See that green thing over there? It's MSNBC's fig leaf. The network has decided to take it all off and admit what everyone knew was obvious: that it's trying to become the far-left's cable channel of choice.

That's really about all you can say after learning the news that the MSNBC show "Race for the White House" will now be simulcast live at 6pm ET on Air America, the low-rated radio network for liberals.

"Race" is a nightly show about the 2008 campaign hosted by liberal NBC reporter David Gregory and prominently features Air America host Rachel Maddow as a panelist. The simulcast move is just one of the latest in a long series of leftward moves made by MSNBC since it determined that pandering to the nutroots left could rescue it from the ratings cellar.

Both times Abrams levied said assertion in response to Limbaugh's apparently effective (at least at tweaking the likes of Abrams) Operation CHAOS.

Which is what Limbaugh has dubbed his call for Republicans to cross over -- where legal -- to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic Presidential primaries. In so doing he hopes to prolong as much as possible the Democrat primary process.

Limbaugh began Operation CHAOS in advance of the March 4th primaries and primary/caucus held in Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont and Texas. It appeared to be at least somewhat effective beyond just ruffling Abrams' feathers, as HRC won three of the four (losing only in Vermont). Which is when Abrams first resorted to Limbaugh name calling -- at least in this regard.

Interesting news today out of Los Angeles. Looks like CNN is going to try and tap the political entertainment market that was formerly served by the departed "Half Hour News Hour." My comments below the fold:

Headline News will be sacrificing newsmakers to the comedy gods with "Not Just Another Cable News Show," a half-hour skein set for the 7 p.m. timeslot Saturdays and Sundays starting April 5. It will re-air at 9 p.m. and midnight. [...]

"News Show" will pull footage from CNN's archives as well as from recent news.The first episode will feature commentators including Time.com's Washington editor Ana Marie Cox, L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein, Republican strategist Amy Holmes, Huffington Post media editor Rachel Sklar and comic Hugh Fink.

According to Media Life Magazine, the three big network evening news broadcasts have slipped badly in the key 18 to 34 age bracket. At the same time, though, the Cable news nets have picked up among that same demographic. All three network newscasts have lost numbers since last year, with Katie Couric having the worst slide of the three.

According to Media Life, the main reason the evening news shows have been losing so steadily is because the Internet and Cable can give news at any time the viewer is ready to take their news whereas the evening news must be specifically scheduled into the viewer's lives. Media Life claims that the 18 to 34 age group just "never got into the evening news habit" -- a pretty plausible point.

The Internet is a big factor for this age group:

Finally: a news network that made Gov. Eliot Spitzer's party affiliation clear. Chances are you've never heard of it, however.

During live coverage of Spitzer's resignation announcement, Washington, D.C.-area News Channel 8 informed viewers of Spitzer's party affiliation in an on-screen graphic reading "Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) NEW YORK." (see screen grab at right)

NewsChannel 8 is carried on D.C.-area cable systems and is owned along with ABC affiliate WJLA by the Allbritton Communications Company.

The news just keeps getting worse for old-fashioned media outlets that disseminate news: more and more people are turning away from them and relying instead on the Internet for information.

Such was the conclusion of a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll released Wednesday.

As reported by Reuters (emphasis added throughout):

Standard-free journalism on parade all day on NBC's Sunday

Forgotten But Not Gone

Over the weekend NBC offered up their latest versions of Tim Russert's Meet the Press and the Chris Matthews Show -- the latter being political television's answer to Jerry Springer. In them we were treated to two more glittering examples of all that is wrong with the Jurassic Press.

That being the woeful lack of journalistic ethics demonstrated by those at the heights of the media mountain, and the utter shamelessness they and their colleagues exhibit upon their being outed as amoral hacks.

Choice excerpts of Media Research Center Founder and President Brent Bozell on C-SPAN's Washington Journal on February 22, 2008.

Bozell speaks of the Bill Keller New York Times disaster, its implications for the 2008 Presidential race and more.

C-SPAN's posting of the full video of the 30-minute segment from Washington Journal.

If you were to write an article about how the three cable news networks are covering a story, would you address the one with the highest ratings first, or the also-ran?

At the Washington Post, the answer is "the also-ran."

On Tuesday, in a piece about how political pundits are "overpopulating the news networks," staff writer Paul Farhi first highlighted what was going on at third-place MSNBC, and even gave Keith Olbermann the first crack at commenting on the matter (emphasis added throughout):

CNN Has stiffed Geraldo!

Now, this is how we expect the more "civilized," more "caring," more "intelligent" folks over at CNN to act, isn't it? The Page 6 column in the New York Post found that CNN has instituted a "a blanket boycott" of anyone from Fox News from appearing on their precious airwaves, even though Fox has had several CNN folks on their shows when those CNNers were flogging their books and side projects. It seems civility is something that CNN just cannot muster these days.

THE folks at Fox News Channel are magnanimous enough to put their rivals from CNN on air, but CNN isn't big enough to return the favor. Geraldo Rivera - who has a new book coming out, "His Panic: Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S." - was booked to appear on Nancy Grace's CNN show on Feb. 28. But then he was disinvited and told CNN had "a blanket boycott" against anyone from Fox. " 'The Most Trusted Name in News' just chickened out," Rivera told Page Six. "This reveals a corporate insecurity." Fox has had on as guests both Wolf Blitzer and Glenn Beck. A CNN rep denied any boycott and blamed a scheduling conflict.

It's bad enough that CNN is so anti-social that they won't return Fox's kindness, but even worse that they went ahead and booked Geraldo and then pulled the rug out from under his invite after all the plans were made!

Update/Clarification (Jan. 24): Ocean MacAdams of MTV News responds (see bottom of post)

Politico's Ben Adler has a story today about Rock the Vote submitting a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of overturning a law requiring voters furnish photo identification before casting a ballot:

Isn't it often the case that over-confident braggarts are typically insecure types masking their own short-comings with undeservingly cocky bravado?

After all, one would think the president of the cable news network whose ratings in virtually every time slot have plummeted for years would be a little humble when referring to his competition in the industry.

Quite the contrary, in an interview with the New York Observer, CNN's Jonathan Klein behaved like he was running the Yankees, and Fox News Channel was the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (emphasis added throughout):

Hillary Clinton's performance in her interview with Maria "Money Honey" Bartiromo of CNBC last week was so bad that she must have sent a double (stop shivering at the thought, will ya?).

After all, the genuine Smartest Woman in the World couldn't possibly have said the things she said, as noted at Rush Limbaugh's site last Thursday. It got so bad that Bartiromo, who seemingly has barely cracked a smile since George Bush became president, felt compelled to challenge her.

Here is one of the choice offerings Mrs. Clinton served up:

(There are ) lots of people who come on your show who, you know, are gung-ho, protect the tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans, that will not work if the economy slows down. You need to get money in the pockets of tens of hundreds of millions of Americans, and that's what I intend to do.

First published in Human Events on November 27th, 2007.

Wash, spin, rinse, spin. Phone, spin, report, spin, poll, spin. The similarities between the work of the mainstream media and a laundry machine are striking. Yet there is nothing about the cycle -- the spin-report-poll-spin cycle -- that does for political events what detergent does for your boxers or briefs.