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Jeff Cohen's Journey Through the Cable News Looking Glass

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Message Randolph Holhut
If the key to Donohue's success was being a passionate liberal who involved his audience in the debates, creating a show for him that became just another cable shoutfest was incomprehensible to Cohen.

Equally incomprehensible was MSNBC's refusal to advertise the show in liberal magazines such as The Nation, to let Donohue's natural audience know that he had a nightly news show.

Most of all, Cohen believes MSNBC's refusal to let Donohue be as liberal as O'Reilly and Hannity were conservative failed to recognize the realities of cable TV. Cable is about broadcasting to niche audiences. Fox already has a lock on the conservative niche, so why not go after an underserved audience?

When one looks at the explosion of liberal media on the Internet from blogs like Daily Kos to news sites like Common Dreams, or the success of Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now," or how well liberal talk radio hosts like Thom Hartmann and Randi Rhodes are doing in the ratings, you might think that only a fool would ignore this audience. But MSNBC did. Even though his show had the highest ratings of any program on MSNBC, Donohue's show was taken off the air on Feb 25, 2003, less than a month before the Iraq invasion began.

An internal NBC report drafted shortly before the cancellation stated that Donohue "represented a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war ... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." Their fear was that his show would become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

It's thinking like this that reinforces Cohen's view of cable news, that it "has become a downwardly spiraling circle: three dogs chasing each other's tails to the right."

Both CNN and MSNBC are stumbling around in search of themselves, trying to imitate Fox News Channel, but coming up short. In a time when independent, left-of-center media is flourishing, why can't MSNBC or CNN become the liberal version of Fox News Channel, only with more intelligence and factual reporting.

The reason, as Cohen makes abundantly clear in this book, is that the fear of being labeled as "liberal" scares nearly everyone who works in the corporate media.

In a just world, Amy Goodman would be anchoring the CBS Evening News instead Katie Couric. Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins and Barbara Ehrenreich would be frequent contributors to network news programs. When issues of war and peace are discussed, people other than retired generals would be discussing them. Labor and workplace issues would get as much attention as stock prices. And Jeff Cohen would have a steady gig somewhere running a news program, without corporate interference.

Alas, it is just a dream - at least in cable news.

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Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 25 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.
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