What Should GE and Microsoft To Do With Their Libs?

The secret's out. MSNBC, we are told by its executives in a NYT article today, never sat around a conference room table with a dogma chip on their shoulders and decided it would be great to attack Bush and Cheney long enough and hard enough so that their lackluster techie news cable network would become America's liberal TV network.

Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.

“It happened naturally,” Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel’s passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m. “There isn’t a dogma we’re putting through. There is a ‘Go for it.’”

As well-spun as that sounds, there's a modicum of truth to it, especially when you consider that Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and John Gibson were all early MSNBC on-air newsfolk.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Clinton's impeachment, as MSNBC suddenly began seeing surging viewership on a show hosted by an angry leftist by the name of Keith Olbermann. They liked the dough, and now it looks like the networks sole holdout against flaming liberalism, Tucker Carlson, is about to be shunted aside to make room for 9/11 nut and angry lesbian Rosie O'Donnell.

Giving O'Donnell airtime is a much more whacky proposition than putting Olbermann in front of a camera. He's just a run of the mill, well vocalized lib. She's a certifiable paranoid crazy.

So the co-owners of the network, GE and Microsoft, appear content that the child they birthed to appeal to geeks at the dawn of the Internet age has grown up to be a haven for rants against America and American values. That's not exactly a conventional marketing scheme.

Should we buy Whirlpool instead of GE? Should we shun Windows and Vista (as if that's possible, Apple fans notwithstanding)?

I say no, with one condition: If its owners talk as frankly about the network as the network's hosts do. Here's the not too cryptic Olbermann:

“If you go into a burger place, and you go in there for the fish, you might want the fish occasionally but it’s probably a mistake,” he said. “Could you be utterly different politically and succeed in this format? You’d basically be throwing your audience away.”

Burgers apparently being the food of the left and fish the food of the right. No MSNBC execs would talk for attribution to the Times about the network's leftist leanings. Let them admit it openly, let the corporate owners say they're pursuing the money that comes in from left field, and I'm ok with it.

If they pretend that they're just another fair and balanced news outlet (get the hint, Fox?) then I'd be concerned about giving my money to corporate liars.