Opinion: The MSNBC long knives come out for Andrea Mitchell…

Oh boy, NBC has a leak problem with Jossip. In the past six months there have been a series of damaging leaks aimed at pushing an agenda. The latest came today when the site featured some anonymous sniping aimed at Andrea Mitchell.

Watching Andrea Mitchell’s hour-long 1pm show on MNSBC, we can see why her critics, from inside 30 Rock, are bickering.

Mitchell, who we’ve always loved on the NBC Nightly News and her daytime MSNBC appearances, doesn’t appear confident in her anchor chair. Introducing guests, and saying goodbyes, takes extraordinarily long. And the conversation is nothing less than stilted.

More than one MSNBC insider has relayed the gossipmongering going on inside MSNBC, which ranges from “nobody’s impressed” to “she should go back to being a full-time correspondent.”

What’s really behind this? Mitchell’s show has been a welcome respite from the mess that has been dayside. Mitchell brings in higher profile political guests that the rest of dayside can only salivate over from afar. Her delivery may be restrained but the content has been first class. Which is more than can be said for some of the interviews I’ve been watching on a lot of dayside the past few months with the same bench of regular pundits we see day in and day out. Today’s leak sounds more like sour grapes to me.

But that shouldn’t be surprising. The past couple of months Shannon High-Bassalik has been implementing a series of producer tryouts on MSNBC to apparently try and jumpstart dayside’s sliding ratings vs. HLN from November through January (for backstory on that read this. I should add that I don’t have numbers for February and March at this time…the blog was down so how could I?…and things may have changed since January). ICN has heard that this pitting of producers against each other to secure a permanent position has made a lot of people unhappy. So along comes Mitchell to dayside and she gets better guests and a higher profile and more buzz, including the unofficial official leaking of the ratings of her show’s debut to TVNewser…and I’m not surprised to be reading anonymous attacks on her.