MSNBC's Morning Joe Television Show Running Hard for Second Place

On MSNBC's Morning Joe show today, Mika Brezinski mentioned to her panel that she walked to work this morning so that she "could feel the blast of cold air" on her face and that would help wake her up. In this context, Brezinski pointed out how alive and lit up the city was, even at 3:30 in the morning. The point of such a remark, of course, is to invite praise of her true grit in braving the horrors of New York city, a woman alone, plucky news reporter, all that...

Brezinski must have forgotten the first rule of a.m. mock-discussion programs - panelists are there to spice things up. The way to spice things up on morning television shows this type is to make clever, snarky remarks, whether at the expense of the topic du jour or the other "panelists"-it doesn't matter. Or rather, it does matter but people are so anxious to on expatiate on television that they can't help themselves.

So one of the panelists, an off-screen voice (because the camera is focused on Brezinski's new make-over) says something like:

"Yeah, Mika...that's pretty good...walking all the way in from Westchester."

If you don't know, Westchester County is a suburban enclave, the 2^nd most wealthy county in New York State, within barking distance of Manhattan, where Brezinski works. The remark rearranged Brezinki's rather too expressive face, and I got the feeling that the possessor of the off-camera voice stands a good chance of being sent back to Newspaperland.

Not only is there trouble in Newspaperland these days, there's also trouble on MSNBC's Morning Joe show which had made a good run on second place early in the year. (The Fox and Friends Show continues to top the morning ratings by a huge margin)

MSNBC's Chief competition for second place has been CNN's American Morning and Robin Meade's Headline News; though Morning Joe surged into second place for a time, it fell back to fourth place in the November ratings.

The competition for morning hearts and minds is discussed in detail in an excellent article by Felix Gillette of the New York Observer. (Morning Joe, Piping Hot a Year Ago, Steadily Loses Steam). Gillette writes that the pending purchase of NBC Universal by Comcast is squeezing the MSNBC lineup, which fears a staffing shakeup as Comcast bean counters pore over the bottom line budgets.

But there is a viewer bottom line which the Comcast accountants can't measure, and Mika Brezinski's "common New Yorker" pretense of walking to work from Westchester doesn't help with that. Later on, Brezinski admitted, well, she "walked just a few blocks," with no mention of where her chauffeur dropped her off. (I had a vision of Mika's former NSA father Zbigniew Brezinski assigning a team of spooks with guns to trail her.)

The problem for MSNBC is that it has a good idea in attempting a focus on serious political news, but like an over-anxious octopus, it reaches for every prop in the tele-hoodwink handbook. Fox News, like it or not, has stability and keeps its audience, even while blundering into the kind of nonsense that 8^th graders and Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy love.

The difference between Fox News and its MSNBC competitor is that Fox pokes fun at itself, whereas some of the characters on the Morning Joe show seem to have an abiding faith in their own pretensions. On the Morning Joe program, regular panelist Willie Geist is supposed to be the draw for the highly coveted 24 to 54 crowd but he's lugubrious more often than ironic, and the November drop in viewers has been most drastic among young self-styled urban hipsters who don't much go in for football scores and already know how to download viral YouTube videos.

Joe Scarborough is my favorite "normal guy" and the star of the Morning Joe crew, and Scarborough embodies the token quasi-conservative/quasi independent, but he's gone to Florida much of the time, and then the show marches off in a harder-left direction superseded only by the evening Obama-based panegyrics of Mssrs. Matthews and Olbermann and by former Air America broadcast steward, Rachel Maddow .

On the Morning Joe, Diva liberals like Nora O'Donnell dish piping hot political gossip from "Capitol Hill" with a nod and bow to Daily Kos and Politico junkies who appear regularly like baits in a rat-trap to pin down the idealist ideologues who are anyway more preoccupied with running out the door to see "Avatar." But credit is due -- the basic focus is political and related economic news, something which MSNBC honcho Phil Griffin continues to believe will work.

During the morning grab-em-and-keep-em slot, MSNBC is attempting a glacial but sure move toward the political center, reflected best in the hiring of CNBC's Dylan Ratigan for the show that follows Morning Joe. Ratigan's not a political lemming, and is one of the few anchor-style news people who don't have to merely pretend to understand Wall Street and the economic world. That kind of economic depth often leads to hard questions for suddenly timid and more truthful politicians who appear with Ratigan on Morning Meeting.

Now if MSNBC Morning Joe kept Scarborough for political insight, Brzezinski because an audience likes to watch scenes of self-immolation, and then moved Ratigan front and center to Morning Joe, MSNBC's mercurial morning project might re-capture second place.