I'm a huge fan of MSNBC. I watch Olbermann every night and while Chris Matthews can really be obnoxious, I'm too much of a political junkie to miss Hardball. The new Verdict show is not bad either. But when it comes to the morning it's a whole different story.
MSNBC's morning program is "Morning Joe" hosted by former GOP congress creature Joe Scarborough. Again, I am a political junkie (as I am sure just about everyone who visits this site is) so I try to watch MSNBC in the morning because they do cover more politics than the other cable networks. I was actually getting into the show more because Joe was off for a few weeks while his wife had a baby. However, Scarborough's now back and his consistently right wing or just plain stupid comments are really making it intolerable for me to keep watching this show. To give you an example. One day the show was about the environment and Joe's question, to the environmental expert guest, was "I keep finding empty plastic water bottles all over my house, what can I do about that?" (Um, not buy bottled water?) You must have seen the quote from Joe about how Obama would be crushed by Hillary too.
Today's show really took the cake though. Andrea Mitchell was on and she and Joe were discussing the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. After Andrea opined that this poll was the best in the business, she announced that it showed Obama was up 47-41. Pretty good news for Obama right? Wrong! Andrea and Joe then spent the whole time talking about all of the weaknesses for Obama the poll allegedly revealed (McCain ahead among suburban white women! Gasp! Obama behind among white men! Shock!) They actually never mentioned that being up by 6 points after all Obama has been through is probably pretty good news for Obama and certainly there must have been some bad news for McCain in there somewhere AS HE IS DOWN 6 POINTS IN THE POLL!
Compare this discussion to the one Matt Lauer and Howard Fineman had about the same poll. Fineman started out by saying the poll was good news for Obama because the key issue the voters mentioned was that they wanted change over experience. When the issue of suburban white women was mentioned by Lauer, Fineman said that the current numbers should be of concern to Obama but that he thought they were temporarily low because a number of those women were strong Hillary supporters and they were still getting over the shock of her being beaten by Obama. On the whole, a fairly balanced discussion.
I email MSNBC all the time complaining about Morning Joe, but it doesn't seem to get me anywhere. I just don't understand why the network that brings us Countdown has to put a show hosted by Joe Scarborough on in the morning. I want my politics fix in the morning, I just don't want it with a constant right wing spin. Isn't Rachel Maddow available to host a morning show?