As a guy who’s been married and divorced three times I obviously have no problem admitting when I’m wrong. And I was certainly wrong about what Chris Hayes’s new MSNBC show, All In, would look like. When I wrote about the audacious, revealing choice MS was making by casting Hayes as the new bedrock of its prime-time a couple of weeks ago, I figured that the network was going to, at the very least, tinker with the Chris Hayes morning show format so that while Hayes’s personal depth and wonkishness would travel to weeknights, 8PM, the profoundly cerebral nature of the program as a whole would stay safely behind on the weekends.

Well, MSNBC apparently has much bigger balls than I thought, because last night’s debut of All In proved that the network is banking hard on Hayes and what he’s all about by going with the motto, “Let Chris Be Chris.” I get the impression that “All In” slyly refers not just to what Hayes is bringing to the table on the subjects he cares passionately about but the commitment MSNBC is making to Chris Hayes and to a sense of news as a scholarly endeavor in general in prime-time.

Do I like the show? That’s a tough question, actually. I’m not sure I like it so much as I admire it, and that’s the pitfall MSNBC is going to have to dodge with a show that’s as intimate as All In. Like Hayes’s previous show, which has now been handed off to the entirely capable Steve Kornacki, his new vehicle focuses on an almost astonishingly small number of topics in an hour. It’s a format that goes against everything we’ve come to expect from cable news prime. All In also features, as Hayes’s Up did before it, loosely orchestrated panel discussions on the subjects the show chooses to concentrate on, something most news programmers would consider a death sentence at 8PM weeknights. It’s in-depth, it’s erudite, it’s even occasionally tedious — an unavoidable risk — and it’s like nothing else in prime-time on cable.

Put it this way: When your debut in the most important spot in a cable news network’s lineup begins with a group of people sitting around talking about an oil pipeline rupture in Arkansas and what it says about our relationship with fossil fuels — a news story that would traditionally be as toxic to ratings as the heavy crude spilling out of the Exxon Mobil Pegasus pipeline is to Mayflower, Arkansas — and continues with the story for half the show, you’ve either got the full backing of the network in writing or you have access to some particularly damaging photographs of the network president and a small child.

The thing with All In is that you have to care about the subjects Chris Hayes obviously cares about. This puts the onus on Hayes to make you care about those subjects and stories. There isn’t a thesaurus detailed enough to describe how bold a move like this is for a mainstream cable outlet in our current media climate. What Hayes is basically doing is providing the antidote to the current crop of cable news shows in prime-time that so many people claim to clamor for but what many generally won’t watch when given the chance. Hayes isn’t giving you what you want, he’s giving you what he believes you need. While he’s certainly feeding an overall confirmation bias — it’s very unlikely you’re going to watch a show like All In if you’re not predisposed to Hayes’s largely liberal mindset; fair, but liberal — he’s absolutely not breathing fire at the typical subjects you’re guaranteed to want to shout along with if you’re a regular MSNBC viewer. He’s trying to, dare I say it, inform you at 8PM.

Again, it’s a hell of a risk. A philosophy like this is generally considered niche programming, the kind of thing that works fine on the weekend but which will never fly in prime-time. The question, of course, is whether it will in fact fly in prime-time. That remains to be seen. But there’s no doubt that MSNBC thinks it will because it’s apparently putting absolute faith in Hayes and his brand of thought-provoking television.

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Call it one hell of a shot across the cable news bow. In the span of just 24-hours MSNBC has made it perfectly clear exactly what kind of network it wants to be. The outraged populist with the combative tone, force-of-nature personality and tendency to let his constantly running mouth get him into trouble is gone. In his place will now be a cerebral, wonkish, self-described facts-and-figures nerd who couldn’t fit the traditional conservative cliché of an elitist left-wing weenie more if he wore a bow tie and had pure New England ivy growing out of his ass. Both are liberals, but the kind of liberals they are — at least in presentation and tenor — are light years apart. And MSNBC has chosen not only which person it wants but what message it wants to send in its highest-profile spot, cementing a line-up that officially marks the self-coronation of the network as an unapologetically intellectual powerhouse of liberal politics, for better or for worse.

I’ve never been a big fan of Ed Schultz. Anyone who’s read me for a while or listened to the weekly podcast I do with Bob Cesca knows this. I’m not into silly, bellicose posturing that offers no real insight and which relies almost entirely on the personality of the host delivering the information rather than the quality of the information itself. MSNBC’s decision to banish Schultz to weekends 5-7pm is a good one, as far as I’m concerned, and one that’s long overdue. (It’s not even worth entertaining the bullshit spin that Schultz himself requested the move; he’s going to the cable news equivalent of Siberia and no sane person wants to jettison the top stop at the network for that.)

While I respect Schultz’s fervor and certainly don’t doubt the sincerity of his convictions, he was bringing nothing to the table at the coveted 8pm weeknights spot in terms of either content or ratings. The pro-union, blue-collar firebreather routine served only as a mirror image of MS’s direct competition at that hour, Bill O’Reilly, a guy who pours the same shtick on thick from the other side of the political spectrum and regularly brings in nearly three times the number of viewers. Phil Griffin could’ve kept The Ed Show in place and let that time slot tread water well into the foreseeable future, but to his credit he made an unambiguous and ballsy choice as to who would be the new face of the network in its prime time linchpin spot: Chris Hayes.

Hayes has made a nice little name for himself not only filling in for the not-so-dearly departed Keith Olbermann and MSNBC’s smartest asset, Rachel Maddow, but also hosting his weekend wonk-fest, Up with Chris Hayes. Don’t expect the current Hayes format you see on weekends to move with him to 8pm weeknights; the lengthy panel debates and Mariana Trench-deep analysis won’t play at that hour. This isn’t to say that Hayes won’t still be expected to be everything he’s been up until now — a profoundly intelligent student of national politics who prefers book-smarts to bombast — but his new show will almost certainly be streamlined and focused to a scalpel’s edge. Yes, there’s no denying that MSNBC is purposely counter-programming Fox with a choice like Hayes at 8pm, but the show still has to be, for lack of a better term, ready for prime time.

I’m not sure how Hayes will play at his new hour. My first instinct is to say that while Ed Schultz certainly didn’t have the right kind of disposition overall to carry the 8pm time slot there’s something to be said for putting a strong personality in place at the start of prime time. Olbermann was a monumental pain-in-the-ass, a cloud that hung over the newsroom so toxic it simply couldn’t be allowed to continue polluting everything around it, but there was no doubt about his skills as a broadcaster: he was brilliant. While his personal issues caused him to go wildly off the rails into a swampland of pure obnoxious self-indulgence every time he felt his brilliance wasn’t being appropriately deferred to by management, he had the unique ability to strike exactly the right tone between erudite and indignant. He was definitely a pompous ass, but he was a talented pompous ass.

But if Phil Griffin’s decision to put Hayes in place at 8pm is any indication, there’s a chance that even if Olbermann had been Employee-of-the-Month ten months in a row he still might not have survived the overhaul that’s now moving MSNBC to an academic, data-driven, and most of all sober-and-sophisticated outlet for progressive-minded news. The prime time lineup of Hayes, Maddow and O’Donnell is almost sure to eschew sound and fury at every turn, making it, again, the ultimate counter-programming to Fox News. What’s more, Fox’s personality-driven, largely reality-free prime time may wind up finding fierce competition in a set of hosts, particularly at eight and nine, who are unwavering in their dedication to backing up their arguments with unassailable facts.

In some ways it’s a hell of a gamble Phil Griffin and MSNBC are taking by deciding that this is what they want to be in prime time. If it pays off, the result will be a seismic shift in the cable news landscape. Only time will tell.

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I’ll make this quick because it’s Friday and I have no desire to work late tonight.

MSNBC’s heading faster and faster down a dangerous road and it needs to put the brakes on. Now.

For a couple of years now the network has been fielding accusations of being the liberal answer to Fox News and for a couple of years now I’ve defended it as being nothing of the sort. While Fox News has had a top-down political mandate from the start, one that’s not only allowed to but is expected to directly impact every single facet of its coverage, MSNBC has always been in a more precarious position journalistically. That’s because MS has always had to answer to the NBC News mothership, which is insistent on balance and objectivity to a fault. NBC is so dedicated to the notion of non-bias that it will proudly behave as if all political stories have two equal sides, essentially turning its journalists into little more than stenographers dutifully reporting the conventional wisdom from whichever side of the aisle they happen to be assigned to — and MSNBC had to at least nominally toe that company line because not to would hurt NBC News’s reputation as a whole.

Yes, there were a lot of programs on MSNBC that leaned left, particularly in the prime time opinion block, but the shows were basically hosted by progressives who provided a leftward slant rather than having that leftward slant dictated to them from on-high.

But lately a lot has changed at MS. The dayside block of shows, which for the most part used to consist of well-balanced, straightforward news, has now had a giant pile of pure left-leaning provocation dropped right in the middle of it in the form of Alex Wagner’s daily troll-fest, Now. Then a couple of weeks ago it was announced that the network was bringing Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod aboard as paid contributors, essentially throwing any illusion of fairness right out the 3rd floor window of 30 Rock. For the record, no news organization anywhere should employ any member or former member of a sitting president’s administration. That’s journalism 101. Finally, a couple of nights ago MS seemed to go fully down the rabbit hole by either mocking for a scant few seconds or entirely ignoring Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster over the nomination of John Brennan as CIA chief.

Look, Paul’s a self-righteous little turd and his filibuster wasn’t much more than a grandiose publicity stunt aimed at improving his Q-Score and grabbing tightly onto an anti-Obama issue that might actually have legs, rather than the usual right-wing cacophony of made-up nonsense. But that said, the filibuster deserved coverage. O’Donnell gave it a few minutes and Maddow, predictably, was all about due diligence but for the most part everyone else pretended it wasn’t happening. For 13 hours. That’s the kind of crap Fox News pulls when someone not on its side makes news that can’t instantly be painted as bad for the country. Perfect example: Just recently Fox hyped the hell out of the Robert Menendez Dominican prostitute “scandal” but when the whole thing fell apart it ignored it completely, not even bothering to inform its audience that the initial report was horseshit. That kind of thing isn’t simply bad journalism, it’s bad for the country because it reinforces, more and more and more, each side’s epistemic bubble. The job of a news outlet is to provide an unflinching look at the stories of the day and to broadcast or report only echo chamber items is a gross dereliction of duty.

MSNBC still tops Fox News in that it relies much more heavily on facts and independent reasoning than its nemesis. Its stable of conservative personalities is also far more robust than the typically ineffectual tomato cans Fox trots out as red meat for its right-wing prize fighters. But it’s becoming increasingly hard to defend MSNBC as being something other than what its critics have long called it: the liberal Fox News.

And that’s really depressing.

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The quote of the day comes to us from NBC chief Bob Greenblatt, who said at this past weekend’s Television Critics Association conference: “We talked him out of running for president. Wasn’t that good enough?”

The “he” Greenblatt is talking about is Donald Trump — pompous buffoon, national punchline and incessant self-promoting fabulist — and the quote comes from a question Greenblatt fielded about whether he and NBC had ever asked Trump to tone down his powerfully stupid political bluster and if the ongoing embarrassment Trump is causing himself might put his job with the network at risk. Greenblatt defends Trump’s right to say what he wants but goes on to say that “if he becomes somehow hurtful and says or does things that cross a line, we would figure out what to do with that.” This leaves you wondering, considering all the vitriolic nonsense and relentless attempts to bully the President of the United States that Trump has been responsible for and has actually reveled in over the past couple of years, exactly what would cross the line in Greenblatt’s eyes. I’m guessing he’d have to gut a peacock and personally call Greenblatt a wicked Jew who controls the media on a live finale episode of Celebrity Apprentice to finally get kicked off the air.

For a while now I’ve grappled with the problem of Donald Trump and how I feel about the fact that he still has a job with NBC. Anyone who’s read my stuff regularly knows that I tend to fiercely defend media figures from attacks by those who claim to be offended by the things they say. With the rise of social media, it’s tough to argue that there isn’t an “outrage machine” in place in our culture, a standard cycle that ramps up every time someone says or does something that offends someone else. It works like this: the offended party or parties take to Twitter or Facebook or whatever and shout their indignation into the ether; like-minded types immediately get all offended as well and hop on the bandwagon and begin an honest-to-God public outcry; the whole thing gets amplified by a thousand and it all ultimately turns into a deafening cry for the person guilty of being offensive’s livelihood and the immediate decision to declare that person a cultural pariah. We’ve seen it over and over again over the past few years.

So how to reconcile my belief in defending the ability of someone to piss a few people off without being completely thrown to the wolves with the fact that I really would love to see Donald Trump relegated to spouting crap only on Twitter and deprived of a forum to push his ridiculous brand on NBC? Well, as it turns out I don’t really need to rationalize my belief that Trump should be canned by NBC because the fact is that there really are quite a few differences between Trump’s role at NBC and, say, that of Tracy Morgan, who you’ll remember faced public outrage and demands for his NBC job following a really crude anti-gay crack at a comedy show of his a couple of years back.

First of all, whereas most people who face the wrath of a segment of the public for saying something obnoxious can at least make the claim that their comments are independent of the persona they adopt for television, movies, etc. Trump is his persona — the Trump character is his brand and it’s what NBC bought and promotes 100%. Trump can’t divorce himself from his obscene opinions in the name of keeping his NBC gig because he doesn’t have to; that self-congratulatory blowhard character is who he is and it’s what NBC is paying for. Trump’s show is, after all, a reality show — it’s not art. Trump isn’t playing someone else on TV — he’s just being himself.

Add to that something else that should damn Trump in the eyes of the peacock: he’s inextricably tied himself to NBC on his overworked Twitter feed, again that same feed he regularly uses to attack his enemies with all kinds of childish accusations and spout rambling, conspiratorial nonsense questioning the legality of Barack Obama’s presidency. In addition to the relentless stream of embarrassing insanity that comes from Trump’s manicured fingers, there’s a whole lot of Trump shamelessly plugging NBC and his show, which he’s delusionally claimed in the past to be NBC’s number one series (it isn’t and never was for longer than maybe a week). Trump isn’t simply an actor on an NBC show — he’s made himself part of the promotion for it and for the network as a whole, offering up his sage wisdom on everything from how NBC should be programmed to its internal politics. This makes him far more than just a guy whose occasional off-cam rants might be cause for a little concern at 30 Rock; it makes him a serious potential liability.

When Lawrence O’Donnell first began viciously attacking Donald Trump on his nightly MSNBC show during Trump’s utterly horseshit pretend dabbling with a run for president a couple of years ago, I wondered why NBC let him get away with it — until I remembered that to NBC cross-promotion is king and any publicity is good publicity. The execs at the network probably ate up the fact that one of their own was beating up on another one of their own because that kind of infighting gets people talking. O’Donnell gets free publicity; Trump gets free publicity; NBC gets free publicity; everybody wins. But then O’Donnell did something truly extraordinary and something legitimately ballsy and dangerous: he began attacking NBC itself, accusing it of being complicit in the hoax that was Trump’s threat to run for president. O’Donnell understood that NBC entertainment had known from the very beginning that Trump wasn’t going to run because it had signed him for another season of Celebrity Apprentice — and by withholding that information from the NBC news department it was basically engaging in indefensible corporate malfeasance and covering up information that was hamstringing its own network.

Which brings us nicely back to Greenblatt’s quote about supposedly convincing Trump not to run for president. First of all, that’s crap. As Lawrence O’Donnell said over and over again during the period in which he mercilessly chided Trump for being entirely full of shit, Trump is a phony billionaire and in fact can’t afford to lose his gig with NBC. But the fact that Greenblatt is willing to admit his network had anything at all to do with the trajectory Trump’s supposed presidential aspirations took proves all the more why Trump isn’t your average host of a crappy reality show. He’s had much more influence than that both at NBC and within our popular culture over the past few years. If Bob Greenblatt actually feels like it’s okay to say that NBC talked Donald Trump out of running for the most powerful office in the world then the relationship between NBC and Trump truly is unholy.

When all is said and done, the reality is that only low ratings will kill Trump at NBC. That’s the best we can hope for. But make no mistake: NBC should fire Trump. He’s an embarrassment to the network not simply because of the things he consistently says but because of the myriad ways in ways in which he ties those things — the lunatic conspiracy theories, the ignorant political rants, the self-parodic attacks against his perceived enemies — directly to NBC.

Besides, Trump shouldn’t really have a problem losing his job at NBC — he’s a “billionaire” after all, right? Of course, if he does lose his weekly forum what will he really be able to say he does anymore?

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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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By Chez Pazienza:

As evidenced by the one above this piece, it’s never a good idea to trust a headline. Often, what you see in the headline of a piece of journalism isn’t a fair descriptor of what you’re going to get inside the story itself. That’s because, often, headlines are written not by the people writing or reporting the stories themselves but their editors or a specific editorial department, and by and large these editors are far more interested in hooking you into reading than they are with being 100% factually accurate. A headline exists as a tease, which means that these days more than ever — particularly when it comes to stories on the internet — it’s designed basically to troll you. Unfortunately, here at The Daily Banter we don’t have a dedicated editorial department or even a staff full of willing and nubile young interns whom we can toss a few Quizno’s coupons at in exchange for writing headlines for us — although I’ve been working on Ben to secure AmEx Corporate Black Cards for us that we can use for high-priced escorts, Aston Martin Vantage rentals and of course to cut the giant rails of the good blow he traffics in from Bolivia on his private jet — and so that means we’re forced to write them ourselves. So, if we’re trolling you with a headline — it’s really one of us trolling you.

I bring this up because the headline for Bob Cesca’s column from a couple of days ago really caught my eye, which I have to assume it was designed to. It read, “There Is No Pro-Obama Bias at MSNBC.” At first I figured, as I said, that Bob was just going for the attention-grab. But once I started reading the piece I quickly realized that, no, he really did intend to make the argument that MSNBC isn’t biased in favor of President Obama; he wasn’t just trying to get me to spend a few minutes cleaning coffee off the screen of my laptop.

Bob and I actually talked about this a little on our podcast last week and I certainly understand his basic premise: a recent Pew study claims that during the final lead-up to the election, MSNBC didn’t do one negative story about Obama and Bob takes issue with that. His main argument is that the study is flawed because it doesn’t clearly define what a “story” is and because the survey, for perplexing reasons, didn’t bother to factor in the three-hour-a-day block of often right-wing and faux-centrist hackiness that is Morning Joe. Admittedly, these are fine points worth considering, but neither negates the obvious, the thing that makes that one headline so jaw-dropping: Holy hell, of course there’s pro-Obama bias at MSNBC. With all due respect to my friend and fellow heavy drinker Bob, to bluntly state otherwise borders on fucking delusional.

The question isn’t whether MSNBC as an institution tends to favor the president and the Democratic/liberal point of view, it’s how it does it and the ways in which it manifests itself. The fashionable, and most obvious, thing to do when it comes to examining MSNBC is to compare it to Fox News, which many argue it’s become the left-leaning version of. No, MSNBC is no Fox News; there are several important distinctions that make Fox as noxious and devoid of journalistic substance as it is. First of all, there’s an institutional mechanism in place at Fox that’s designed to push a conservative and Republican agenda at all times and it begins with a set of talking points created at the very top of the management food chain and trickling down from there, infecting everything. MSNBC may foment a left-leaning viewpoint and give its hired hosts room to be as liberal as they want without being hauled into the corner offices, but Phil Griffin doesn’t wake up every morning and draft a coverage plan dictating what political positions his producers and talent should take.

Meanwhile, Fox not only hires directly from the Republican politician pool, it often supports candidates through regular appearances on its programming while also promoting “astroturf” causes like the Tea Party, whose rallies it helped organize and to which it dedicated an enormous amount of positive coverage.

There are quite a few more examples, but maybe the best and most undeniable illustration of what Fox News is all about was brought to light just a couple of days ago. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that during a Fox interview with David Petraeus in 2011, Roger Ailes had a contributor take a personal message to the general: run for president as a Republican and not only will the network support you but Rupert Murdoch will personally be involved in bankrolling your campaign. What this proves, conclusively — as if we needed more of this sort of thing — is that Fox News isn’t your average news outlet; it’s strictly an arm of the Republican party. As, ironically, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC said in response to the story, there’s nothing particularly wrong with being a propaganda bullhorn for the GOP, but there is when you call yourself news, and that’s always been the biggest problem with Fox News: it casts itself as legitimately unbiased news when in reality it’s anything but.

I bring up Maddow because she actually does stand as an example of what sets MSNBC apart from Fox. MSNBC basically hires liberal talent and allows them to do their shows their way without too much interference. (Although if you believe Cenk Uygur, that’s not entirely true, which as far as I’m concerned is unsurprising simply because the network does still have to answer to the NBC mothership; MS can lean left but if it goes too far left, NBC will have to yank the reins in an effort to be able to continue playing the centrist card in the name of often phony objectivity.) People like Maddow, O’Donnell, Hayes and Harris-Perry aren’t told what to do, but MSNBC knows what they’re going to do: they’re going to largely, though not always, lean in favor of President Obama, or at the very least want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yes, unlike many on Fox — with a few rare exceptions — they’ll openly criticize a president whose politics mostly align with theirs when they feel it’s warranted because they aren’t ordered not to, but overall they accept that the Obama administration is on their side and so they often sing its praises. They’re fairer than Fox, certainly, and they rely on facts in ways their counterparts at Fox don’t at all, but MSNBC knew when it hired them that they leaned left, hence you get, yes, a pro-Obama bias at MSNBC.

MSNBC also hired at least a few people who it knew would almost never deviate from a slavish support for Obama — people like the insufferable Al Sharpton, the comically bellicose Ed Schultz and the opportunistically obsequious Martin Bashir. MS doesn’t get plausible deniability just because it doesn’t order these people to say exactly what it knew they were going to say when it brought them on board. True, MS offers genuinely smart counterpoints to its generally left-leaning sensibilities — unlike Fox, whose token liberal guests are always little more than tomato cans designed to confirm its audience’s worst preconceptions about the left — but it knows which side its bread is buttered on. By being a network that largely — not always, but largely — supports the Obama administration, at best fairly highlighting its achievements and at worst, again, giving it the benefit of the doubt, it’s carved out a niche for itself in cable news that’s both successful and highly profitable.

There is a pro-Obama bias at MSNBC. The bias isn’t as institutional as we’ve seen at Fox News and because of that not every single person or show is on board since it’s not expected to be — but it exists in a letting-nature-take-its-course kind of way. The thing is, at least MSNBC admits its leanings. Which immediately puts it leaps and bounds above the network it’s so often compared to these days.

By the way, if you read the original Bob pieces that spawned this one — or the Ben pieces that followed up on them — you know that Glenn Greenwald plays a role in all this hand-wringing over MSNBC and its political leanings. Why didn’t I bother to bring Greenwald up in detail? Because fuck him, that’s why.

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