What’s Not for 2008

NBC Budget Cuts – You’d think there’s nothing left to cut at NBC News after all the cutting that had taken place in 2006 and 2007. And you’d be wrong. Another round of cuts were implemented at the end of 2008 and it affected on the air and off the air talent all over the place.

CNN Budget Cuts – Unlike NBC’s very public axe wielding, CNN’s cuts came about suddenly as a bunch of on the air talent lost their jobs. Most notable loss; CNN veteran Miles O’Brien. CNN has yet to publicly account for all this talent loss, which flied in the face of the public posturing done by Jonathan Klein regarding how his network was in the money.

Fox and Friends Weekend – The first half of 2008 saw FNC blow up the perfectly acceptable Page Hopkins/Kelly Wright/Greg Kelly team and an assortment of talents tried out the chairs for months before the lineup was finally settled upon. Both Hopkins and Kelly would be out of FNC by the end of the year. 2/3 of the current hosts are bland cookie cutter types and I’ve given up on the show. I’ll leave it to you to figure out who the “bland cookie cutter types” would be.

FNC talent turnover – In addition to Hopkins and Kelly, longtime talents Laurie Dhue, Eric Burns, Brigitte Quinn, E.D. Hill, and others exited the network in 2008.

End of an era – The last of MSNBC’s roster from 1998, Chris Jansing was sent packing out to NBC’s LA Bureau as a correspondent, thus robbing the network of its most professional news anchor. MSNBC Dayside hasn’t been the same since; a point driven home repeatedly throughout 2008 whenever she would pop up on MSNBC for fill-in duty. What a waste of talent.

Working the Ref – In 2008 there was a lot of righteous indignation aimed at the networks in order to gain a strategic advantage. Hillary Clinton supporters slag MSNBC and NBC, Obama slags FNC, Edwards slags FNC, the Chinese Government slags Jack Cafferty, Anti-Communist Chinese protesters slagged NBC over its Olympics coverage, CNBC and FBN tried to slag each other via the MSM and the blogosphere, the White House taking on NBC over alleged selective editing, the Republican Convention’s very public booing of NBC…the list goes on and on.

Programming as a business decision – For over a year Bill O’Reilly would complain that NBC had gone left as a business decision but failed in my eyes to offer up any proof that was incontrovertable. But then this year NBC did just that, first by simulcasting the then “Race for the White House” program on Rachel Maddow’s Air America show (to take advantage of Maddow’s presence on the MSNBC program), and then later the wholesale dumping of Dan Abrams and his less than six month old MSNBC program “Verdict” in favor of Maddow. The gambit worked. MSNBC’s ratings shot up big time and began seriously breathing down CNN’s neck in the primetime Demo. If not for the lack of fresh programming at 10pm, I believe MSNBC would have overtaken CNN by the end of 2008. Open question: Can MSNBC hold serve now that the election is over? Which leads to…

Dan Abrams – 2008 started out promising for Abrams. He had a newly minted, not too ideological show called “Verdict” and it was making inroads on CNN. Just not enough inroads to suit Phil Griffin or Keith Olbermann as both pushed to get Abrams out of there. By the end of the year Abrams was indeed out, though he will still occasionally pop up on NBC and MSNBC as a legal analyst (with varying degrees of a beard showing…Dan either grow the beard permanently or lose the beard…you don’t want a drinking game being named after you and your on again, off again beard do you?) and a new business opportunity: Abrams Research; the latter picking up a lot of flack in the media for the new ground it breaks in the area of journalists and consulting. Time will tell whether the critics are right or wrong.

Programming as a business decision: Part 2 – FNC saw MSNBC’s leftward turn and decided to mirror it by giving Sean Hannity sole possession of 9pm thanks to Alan Colmes’ departure from the program that half beared his name. Now FNC has two Conservative hours at 8 and 9 to match MSNBC’s two liberal hours at 8 and 9.

Programming as a business decision: Part 3 – CNN basically threw in the towel at 8pm and joined the “all opinion hour” with Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull. I would really like to meet the brainiac who came up with that title. Jonathan Klein and Brown have been falling all over themselves trying to seperate CNN’s opinion foray from MSNBC and FNC’s. However, the fact remains that going in to Brown’s hire Klein said that the show would not be opinion (and Brown would publicly say she doesn’t do opinion), but by the end of 2008 not only was the exact opposite the case but CNN was openly trumpeting the “new” Campbell Brown.

Funny Numbers – CNN entered new and dangerous territory this year when it began tagging the 10pm hour of special 2008 election coverage as “AC 360”. Neither MSNBC or FNC were using their standard 10pm program titles to describe their respective hours. This had the desired effect CNN wanted, it boosted 360 in the ratings. This drew howls from the other networks and led to a pow-wow between the big three and Nielsen. Nielsen shirked its duty and instead of slapping CNN down, it punted. What happened next was entirely predictable (in fact I was openly advocating it). FNC began tagging its 10pm hour as On the Record (even though Brit Hume was on the majority of the time under those circumstances).

Three headed monster – The latter half of 2008 saw MSNBC come up with a ill-thought out programming change where the 9-1pm hours of MSNBC would be handled by three anchors at the same time. It’s been an uneven experiment riddled with technical glitches which is exactly what one would expect from such an endeavour.

Jesse Jackson’s N-Bomb – This makes the not hot list not because of what Jackson said but because of the way FNC horribly bungled handling the story. Almost immediately word leaked out that the original video that aired on The O’Reilly Factor wasn’t the whole story. Within two days ICN knew the dirty details, but was blocked from revealing what it knew thanks to a promise to a source not to reveal in exchange for learning what happened. But ICN wasn’t the only blog hearing what happened and as the pieces started drip, drip, dripping out, FNC was forced into a defensive position but wouldn’t reveal the whole story. ICN and other blogs kept the pressure on by repeatedly returning to the story until FNC was finally forced to address the issue.

Jeff Zucker – To say Zucker had a good year would be a vast overstatement. If he wasn’t catching flack for NBC Entertainment’s continued dismal performance, he was catching flack for the Olbermann/Matthews pairing, cutting past the bone at NBC News, and general criticisms of why he was still in charge of NBC Universal.

MSNBC misses the HDTV boat – Everyone was expecting MSNBC to join FNC and CNN on the HDTV bandwagon in 2008. It didn’t happen. Worse, it was pushed back to Q2 2009. This really hurt the network, particularly as the political season really heated up with the conventions and the general election.

Tony Snow passes away – Snow had been seriously ill for some time but his death still reverberated throughout both his current employer CNN and his prior employer FNC.

Lee Cowan – Cowan held the coveted position of covering the Obama campaign in 2008. His reward? Getting shipped out to the LA Bureau. Cowan is a first rate reporter and it looked to me like he was deserving of a better assignment.

Weather Plus – With the purchase of The Weather Channel, NBC Universal had one too many weather operations. Most of Weather Plus was eliminated; the remainder folded into the Weather Channel umbrella.

The Huffington Post – Huff Po spiked a Rachel Sklar story on Keith Olbermann that was, in the opinion of this author, fair in its criticisms. Not a shining moment in the history of The Huffington Post.

Ha…ha…ha… – CNN entered the comedy forray in 2008 with D.L. Hughley. So much for serious journalism…

Softball – Lastly, a big ICN raspberry goes out to all the media writers who turned in puff pieces and wouldn’t call a spade a spade. You know who you are and you owe it to your readers to do better.