Big article on Cable News - Fox, MSNBC & CNN-help me decipher the last para re where MSNBC is headed

[Pirate Smile]

Obama's story was good in the ascendancy but now is boring so ... what exactly are they saying? I think I must be particularly dense tonight because it seems like it could be taken a couple of ways.

It quotes Rachel using a very naughty word ;) and talks a lot about Keith's massive ego.

But help me out with the last paragraph...

Chasing Fox
The loud, cartoonish blood sport that’s engorged MSNBC, exhausted CNN—and is making our body politic delirious.



-snip-
On a recent Friday, Rachel Maddow is standing at a whiteboard twirling a green Sharpie and looking disapprovingly at an array of stories listed in front of her. There’s a segment about the Obama White House’s failure to win the PR war, another segment about a new political ad by Florida Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio that features Maddow as a punch line, and a segment on the congressional hearings into the BP spill. Maddow scans the whiteboard. The Shirley Sherrod scandal, which had been dominating the news all week, isn’t on the lineup, and she wants to cover it tonight. Five days into the scandal, the story had shifted to the ideological battlefield of cable news, and Maddow is now a target. The previous night on Fox, O’Reilly lashed into Maddow and NBC News for charging Fox with stirring the racial pot. “I mean, one NBC News loon actually said on the air that the coverage of acorn, the Black Panthers, and Ms. Sherrod was designed to make white Americans scared of black Americans. Who is sponsoring this stuff, Mad magazine?” O’Reilly roared. He then recast the debate in business terms, portraying MSNBC as a desperate competitor. “NBC News is getting crushed by FNC—crushed,” O’Reilly told his audience. That’s why Capus and his character assassins do what they do. If you can’t beat them, slime them.”
Maddow thinks she’s settled on the appropriate comeback. “I want to wear a loon suit,” she says, flashing a raffish grin. She turns to her staff and pretends to address O’Reilly as a duck. “Sorry, you really hurt my feelings, I am a loon. I’m on the Canadian dollar bill. It’s awful”—she pauses—“but you, however, are also a race-baiting fuck.”

The room explodes in laughter. Maddow’s executive producer, Bill Wolff, has doubts about the bit and pushes Maddow to take on Rubio, not Fox. “My feeling is, Rubio is news. Rubio is trying to be the senator from Florida. O’Reilly is a media schmuck.”
“But it’s the Sherrod story,” Maddow counters. “I have leveled a serious charge about what’s happening with making white people afraid of black people as a political tactic by political activists, by people who want to harm the administration, and by Fox News as a political organization.”
On cable, schoolyard rules rule. “You should always get the last word,” Maddow reminds her team. “Right now, we don’t have the last word. Right now, the last word is loon.”

-snip-
Fox, meanwhile, seems on the verge of winning an election with the help of a movement—the tea party—it did much to create. But it, too, is increasingly riven by schisms that mirror those in the Republican Party itself. Bill O’Reilly has gone RINO, palling around with Jon Stewart. Beck, a one-man tea party, is going rogue, and the Establishment is pissed and worried. “People are uncomfortable with Beck,” one person working at Fox News says. “He gets 2 million at five o’clock? He would be dying at HLN. He’s not a popular guy within Fox. Hannity’s not really happy with Beck. Beck is a hired gun who’s benefiting from Fox News.”

And wisecracking, high-spirited Phil Griffin, though his patron Jeff Zucker is gone, and new bosses at Comcast are on the way, knows which side his bread is buttered on. “Barack Obama was good in the lead-up, but I do think that in life, in Paradise Lost, Satan comes across much better than God. Evil is always more interesting than good,” he says. “I’m not passing judgment. It’s just a fact.”

http://nymag.com/news/media/68717/

[depakid]

1. Oops- hey Rachel:

[blogslut]

2. It's difficult to say since it's such a cryptic paragraph/quote

Ultimately, I guess the article is attempting to predict at rightward-leaning MSNBC after COMCAST takes over because wingnuttia works for Fox. It was a weird end to an otherwise juicy article.

MSNBC: Keepin’ It Real - bwhahahahahaha!

[Pirate Smile]

4. It was so odd. Cryptic is the right word for it. I couldn't tell if they were saying Obama's story

was great in the build up but now the story line of his fall is what is interesting OR Obama is good and that's boring so they will focus on the evil stuff - made me think of RW teabagger & Republican crap AND are they saying MSNBC will turn right with Comcast OR that they know their spot is to the left so they will stay there.

I mean :wtf:

I can usual decipher things and pick up the gist even if it isn't spelled out but that paragraph left me totally hang'in :shrug:

[Parker CA]

5. I read it as Obama is good and that's boring, so the focus will be on the bad teabaggers. Seemed

pretty clear to me, although it was an odd paragraph.

[Cosmocat]

6. Spot on the left ...

I get what you are getting at, but from a business standpoint, MSNBC was on the ropes and decided out of desperation as much as anything with Olbermann showing a pulse, to go all in on left to counter Faux ...

CNN is drowning in Faux light ... Right now, these operations have to pick a side and go with it ... MSNBC will never be able to beat Faux running a the left leaning netwwork, but they can't out Faux, Faux, either ...

[Jennicut]

3. Is there a reason that all 3 cable news networks pretty much make me sick?

I know it is a business but they all come off as tools in this article, except perhaps Rachel Maddow.

[kjackson227]

7. This was a very interesting article into the goings on behind the scene of the cable news...

industry. A lot of back-stabbing and throat cutting, that's for sure. But, to answer your question, with Comcast about to take over, there might be more changes to MSNBC. The big question will be which way will this news organization be taken in order to overshadow Faux News... more liberal, more CONSERVATIVE and who/what will be their main focus. Since Obama is viewed as "good", then who will be the "satan" that MSNBC will focus on is the question. Besides the teabaggers (who could be described as "satanic"), who/what other group can they focus on??? I'm not sure because they just about cover every detail of the tea baggers starting with their evening line-ups everyday. Personally, I would like to see more foreign coverage. Recently, Richard Engle embedded in Iraq, along with Maddow was a great feature. I'd like to see more of him. He's a great journalist.