Is MSNBC purging leftist hosts in an attempt to move the network to the right? An inside source told the Daily Beast that is exactly what is happening.
“Going left was a brilliant strategy while it lasted and made hundreds of millions of dollars for Comcast, but now it doesn’t work anymore…The goal is to move away from left-wing TV,” the source candidly admitted. “Everybody in the food chain from top to bottom understands that the Olbermann era is over.”
Left wing media has become a loser for networks. MSNBC’s shakeup follows a massive ratings slump. CNN and HLN also reported huge downturns in viewership last October.
MSNBC began to respond last Thursday, shaking up its daytime schedule by cancelling poorly performing shows hosted by Joey Reid and Ronan Farrow. The inside source at the Comcast-owned media giant told the Beast that these moves were only the beginning.
It is expected that major changes are coming, which sources say could see Al Sharpton scaled back from a weekday 6pm timeslot to a once a week show on the weekend and Chris Hayes’s show All In cancelled. As the network management attempts to redirect their course and prevent further ratings slides, don’t be surprised to see even more drastic changes.
The NBC Universal News Group has had their attention chiefly focused on the fallout from Brian Williams’s embellishments on the NBC Nightly News. But the sliding rating at their 24hrs cable news station can’t be far from their minds.
As the nation soundly rejected liberal policies in the last midterm, it appears for the time it has also turned the channel on liberal news. It can be expected that this will have a significant effect on programing. American media is wholly a capitalist venture. Despite popular opinion, it is not so much a partisan creature for pushing agendas as it is an echo chamber of popular American ideas and sentiment. Where the viewers go, the media will undoubtedly follow.
