MSNBC Not Shy About Criticizing Obama - NYTimes.com

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By BRIAN STELTER

If President Obama happened to glance at “The Rachel Maddow Show” last Monday, he might have winced.

Ms. Maddow pretended to celebrate the passage of a health care overhaul bill in the House, calling it “potentially a huge generational win for the Democratic Party” — but then halted the triumphant music and called it an “electoral defeat.”

The Stupak amendment, she said, was “the biggest restriction on abortion rights in a generation.” Then she wondered aloud about the consequences for Democrats “if they don’t get women or anybody who’s pro-choice to ever vote for them again.” She returned to the subject the next four evenings in a row.

This is how it looks to have a television network pressuring President Obama from the left.

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

The spectacle of Democrats sniping at one another is not new, but having a TV home for it is. MSNBC — sometimes critically called the “home team” for supporters of Mr. Obama — has even hit upon the theme with a promotional tagline, “pushing back on the president,” in commercials for “Hardball,” Chris Matthews’s political hour.

“Our job is not to echo the president’s talking points,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. “Our job is to hold whoever’s in power’s feet to the fire.”

But is it good business? MSNBC is projected to take in $365 million in revenue this year, roughly the same amount as last year, when the presidential election bolstered its bottom line. Three years ago, before making a left turn, it had revenue of about $270 million a year. MSNBC’s parent company, NBC Universal, is on the verge of being spun out of General Electric in a deal that would make Comcast its controlling entity.

Gary Carr, the executive director of national broadcast for the media buying agency TargetCast, said the opinions matter less than the ratings they earn. With cable’s prime-time opinion shows, “you’re reaching a lot of people,” he said.

It is certainly reaching the White House. Anita Dunn, the departing White House communications director, calls Mr. Olbermann and Ms. Maddow “progressive but not partisan,” and in doing so, distinguishes them from Fox News, which she considers a political opponent. The MSNBC hosts, she said in an e-mail message last month, “often take issues with the administration’s positions or tactics and are never shy about letting their viewers know when they disagree.”

Ms. Maddow said that apart from an off-the-record meeting between Mr. Obama and commentators that she attended last month, she has heard little from the White House.

Mr. Griffin said, “We heard a whole lot more from the Bush White House.”

MSNBC’s liberal points of view have made the channel an occasional thorn in the side of G.E., but the channel has also fostered a diversity of opinions that people like Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, say were lacking in the past.

“There’s been a huge market void for a long time,” Mr. Green said. Speaking of the MSNBC hosts, he said, “They are creating an environment where progressive thinkers and activists can thrive.”

Ms. Maddow, not surprisingly, agrees. “What looks like the middle of the country ought to look like the middle on TV,” she said in an interview this month.

She paused and added, “Maybe that would have helped us make better policy decisions in the country in the past.”

Sitting down to a midnight dinner in the East Village after her program on a recent Thursday, Ms. Maddow had shed her suit for a T-shirt. Four minutes in, a fan asked for an autograph. “You’re doing great work,” he said while she signed her name.

MSNBC’s political tilt — and Ms. Maddow’s ascension to one of the most influential positions in progressive America — are still starkly new phenomena. A Rhodes scholar with liberal radio roots, Ms. Maddow started to host MSNBC’s 9 p.m. hour on the eve of last year’s presidential election, at a time when MSNBC was wrestling with its political identity. New viewers materialized overnight, peaking at nearly two million a night in October 2008. Without an election to drive viewership, her program averaged 880,000 viewers last month.

As her objections to the Stupak amendment (so named for Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan) indicate, much of her work these days involves the Democratic health care overhaul. Ms. Maddow, Mr. Olbermann and Ed Schultz, the channel’s 6 p.m. host, formerly of Air America, have all exhorted Democrats to keep the public option.

Mr. Schultz started a broadcast last month by asking, “Where is the president? I think it’s time to be clear — crystal clear. What does Barack Obama want when it comes to health care in this country? What does he want in the bill?”

Topics often tackled on Ms. Maddow’s program include the relationship between the United States military and politics (something she is writing a book about) and the repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gays in the military.

Representatives for two gay members of the military, Dan Choi and Victor Fehrenbach, approached Ms. Maddow’s producers about coming out on her show, in March and May respectively. Introducing Mr. Fehrenbach, Ms. Maddow intoned that he was about to be fired “in the shadow of these political promises left unfulfilled.”

Asked why she thought the two men had contacted her producers, Ms. Maddow said, “Maybe it’s because I’m gay; maybe it’s because we’ve covered this issue before on our air.”

Other MSNBC hosts have also objected to some of the president’s policy decisions. In April, Mr. Olbermann, the channel’s best-known voice, urged Mr. Obama to hold members of the Bush administration accountable for what he called the “torture of prisoners.”

“Prosecute, Mr. President,” he said. “Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn.”

Ms. Maddow, however, contrasts her channel’s advocacy with the activism conducted, she says, by others on cable news. “We’re articulating liberal viewpoints,” she said at dinner, “but we’re not saying ‘Call your congressman, show up at this rally!’ ”

On her show, she has criticized Fox News for seeming to promote tea party rallies denouncing the administration this year, and the Fox host Glenn Beck, who has promoted a “9/12 Project,” intended, he says, to restore the values that Americans sensed immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I don’t have a constituency,” she said. “I’m not trying to form a — what would it be? — a ‘9/10’ movement.”

News Site Keeps Focus on Town’s Recession

By BRIAN STELTER

Like other media organizations this year, MSNBC.com wanted to show the wrath of the recession at the kitchen table level. So it began what is one of the most unusual experiments in online journalism to date: it ensconced itself in one city in Indiana and documented how that city grappled with the economic downturn.

For the Elkhart Project, which is entering its fifth month, MSNBC.com assigns one staff member to Elkhart, Ind., at almost all times to ensure a regular output of blog posts, slide shows, videos and Twitter messages. In Elkhart, readers and viewers see the effects of job losses, foreclosures and stimulus money projects — what MSNBC.com calls “stories of struggle and recovery in America.”

The project has won over some residents who were initially upset about the media’s portrayal of the manufacturing city of 53,000, which has an unemployment rate twice the national average and is sometimes treated as a national symbol of distressed middle America. The project has also been recognized by other journalists for its storytelling; last week it received the National Press Club’s online journalism award.

The project is not exactly a model of hyperlocal journalism (a term for Web-powered neighborhood news) because it leaves most of the day-to-day reporting to the local newspaper, The Elkhart Truth, which it counts as a partner.

Instead, “we’re focused on the themes that are familiar to all Americans and using our reporting in Elkhart to deal with those universal issues,” said Jennifer Sizemore, the editor in chief of MSNBC.com, which is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.

Vikki Porter, the director of the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California, called the project an excellent example of how a classic journalism model “can be mashed up with the 2.0 storytelling tools of the Web.”

Ms. Sizemore declined to say whether the Elkhart Project was a profitable enterprise, saying “our best news projects serve the consumers’ needs and interests first.”

According to Web measurement firms, MSNBC.com’s Web sites are among the most popular in the country, with about 40 million visitors a month. MSNBC.com would not say how many visitors the project has attracted, but put its audience in the millions.

The project’s genesis was in MSNBC.com’s desire to relate the economic recession to lives of ordinary Americans. “The adage that all news is local is absolutely true,” Ms. Sizemore said, adding that personal reporting humanizes a story.

The Web site had focused at length on a town before: in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, MSNBC.com employees tracked the recovery of two Mississippi towns in a series called “Rising From Ruin.”

Ms. Sizemore said that the hurricane was a local story with national interest, and the Elkhart Project is in many ways the inverse: “It is coverage of a national story through the lens of one location, and includes tools and data that are relevant no matter where you live.”

Elkhart was chosen after President Obama visited the town in February and, as Ms. Sizemore put it, “staked his administration’s credibility on the success or failure of the town’s recovery.” He had already visited twice as a candidate.

A deputy editor suggested that staff members visit Elkhart the next day on an exploratory trip, and MSNBC editors eventually decided that it would serve as the soul of the Web site’s coverage.

The project, at ElkhartProject.MSNBC.com, includes several strands of reporting, including the causes of the somber unemployment statistics, the impact of the federal stimulus funds and the views of young people about the economy.

At the outset in April, the Web site intended to report from Elkhart through the one-year anniversary of Mr. Obama’s February visit. Ms. Sizemore now says the site will stay to track whether stimulus funds show up, and whether they have the intended effect.

“It may be a story that we never really drop from our radar,” she said.

Seemingly every day, an Elkhart article appears on MSNBC.com’s home page, often illustrated by a photo of a local citizen. When Mr. Obama visited Elkhart last week, an NBC correspondent asked him questions submitted by local residents.

Residents seem to have warmed up to the project. In the spring, Jennifer Holderread worried in blog posts and on forums that the city was “in danger of becoming nothing more than a media plaything.”

But her outlook has changed. “I think the people who were initially sent here to cover the economy had the forethought that they were going to cover nothing but poverty and despair,” she said in an e-mail message. Now, though, they are covering events like the county fair and new businesses, showing a more nuanced view of the city.

Dan Gillmor, who runs a center for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, praised the project’s ambition, but suggested that MSNBC.com should encourage genuine collaboration with the people of Elkhart, perhaps by incorporating local blogs and videos more fully. “The people of the community could contribute a lot more if they weren’t being seen as sources for interviews or anecdotes, or, to put it less kindly, as journalistic lab rats,” he said.

To buttress its big-picture coverage, MSNBC.com shares reporting with The Elkhart Truth. Ms. Porter said she was most intrigued by the collaboration of the national news organization and the local one.

Rather than merely parachuting into a local story, she said, “this is a commitment model, integrating the local news resources with the national perspective over the long haul