Jon Chait makes a good point in responding to the excellent article in New York magazine on the trials of CNN and MSNBC:
MSNBC, as Sherman reports, is now courting a liberal audience. But (my opinion) you'll never have a liberal equivalent to Fox News that has anything like the same level of success. Conservatives believe that the mainstream news is fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. They want a fully closed information ecosystem in which every piece of data they consume is filtered through the perspective of the conservative movement. Very, very few liberals want that. They want their liberal opinion, but they also want straight news, or at the very least news that isn't overtly propagandistic like on Fox. MSNBC has slightly right-of-center programming in the morning with Joe Scarborough, straight news throughout the day, then liberal opinion at night.
I'd add that it isn't just that conservatives want a fully closed information ecosystem, it's also that many of them have come to believe that a fully closed information ecosystem is the only way they can avoid being drowned by liberal propaganda. When you watch Fox, you're told again and again that every mainstream news outlet is hopelessly liberal, and the only way to learn the truth is to stay right here. For conservatives who have had the message of liberal bias hammered into them for the last few decades, it's very persuasive. MSNBC doesn't say anything like that to progressives. It's more, "Here's some programming you might like," as opposed to, "This is the only place you can get the truth."
MSNBC couldn't duplicate Fox's message about the rest of the media if they wanted to -- progressives might have complaints about The New York Times or NPR, but no one would try to convince them that those outlets are nothing more than cauldrons of rightist propaganda. So while their increasing turn to the left may be successful, it is unlikely to produce the kind of loyalty Fox gets. Few progressives are going to decide to only get their news from MSNBC because they can't trust anyone else.
That said, MSNBC has decided to stop beating around the bush and brand itself as the progressive cable network. Look at this spot, part of their new "Lean Forward" branding campaign:
You've got liberal icons like John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, two men getting married, multiple shots of President Obama, and more -- no ambiguity there.
-- Paul Waldman
