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Maddow's decision to interview Stewart and Olbermann's to push back so forcefully against Koppel both addressed the notion that MSNBC is the left-leaning equivalent to right-leaning FNC. They followed the suspension of Olbermann by NBC News for making unapproved campaign contributions to candidates in the midterm elections, contributions to Democrats that were equivalent to Sean Hannity's contributions to Republicans at FNC.
By suspending Olbermann and by challenging Stewart and Koppel, MSNBC appears eager to disabuse us of the notion that it is FNC's mirror image.
The contrast between MSNBC and FNC, and Stewart's suggestion of an equivalency, accounted for a protracted portion of the Maddow-Stewart discussion. At PressThink, Professor Rosen came away unconvinced that Stewart succeeded in persuading us that "he has no commerce" with such a notion. On the one hand, Stewart reminded Maddow that FNC occupies "a special place in our hearts" on The Daily Show as a target for his satire. He singled out FNC for its success at deligitimizing other news media while simultaneously granting them clout by maintaining a sense of persecution by them. Yet at other times Stewart described the two networks as being "in an arms race." He argued that first Olbermann and then Maddow, unabashed liberals, would never have appeared in primetime on MSNBC if it had not been for FNC's success with unabashed conservatives. Maddow herself admitted that Olbermann had "made it OK to come out of the closet as a liberal."
False equivalency is a classic Culture War tactic of conservatives and at the same time the lazy refuge of those who seek to speak with authority by finding a trustworthy place equidistant from dueling partisans. Koppel, for example, epitomized the quest for such a neutral refuge at the end of his Talk of the Nation discussion with Professor Jarvis: "If there is one thing we desperately need in this country, it is the ability to come together to debate the issues without rancor or partisanship."
There is no denying that MSNBC's primetime line-up is liberal and that FNC's is conservative. What I do deny is that MSNBC's ideological and cultural role in the body politic is symmetrical with FNC's. Generally speaking, the conservative wing of American politics is organized differently from the liberal-progressive wing and it is inconceivable that their news media would not be different too.
I see FNC as the journalistic wing of the Conservative-Populist Entertainment Complex (C-PEC) that also includes talkradio, the lecture circuit and book publishing. C-PEC's non-FNC luminaries include Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter; Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, a pair of non-journalists, move seamlessly between FNC and those other media.
Indeed, FNC is much more than a news channel: Beck is an entertainer and Hannity is an activist. The channel is the debate forum where the various strains of the Republican Party rehearse their talking points in advance of the Presidential primary season; Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove are all on the payroll. FNC embodies many different strains of right wing politics, with Beck leaning towards the Tea Party, Hannity representing the GOP establishment, O'Reilly the cultural Reagan Democrat, newsman Shepard Smith the straight-talking southerner. The reason this diversity of outlook works as a line-up is that conservatism in the United States is as much about identity as it is ideology. The FNC audience is concentrated by region and religion--and first and foremost by race. Identity-based stories on topics such as illegal immigration and the domestic role of Islam and reverse racism get more traction on FNC than on other news outlets. FNC's audience so homogenously Caucasian that Stephen Colbert famously joked about the 1.4% that is African-American: "7% are white people who just enjoy watching in black face…and 23% are Juan Williams."
By contrast, MSNBC represents the liberal wing of a journalistic institution, NBC News, which also includes its mainstream broadcast division and CNBC, its financial channel (Wall Street turns out to be the only major component of the conservative coalition that FNC has failed to embrace). MSNBC's line-up is a mixture of liberals, centrist Democrats (Chris Matthews) and mainstream NBC News personnel who strive for Koppelesque neutrality (Chuck Todd, Savannah Guthrie, Andrea Mitchell). MSNBC, like FNC, has a couple of non-journalist hosts: Ed Schulz is a progressive activist; onetime Republican congressman Joe Scarborough is a fiscal conservative. MSNBC has a much smaller audience among liberals than FNC does among conservatives, so it neither speaks for nor speaks to the entire left-liberal coalition. Where is its Hispanic and African-American programing, for example? It does not stand in opposition to the remainder of the news media in the way that FNC stands in opposition to centrists-and-liberals combined. On the contrary, MSNBC is in fact and in presentation an extension of NBC News, the place in that organization where liberals are allowed to come out of the closet, in Maddow's words.
UPDATE: PressThink's Rosen offers another 15 minutes of videotape musing, this time courtesy of The Macallan. He picks up on the paranoid resentment that Stewart alludes to and he picks up on FNC's entertainment role--"More Blondes per square foot"--which I was driving at with my C-PEC.
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