After a difficult tenure at the top of perpetual cable news doormat MSNBC, broadcast news veteran Rick Kaplan stepped down yesterday — and bloggers made sure to hit him with the door on the way out.
“Rick Kaplan is out after two [and a half] years as MSNBC president, during which the perennially third-place news network showed modest gains but didn’t change its competitive standing with Fox News Channel and CNN,” wrote Iowa radio show host Rich Hancock on his blog. While NBC News President Steve Capus and Kaplan called the departure a “mutual decision” (“He came in at a critical time, he stabilized it and now we’re going to grow it,” said Capus), Hancock put things thusly: “What a nice way to get fired.”
“Today the blogosphere is abuzz with the resignation of MSNBC president, Rick Kaplan,” added Howling Latina yesterday. “Even though MSNBC has ever-so-slowly started to climb out of the bottom of the rating barrel, not soon enough for NBC News President Steve Capus.”
The Cable Game was more unkind, asking for a moment of silence “to observe the exit of the biggest, baddest bad news bear of big, bad (as in terrible) cable news programming, now-former MSNBC prez Rick Kaplan.”
“Interesting word choices by Capus to describe MSNBC’s condition and Kaplan’s ministrations,” continued the Cable Game, saying “critical” and “stabilized” was “kind of paramedic-speak to describe an emergency situation, no? And Capus’ boilerplate also begs the question: why would you want to grow something that, quite honestly, is the cable news equivalent of a Frankenstein monster lumbering around grunting incoherently, the bolts in its head sparking at odd intervals, and breaking everything it touches?”
Oliver Willis was thinking along the same big-picture lines, asking “Can They Ever Get It Right?”
“MSNBC has fired Rick Kaplan and is talking about going in (again) a ‘new direction,'” wrote Willis. “MSNBC’s problem has always been that they don’t know what they are — look at their schedule, you’ve got political talk in Hardball which leads into their news show Countdown and then it becomes this weird mash of right-wingery (Scarborough, Carlson) and crime (Rita Cosby).”
Willis advised the network to “keep Hardball and Countdown and build some personality-based shows around them,” saying “they may as well program to the left because the Republican-lite isn’t working.”
While the New York Times described Kaplan as “widely regarded as a talented producer with a bedside manner that is, at times, abrasive,” yours truly recalls Kaplan as being warm and generous in my one experience with him years ago.
And in contrast to bloggers’ overwhelming hooting at his departure, some of the positive accomplishments of his tenure — “inside the company he was credited with building morale and forging a tighter partnership with NBC News,” as the Washington Post reported — deserve some attention, too.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.