Cable News One Upsmanship…

In what may turn out to be the 2010 must read of the year, Gabriel Sherman writes in New York Magazine about the cut throat world of cable news. Why is it a must read? Oh because of things like this…

And so Klein set out to poach Olbermann. At the time, Olbermann had a window to negotiate in his MSNBC contract and Klein made a hard sell. He told Olbermann he could bring Countdown to CNN—the two even discussed which members of Olbermann’s staff would make the move with him. “Jon and I were in very deep discussions on a regular basis for me to go over there,” says Olbermann. “One of the premises was we would have put MSNBC out of business.”

And this…

Walton pushed back on Klein’s plan to hire Olbermann. “I’m not gonna be the guy who’s gonna turn CNN into an opinion network,” he told executives in meetings. But in Klein’s view, CNN already was an opinion network. For an hour each night, Walton tolerated Lou Dobbs’s anti-immigration tirades. Klein pressed Walton to reconsider, but Walton held firm. “I bailed out when it became apparent that the people above [Klein] were less than sanguine about this,” Olbermann tells me.

And this…

Klein faced a possibly insoluble cable-news riddle: How do you build the kind of excitement that draws in viewers without being partisan? At a Time Warner board meeting this spring, Walton was forced to defend CNN’s ratings issues. The pressure on Klein ratcheted up. In April, Klein began talks with British talk-show personality Piers Morgan. In June, he announced that he would hire the famously black-socked and disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer. Klein faced stiff internal resistance to hiring Spitzer. When one CNN executive expressed to Klein the concern that viewers risked being turned off by Spitzer’s hooker scandal, Klein had snapped, “I don’t give a fuck.”

And this…

This past summer, MSNBC announced it was developing a 10 p.m. show for Lawrence O’Donnell to replace reruns of Olbermann. Recently, MSNBC tried to buy the Huffington Post (Huffington Post founder Ken Lerer rejected the offer). The network hired Spike Lee to shoot a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign and developed its own obtuse slogan: “Lean Forward.”

And this…

Recently, Joe Scarborough quietly called political advisers after his name was circulated as a possible candidate in the blogosphere, but he was counseled against it. “Everyone says the same thing,” Scarborough tells me. “Why do you leave where you are to be the 99th-ranking member of the United States Senate?”

And this…

With the explosion of anti-Bush rage after Hurricane Katrina, Olbermann saw an opening. “I wanted to take over this little corner of the world,” he says. He blasted onto the scene by practicing the well-worn political tactic of punching up, attacking Bill O’Reilly, who, at the time—it’s hard to remember now—was TV’s king right-winger. “O’Reilly punched down on Olbermann and brought attention to Keith,” Phil Griffin tells me. Tensions got so bad that in 2009, Zucker and then–Murdoch adviser Gary Ginsberg discussed a secret truce after O’Reilly began attacking G.E. CEO Jeff Immelt. But these days, Olbermann largely ignores his old foe. “There’s just something missing. There’s some fire that’s gone,” Olbermann says. “He looks tired, he sounds tired.” Olbermann has refocused his artillery on Glenn Beck. “He is the spearhead of the moment. It underscores where the right is,” Olbermann says. “He really is the definition of the demagogue.”

And this…

There’s tension between morning and night at MSNBC. “I don’t have an hour to waste for someone just reading Democratic or Republican Party talking points,” says Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, who’s positioned himself as a moderate. “We’ve created a safe house,” he says of his show.

“I have no comment about him,” Olbermann says.

And this…

Last spring, after David Shuster tweeted that he was guest-hosting Countdown while Olbermann was out sick, Olbermann erupted when a blog mentioned Shuster’s tweet and he fired off an e-mail to him saying, “Don’t ever talk about me and medical issues again.” Olbermann’s executive producer later told Shuster that there’s a rule against mentioning Olbermann on Twitter.

And this…

This past May, Klein conducted a secret survey of about 700 people. “Of course we tested to make sure we’re not fucking crazy,” he told me. At first, Spitzer scored abysmally on likability and awareness. Outside of New York, many people simply didn’t know who he was. But after viewing a series of two-minute clips of Spitzer guest-hosting for Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC that spring, Spitzer’s scores improved. Survey participants liked Spitzer’s strong anti–Wall Street views.

And this…

For years, the values of news snobs held considerable sway at MSNBC. “There was a question, Could the subsidiary take a political position?” remembers a former senior executive. Tim Russert, then NBC News’s Washington bureau chief and moderator of Meet the Press, was an Olympian figure inside NBC News, an information hub, a kingmaker, and the scorekeeper to official Washington. To Russert, the rise of a freewheeling cable channel attached to NBC News was worrisome. In response to Chris Matthews’s relentless attacks on the Clintons following the Lewinsky scandal, the White House had threatened to pull guests off Meet the Press. Congressmen would complain, too. “Then Tim would call Andy Lack or Tom Brokaw and say, ‘What the hell?’ ” the executive recalls. Brokaw would often call Griffin and tell him to rein in Matthews. Around this time, G.E. CEO Immelt confronted NBC News head Neal Shapiro. “MSNBC is a dot on the side of a pool ball,” Immelt told Shapiro, “but it’s embarrassing. I don’t like being No. 3.” And with the surge in patriotism following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, NBC CEO Bob Wright told Shapiro that MSNBC should try and outflank Fox on the right. “We have to be more conservative then they are,” Wright told Shapiro pointedly. Swirling graphics of the American flag soon became a fixture on the network along with the tagline “America’s News Channel.”

And there’s this which makes me ask the question, who’s pulling out the long knives for Dan Abrams. I expect some internal combustion at 30 Rock over this section since Dan’s still with NBC…

Abrams’s lack of experience soon became evident. He blew up at producers if a particular graphic or camera shot was off. He micromanaged decisions. During one conference call shortly after he got the job, Abrams shocked Hardball producers when he told Chris Matthews what questions to ask a guest on that night’s show. Adding to the toxic climate, the prime-time talent, most vocally Olbermann, didn’t listen to him. “Dan never really ran it,” Olbermann tells me. “He’s always tried to ride my coattails.” Staffers were in near open revolt after Abrams proposed a new tagline, “MSNBC: Keepin’ It Real.”

And this previously unknown revelation about the cancellation of Crossfire. Take THAT Jon Stewart…

On the morning of January 4, 2005, Tucker Carlson told CNN political director Sam Feist he had accepted a job at MSNBC and was resigning his post as co-host of the much-derided Crossfire. When Carlson left to go to lunch at the Palm, Klein issued a press release of his own that said he was canceling Crossfire, essentially spinning the story that he was ousting Carlson and canceling the show. At lunch, Carlson was surprised when he received a call from the Times’ Bill Carter asking him to respond to Klein’s press release. Carlson was livid, but there was nothing he could do. It was a PR masterstroke for Klein, who earned plaudits in the press for kneecapping Crossfire.

And I could keep going feeding you quotes…but you get the idea. READ IT ALL! READ IT TWICE!