Viewers send a message by getting Greta Van Susteren canceled – but are MSNBC execs fully listening?
Greta Van Susteren’s weekday MSNBC show was officially canceled today, and it happened the old fashioned way: low ratings. In the few months she was on the air, her ratings started off weak and never did recover. The network’s viewers consistently tuned Greta out, and managed to send a clear signal to the MSNBC executives: “don’t pull this kind of crap in our neighborhood.” But it’s still not clear whether MSNBC is listening.
MSNBC’s most highly rated (and highly regarded) shows are hosted by Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Chris Hayes, three smart liberals who call it like they see it. Chris Matthews is a moderate, but he also calls it like he sees it. All of the above are willing to criticize either party, depending on the specifics of any given storyline. One would think that as additional time slots have opened up, the network would try to fill them with more hosts who, whatever their political leanings, call it like they see it.
But instead MSNBC decided to fill its fairly prominent 6pm time slot with a notorious false equivocator. During her brief time on the network, Greta Van Susteren consistently insisted that both sides of any given story were the same, regardless of what was really going on. On last Friday’s episode, when one of her guests was laying out the facts of a particular story, Greta cut him off by yelling “whatever” and then she launched into yet another generic brainless sermon about how sides are the same. The problem wasn’t that Greta brought her Fox News conservative bias with her to MSNBC. The problem was that she’d reverted to her CNN days of false equivalence.
Oddly enough, there are conservative personas on MSNBC who try to call it like they see it, and they tend to fare better. Nicolle Wallace (from the George W. Bush administration) has begun hosting the throwaway 4pm time slot, and while her ratings aren’t great, she’s holding her own. MSNBC’s liberal viewers find the conservative Wallace acceptable because – as with her liberal host counterparts – she tries to be honest and informative. She’s not an apologist for her own party, and she doesn’t pretend both sides are the same, so she fits in. The same can be said for Steve Schmidt and some other conservative Republican commentators who pop up in segments on the network throughout the day.
Yet even this doesn’t seem to have taught MSNBC’s leadership anything. It’s now giving a weekend show to Hugh Hewitt, a conservative who can be informative when he wants to be, but who most often seems concerned about remaining in the good graces of Donald Trump’s base. That makes him a bizarre choice for the network, considering that MSNBC’s liberal audience will accept conservative commentators but not Trump apologists. And come to think of it MSNBC still hasn’t given a weekday show to highly regarded weekend host Joy-Ann Reid, who has one of the most loyal audiences in all of cable news. Apart from (grudgingly) re-signing O’Donnell just before his contract expired, MSNBC hasn’t made a ratings-savvy move since this past election cycle began.
So now all eyes are on Ari Melber, who will be taking over Greta Van Susteren’s time slot on a permanent basis. He’s best known for appearing on various MSNBC shows as a segment commentator, and for occasionally guest hosting. Melber is generally well regarded by MSNBC’s audience because he’s smart and informative. He’s a moderate liberal, which means that perhaps MSNBC has remembered who its audience is. But the key here is whether MSNBC will ask Melber to play the role of false equivocator, or whether he’ll be allowed to simply be himself. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report
