Pirate's Cove

The humorous headline for this Politico article: “Is losing good for business?” Why is that humorous? Both on the front page and at the top of the single article page, they feature a picture of Rachel Maddow. You know, the Rachel Maddow who was prominent on that loser of a liberal radio station, Air Deadbeat, er, Air America, whose business model was “give us money. Our advertising rates are about the same as Craig’s List.” What? OK, that’s a bit unfair, the advertising rates were closing to a small newspapers classified rates. Anyhow

Having recently doubled down on its liberal image through a new branding campaign, the network now has a chance to become the cable voice of the opposition to the new Republican House majority – in much the way Fox News commentators speak out against President Barack Obama, to higher and higher ratings.

MSNBC hasn’t disclosed its specific plans, but media analysts said it seemed like MSNBC was embracing that role on Election Night.

While Fox’s coverage was led by two anchors from its straight-news dayside and a panel that mixed liberals with conservatives, MSNBC led with a panel of its opinionated primetime hosts without a single conservative at the table.

The Politico opinion is that MSNBC will become a full fledged progressive media outlet, not just with their block of opinionators – Tingles Matthews, Keith Olberman, Rachael Maddow, and Unhinged Lawrence O’Donnell – but with their straight news time.

MSNBC’s current brand emerged out of a position of opposition, when Keith Olbermann and Matthews began picking up on antiwar and anti-Bush sentiment in the later years of the Bush administration. Before that, Griffin readily admits, the brand of the company that was founded by NBC and Microsoft in 1996 was adrift.

“For the first 10 years, we did great work, but we lacked that one thing that sort of tied us together,” he said.

For the first 10 years, MSNBC did a good job, and, was my my preferred cable news station, till about 2002/2003, when they started going moonbat. That’s about the time period their ratings started dropping, too.

The question, from a business perspective, is whether there are enough of liberal viewers to make it worthwhile for the parent company for MSNBC to go the more partisan route.

Nope, sorry, it’s not that there aren’t enough liberals. If we go by the notion that 21% are self described liberals, and consider that there are around 200 million adults in the US, there is a pool of 42 million available. Yet, every single night, MSNBC is blown out by Fox News during the opinion times (MSNBC is blown out during the daytime, too). Why? Even liberals don’t want to tune in, because the shows, well, suck. Like with Liberal radio, they haven’t learned to mix in humor and other stories, and even hardcore liberals don’t want to seethe that much. Particularly after a long day of seething.

But, hey, you go for that hardcore progressive lefty barking moonbat makeover, MSNBC. You’ll learn what liberal radio did: advertising revenues become lower than operating costs. And that can only last for so long before the plug is pulled.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU. sit back and Relax. we’ll dRive!