MSNBC Throws Well-Respected Contributor Under The Bus

By
Megan Hamilton
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MSNBC tossed right-wing media another bone this week by throwing well-respected contributor Joan Walsh under the bus. The network didn’t have the cojones to call or email her with the bad news; instead, she found out about it via her Twitter account while she was baking Christmas pies with her daughter, The Washington Post reports.

She gave her fans the sad news via this tweet:

The network cited budgetary problems as the reason for letting Walsh go. Despite said problems, however, it still has enough money to keep Trump apologist Hugh Hewitt and several other conservative commentators like Charlie Sykes (who seems to be on a crusade to rescue Republicans from Trump), and Peggy Noonan, who worries that newly-elected Democratic Sen. Doug Jones is too liberal for Alabama.

In the tweet below, Hewitt crows about MSNBC’s lurch to the right:

MSNBC also has enough money to hire conservative columnist George Will who is a font of Tea Party misinformation (example: climate change is a hoax). Will also penned a horrible and unapologetic column about rape that blamed “progressivism” for turning “victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,” which, he claimed has inspired “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. ‘sexual assault.'”

Megyn Kelly and Nicolle Wallace found refuge at MSNBC, although Kelly’s show has been panned from the get-go. Greta Van Susteren also made a home there briefly, until her show went down in flames.

So the ranks of the conserverati (my word, thanks) continue swelling alongside the likes of well-respected liberals like Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, and Lawrence O’Donnell. MSNBC recently attempted to drop O’Donnell, but a social media firestorm, fortunately, changed that.  These hosts enjoy consistently high ratings, which means it was foolish for MSNBC to try to fire O’Donnell.

Now we’re losing Walsh, and that has the social media roaring, having inspired the trending #KeepJoanWalsh tag.

And this just begs the question:

What The Hell Is Wrong With MSNBC?

Slate’s Will Oremus, thinks he may have the answer. And in a column he wrote last May, he listed several of them, in fact. Including:

  • News outlets are openly trawling for conservative audiences. Fox News has been clobbered with a thunderstorm of sexual harassment claims, Quartz notes. And with the resulting personnel overhaul which has almost certainly hurt Fox News’ brand, MSNBC has been handed the chance to sneak in the door. MSNBC’s Morning Joe, hosted by former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough gives credence to the idea that conservatives are happy to flip from Fox News if the opportunity arises.
  • Maybe MSNBC is trying to better serve the audience it already has, Oremus suggests, tongue firmly in cheek (perhaps.) After all, The New York Times is suggesting that leftist-thinking may bog down some ideological echo chambers and herd them down the path to lazy-thinking, and (again perhaps) to partisan patting on the back. Especially since the Times has recently hired notorious right-winger Bret Stephens, whose views, (like Wills’s) on climate change and campus rape are likely to rankle progressives. And after all, maybe we should be making the world a safer place for fatuous middle-aged white conservative males doing their best to conserve the status quo (hahaha, of course not. Throw ’em to the wolves.)

Fortunately for Joan Walsh, it looks like her story may have a happy ending. She was let go on Friday and picked up on Saturday by CNN. So MSNBC’s loss will be CNN’s gain.

I don’t know if this qualifies as a Christmas miracle, but Walsh certainly deserves this. Good for her!

Featured image by News Feed via YouTube video

 

 

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