business, not a public service.

 

I think that was me.

I still think it's a bad idea as a business decision.

They've billed themselves as, "The Place for Politics". They want to be the first choice for consumers when there's breaking political news.

Well today, they dropped the ball on that. If you wanted to follow the news on the healthcare bill, you had to turn to FOX or CNN. Where are you going to turn next time?

I don't think any of the shows they ran this afternoon were "appointment TV". How many people would have been disappointed if they had been preempted?

And what would the hard costs been to MSNBC if they had stuck with live coverage? Minimal, I'm guessing.

And while I hate overblown snow storm coverage -- and even though viewers might prefer local coverage for a story like this -- this was also a big story that they should have been covering.

 

Well, among other things, it would require them to call in anchors, producers, writers, photographers, editors, reporters, and an entire studio production staff on their day off, six days before Christmas. That's not particularly cheap.

If doing that made more financial sense than running the prison docs all day on Saturdays, they would do that. Clearly, the prison docs do well enough that it is more financially savvy for them to shut down the newsroom on weekends.

You could certainly argue that today is such a special event with discussion of health care in Washington and snow in parts of the northeast, that they are obligated to completely change format and call in the staff... but I'm not sure I'm buying that.

In the bigger picture, you could argue that MSNBC will never be the go-to news operation for people as long as it's a 5 day a week news outlet, while CNN and Fox work all seven. I think that's a pretty valid argument... though the cable news ratings aren't all that great anyway, so that's probably not a huge concern for the NBC mothership.

 

PC you're leaving off the sat feed time for 3 hours + of live TV -- no small sum, for sure.

The argument I'm trying to make to 2MCM and Yankee Fan (sorry for the confusion there guys, the similar colors in your avatars confused my hung-over mind!) is that MSNBC is not a destination for news viewers, and it shouldn't pretend to be.