The N.Y. Times‘ Brian Stelter is reporting this morning that MSNBC has demoted passionate analyst-commentators and news-show hosts Chris Matthews (“Hardball”) and Keith Olbermann (“Countdown”) — the two reasons I watch MSNBC because they’re unabashed in stating what they know in their head and their gut and are among the few TV news guys who aren’t cautiously corporate milquetoast stooges. Matthews and Olbermann are now out of the catbird-anchor seat — slapped down, chastised and demoted by the fearful.

MSNBC host David Gregory, it’s been announced, will now anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Olbermann and Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage. The problem with this is that Gregory is, to the best of my knowledge, a corporate stooge who’s very much in the tank for the conservatives. How else are we to interpret his having danced on-stage during the infamous MC Rove routine? Would any fair-minded, self-respecting newsman have done such a thing?
The Olbermann-Matthew demotion “is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left,” Stelter’s story says. And so now MSNBC has elevated a guy who danced on-stage with Karl Rove as their new top-dog political news anchor?
Fox News has its partisanship attitude/base, and for one brief shining moment, MSNBC wore its lefty stripes proudly and boldly. No longer, it would seem. The uglies have won over. Gregory is the epitome of everything I despise about news coverage that is rightish, compromised, kowtowing and corporate. Plus he has a rounded monkey nose. I hate the man — I hate thinking about him, listening to him, looking at him.
This is a black, black day for MSNBC freaks like myself. What has happened is nothing short of a right-wing coup by the corporate bad guys and old-school traditionalists in the Tom Brokaw mode.
10:15 am update: The opening graph of this piece that I posted earlier was sloppy and muddled — apologies offered.