Good news for our own Mark Finkelstein. He will soon have more material to work with according to Mediaite which reports that MSNBC's Morning Joe will be expanding an hour. However what is most significant about the report is what, or rather who, it does not mention. Despite being chock full of information about the many changes coming to MSNBC, the name noticeable by its absence is Brian Williams despite the fact that he is supposed to be an incredibly well paid breaking anchor on that network. Is this part of a not so subtle effort on the part of NBC to tell Williams to go away so they won't be obligated to pay his $10 million per year salary?
First let us look at the Mediaite report on the big MSNBC changes sans any mention of you-know-who:
More sweeping changes are coming to MSNBC per a well placed source.
As reported in this space exclusively last week, Kate Snow of NBC News will be taking on a substantial role in MSNBC’s dayside programming. Ms. Snow formerly a weekend anchor for Good Morning America and a frequent face seen on the NBC Nightly News and Dateline will inherit the 3-5 p.m. ET time slot on weekdays on MSNBC.
Great news for Kate Snow but isn't there another anchor who was also a rather frequent face seen on the NBC Nightly News that you forgot to mention?
Also of major note, Morning Joe will be expanded to a four-hour program (it’s currently three). Starting soon, the political roundtable show can be seen from 6 a.m. ET until 10. Note: With the 2016 race heating up, and the great political theater that has come with it and only promises to continue, it only makes sense to expand the network’s editorial page in the morning.
One notable causality to emerge from these moves is current 9-11 a.m. anchor José Díaz-Balart. With Morning Joe going to 10 a.m., Tamron Hall will then take over the 10-12 noon slot, thereby leaving Mr. Díaz-Balart as the odd man out.
There is another odd man out who is apparently so out that he does not appear in this report.
What remains to be seen is who fills the small shoes of Al Sharpton at 6 p.m. as he moves to Sunday mornings. Changes may be coming to MSNBC primetime as well, as network executives still are mulling exactly what to do at 8 p.m. with the struggling Chris Hayes. Another source indicates that Willie Geist may get his own program at that time, replacing Hayes, but that is not confirmed at this time. The Wrap’s Jordan Charlton had reported the same possibility earlier this summer.
Did I detect a bit of a slam against Al Sharpton and his small shoes? Meanwhile Willie Geist may get his own program. Will a certain non-person be making cameo appearances on that show?
So just how deep into non-personhood has Brian Williams fallen? Well, it is so bad that MSNBC was forced to cut way back on its Katrina anniversary coverage in order to avoid the serial fibbery of the unspoken one:
MSNBC scaled back its coverage of the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina because Brian Williams “misremembered” that he saw a dead body float past his hotel while he was there.
The cable network, which inherited Williams as a breaking news anchor after he was bumped from “NBC Nightly News” following an exhaustive internal probe into his tall tales, decided against sending its key anchors to New Orleans, to avoid awkward references to the Williams scandal.
Williams had been due to start his new job at MSNBC in August, but that date was pushed back to mid-September. Meanwhile, NBC has a big team on the ground in New Orleans, including Williams’ successor, Lester Holt, who is anchoring “NBC Nightly News” live from Jackson Square on Friday.
...Williams had spoken of seeing a dead body float past his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton in the French Quarter. He said that gangs had “overrun” the place and claimed that he got dysentery and the hotel had no medicine. But then-manager Myra DeGersdorff said the Ritz-Carlton was secure, there had been a medical unit on-site, and told the Washington Post, “Maybe he misremembered . . . It wasn’t impossible he could have encountered a body, but I don’t think it was in the French Quarter. The French Quarter only got inches” of flooding.
Exit question: If Willie Geist gets his own show will he have a comedy segment called "Fib Or Fact" in which a certain unnamed anchor gives a report and the guests have to guess whether or not it is true?
