NBC Demotes Olbermann and Matthews
Posted on September 8, 2008
The New York Times reports that NBC has removed Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as anchors for the presidential debates and election night coverage. They've both been demoted back to analyst. David Gregory will become the political anchor.
After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.It's true that the on-air sniping between Olbermann and Matthews has reached ridiculous extremes lately. But if MSNBC had been first in the ratings, instead of third, we think execs would have happily allowed those two to stay. But their behavior was an embarrassment without any accompanying ratings boost, so they were demoted.The change - which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle - is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel's perceived shift to the political left. "The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what's supposed to be straight news programming," said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.
Executives at the channel's parent company, NBC Universal, had high hopes for MSNBC's coverage of the political conventions. Instead, the coverage frequently descended into on-air squabbles between the anchors, embarrassing some workers at NBC's news division, and quite possibly alienating viewers. Although MSNBC nearly doubled its total audience compared with the 2004 conventions, its competitive position did not improve, as it remained in last place among the broadcast and cable news networks. In prime time, the channel averaged 2.2 million viewers during the Democratic convention and 1.7 million viewers during the Republican convention.