Olbermann and the other liberal hosts are essentially on borrowed time, much the way Phil Donahue was before getting axed in the run-up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, when MSNBC wanted to position itself as a "patriotic" war booster.
Unlike News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who stands solidly behind the right-wing propaganda on Fox News, the corporate owners of MSNBC have no similar commitment to the work of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.
For the suits at headquarters, it's just a balancing act between the ratings that those shows get and the trouble they cause as Republicans reclaim control of Washington.
Because of the magnitude and intensity of the Right's media, Republicans can confidently sell a wide variety of propaganda themes to the American people. The themes might not make much sense, but they develop a ring of truth because they get repeated so often.
The imbalance has been made appreciably worse by the Left's neglect of media, an attitude that can be traced to the 1970s when progressives dismantled much of the Vietnam War era's "underground press" and downplayed the role of national think tanks in favor of local organizing under the banner, "think globally, act locally."
But the scrapping of promising media outlets from Ramparts magazine and Dispatch News in the 1970s to shuttering Air America Radio just this year has cleared the way for the Right to sell the electorate on conservative, anti-government positions without much resistance.
In this media age, it has turned out that prolific propaganda often can trump door-to-door organizing. This fall, some union activists noted that when they were canvassing at the homes of their members, they could hear the TV in the background tuned to Glenn Beck at Fox News. [For more on this imbalance, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Left's Media Miscalculation."]
Where the People Stand
Some on the Left refuse to accept this analysis, insisting that the American people are already much more leftist than is generally believed. All it would take, this counter-analysis goes, would be for Obama and the Democrats to issue a clear clarion call for progressive action and the people would follow.
But what has been clear in most recent national elections is that the Right can usually dictate the media narrative in favor of the Republicans, and Democrats at least across large swaths of the country assess their constituents as generally hostile to progressive ideas.
That was true again in Election 2010 when the dominant narrative was that Obama had pushed a doctrinaire leftist agenda health care, economic stimulus, financial reforms, auto bailouts, etc. that provoked a right-wing uprising among the voters, most visibly through the Tea Party rallies.
Progressives respond that this narrative is nearly upside down, that Obama's real failure was his lack of audacity in pressing for more aggressive policies and his readiness to compromise excessively in a futile bid to gain some bipartisanship from Republicans.
While there is truth to the Left's perspective, there can be no doubt that the dominant media analysis coming out of Election 2010 is that Obama must "turn to the center" and try harder to cooperate with Republicans, even as their leaders declare that their ultimate goal is his defeat in 2012.
Whenever Obama shows any resistance to this "turn-to-the-center" mantra, the news media's bigwigs are quick to conclude that "he still doesn't get it."
Meanwhile, Obama has sought to fend off this mainstream criticism by promising to renew his efforts to reach accommodations with the Republicans on key issues, such as their demand that all of George W. Bush's tax cuts be continued, including those for the richest Americans.
Obama's doing this even though there is still no sign that his outreach to Republicans will be reciprocated.
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