Dump Phil Griffin?

Mediaite’s Joe Concha argues that MSNBC President Phil Griffin should be removed from his position. Concha goes on to list his reasons. I will examine each in turn and give them grades of 0-10 in terms of being a firing offense…

“The Declaration”

Griffin told The New Republic in March he expected to beat Fox by the end of the calendar year. An odd declaration given it’s a non-election year (when breaking news/human interest stories are more apt to outflank political analysis) and the lack of a big-time progressive star (say, Jon Stewart or Bill Maher) being signed by the network. Instead, Griffin misread the tea leaves of higher ratings leading up to the 2012 election and thought the audience would remain loyal to MSNBC personalities.

Ok, if we dropped a network president every time they said something that was woefully off the mark every single network would have a help wanted sign hanging on its front door. Literally. Run down the networks…NBC, ABC, CBS, FNC, FBN, CNBC, CNN, HLN, MSNBC…each has had a network president say something that was ridiculous at one time or another…some multiple times.

ICN Firing Grade: -1,000,000. It was a dumb thing to say. But that’s all it was. Learn and move on.

“We’re not the place” for breaking news. “Our brand is not that.”

When asked why his ratings were tanking in June, Griffin punted on a major aspect of being, you know, a cable news station. By stating publicly that his network isn’t terribly interested in breaking news stories—where the biggest ratings can often come from—he essentially turned MSNBC into the Olympic games (which occur once every two years). You want coverage of terror attacks like the Boston Bombings, natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy or the Oklahoma tornadoes…or human interest stories like the Cleveland kidnappings? Griffin inexplicably says don’t even bother coming to MSNBC unless politics are at the forefront.

It is well known among those who have followed this network and its parent for any length of time that MSNBC is not viewed as capable of competing with CNN on breaking news, so they don’t try. I was hearing this very point as far back as six years ago. It was the institutional view of the 30 Rock brain trust that they couldn’t compete. All they wanted to do was not look bad. As Concha himself points out, many times MSNBC doesn’t actually fare that badly with breaking news. However, there are times when it doesn’t perform very well at all.

But this is not a new thing, nor is it a byproduct of MSNBC having gone left. The move away from doing news and doing it well has been going on in bits and pieces since as far back as after the Afghan War when MSNBC launched an ill-fated talk format (Curtis and Kuby, anyone?)

All Griffin did here was own up to it. Yes, the optics are bad but the fact remains that the move away from breaking news and in depth news started well before Phil Griffin took over MSNBC.

ICN Firing Grade: 3.

Moving Chris Hayes to 8:00 PM and Ed Schultz to weekends and again back to weekdays.

Mr. Hayes is an intelligent guy. His weekend morning show before moving to primetime was wonky, thoughtful and perfect for that timeslot. But moving him to primetime–absolutely the wrong place and time for his kind of show and personality–has resulted in the opposite of a rising tide lifting all boats. Keith Olbermann averaged 1.2 million viewers when he fired in 2011. Hayes has been averaging half that since taking the reins of any cable network’s most important timeslot. Maddow’s and O’Donnell’s numbers have noticeably suffered as a result.

Yes, this was a bad move. No question about it. Lots of people, myself included, questioned this move before it even took place.

ICN Firing Grade: 8. It has hurt MSNBC’s bottom line and given CNN reason to hope when it should have none.

Hiring Alec Baldwin

If Baldwin did a show that actually featured guests who 98 percent of the audience actually recognizes (See: Not Bill De Blasio, Gary Lockwood, Keir Dullea, Cristina Tzintzun and Mary Brosnahan in the first five weeks of the show alone), it might be succeeding. But the tedious hour has instead produced ratings that have been substantially lower than the cheap and easy repeats of prison documentaries (Lockup), which once occupied the slot. Then there’s the cost of signing Baldwin, hiring producers, writers, other resources…with little return on investment.

This is a sideshow. Or freak show. But it doesn’t have a major impact one way or another on MSNBC’s bottom line. Just in the papers. And that too will pass…one way or another.

ICN Firing Grade: 1. Baldwin’s show is once a week in a throw away timeslot. It’s an experiment. Experiments sometimes fail. But they usually don’t cost someone their job for having dreamed it up. It didn’t Rick Kaplan (Maury & Connie, anyone?)

…that Martin Bashir still has a job.

It’s a consistent, disturbing theme at MSNBC: Griffin allowing anchors to say just about anything without consequences. Could you imagine if Neil Cavuto or Jake Tapper, who occupy the same timeslot on Fox and CNN, respectively, suggested anyone s*it in anyone’s mouth on national television, as Bashir did last week?

And it’s not as he’s killing it in the ratings. Day after day, Bashir easily owns the lowest-rated show in his timeslot among the big three. If Griffin were smart, he’d use this episode as an excuse to get rid of Bashir. But as of this writing (Sunday evening), nothing has been said or done. No suspensions have been handed down. Maybe Bashir will announce his punishment in Politico…

No argument here. Bashir has been an embarrassment for MSNBC since he first showed up on its air. And I wager he’s been an embarrassment to NBC News too. Whatever happened to those planned Dateline contributions anyways?

ICN Firing Grade: 10. The sooner Bashir’s gone, the better.

There are other things Concha didn’t mention that could have been mentioned…

– Dropping Cenk Uygur.
– Demolishing the news/opinion barrier which has had an adverse effect on some of MSNBC’s daytime news anchors as they stick their necks out and make themselves targets. I don’t need to name the names. We know who they are.
– Putting pundits on instead of traditional NBC/MSNBC journalists during big news/breaking news stories and expecting MSNBC’s credibility, not to mention its ratings, to not take a hit.
– Over-reliance on Progressive voices throughout the day. Echo chamber, as a description, doesn’t do it justice. This is monotone TV. It’s boring.
– Ronan Farrow. This has the potential of really sinking Griffin’s ship if Ronan stumbles out of the gate and doesn’t walk on water after his recent gushing PR blitz ran wild. Griffin has all but deified him as the “second coming”. No way he lives up to that. Nobody could.

But, the bottom line is that none of these examples…even in total…should get Griffin replaced. Every one of them had a 30 Rock sign off at some point. 30 Rock was perfectly happy as long as the ratings continued to go up. Now that things have gone south a bit, if Griffin does get removed it will be more along the lines of what happened with Jon Klein at CNN…Griffin will be a convenient scapegoat for decisions others agreed to.