Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Is MSNBC the New "Air America?"

Yesterday, I expected the Obama cheerleaders in the main stream media to gloat over the capture of Osama Bin Laden, but the anchors at MSNBC were so partisan, it seems that they should just rename the network “Air America,” the now defunct liberal radio network that lasted about six years.

This posting is not about whether or not President Obama deserves a great deal of credit for the capture of Osama Bin Laden.   He does.  As I wrote yesterday, he made a very gutsy decision that could have gone wrong and embarrassed him completely.  However, partial credit for the successful raid needs to be shared with the Bush Administration, which started the operation four years ago by appearing to obtain crucial information about a Bin Laden courier from enhanced interrogation procedures.

To their credit, President Obama and his press secretary, Jay Carney, have made every effort to indicate that the killing of Bin Laden was an American victory to be shared by all Americans, Democrat and Republicans.  Evidently, the people at MSNBC didn’t get the White House memo because there have been non-stop rants about how misguided Obama’s critics have been and a definite attempt to minimize any credit due to the Bush Administration.

It didn’t take MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews very long to launch into a tirade against the so-called “birthers” who have questioned whether Obama was born in the United States.  I really don’t know what that had to do with the successful Navy Seal operation.  Ed Schultz was practically foaming at the mouth declaring Obama to be a great leader and condemning those conservatives who dared to ever question his leadership.  Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell did their fair share of conservative and Republican bashing yesterday, too.

Fox News has often been criticized, unfairly in my opinion, for being a shill for the Republican Party.  There is no doubt that Fox News’s Sean Hannity is a blatant conservative Republic partisan, but he makes no bones about it.  You know immediately when you turn on his show where he stands and how he will tilt the issues.  However, the rest of the hosts on Fox, with the exception of Glen Beck, are very fair in their analysis of politics and question Republicans and vigorously as Democrats.

Aside from “Air America,” I have never seen a network so blatantly partisan as MSNBC.  Many critics of the network have joked that it should be renamed MSDNC because it appears to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.  Nevertheless, I have no desire to see the network taken off the air because I see nothing wrong with them offering a totally liberal network in the marketplace of free expression.  My only wish is that MSNBC would be more honest about its obvious bias.  As I have often said, we have way too many media advocates and far too little real journalists.

Unfortunately for MSNBC, they keep losing in the ratings.  Evidently the American viewing public has not bought into the constant drumbeat of liberal orthodoxy.  The network regularly gets its brains beat out by Fox News in the television ratings war.  By apparently mimicking the formula at “Air America,” MSNBC runs to risk of ending up the same way.

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