Remember the "Donahue Show" that was on MSNBC for a few months in late 2002-early 2003? Well, here's an interesting segment of an interview wth Jeff Cohen who was an executive producer for the show, talking about what happened during its run and its demise.
...So there was always this obsession at MSNBC with Donahue toward "balance". The odd thing is, we were up against O'Reilly at Fox News who'd never been cautioned by management to be "balanced". So from the beginning there was an effort on the part of management to not let Phil be Phil. And our show was muzzled from the beginning, and misframed almost from the beginning.
When I think about Roger Ailes who's the head of Fox News, if he ever heard the kind of instructions that management was giving Donahue, such as don't be too angry, don't be too partisan, don't be too liberal, make sure you're balanced, Roger Ailes would laugh his ass off because that's not instructions he ever gave O'Reilly. You can't conceive of Ailes ever telling O'Reilly, be less angry, be less confrontational, be less partisan. It would be insane, and in a medium like cable news where Fox had shown the way, that very strong, passionate advocacy programming at night could work, could attract an audience. At MSNBC, which is owned by General Electric and Microsoft, there was never a sense that let's have Phil Donahue counter-program against that and build up an audience. That's not anything we were ever allowed.
So we began in the position of this "balance" demand, which was silly, and then it led a few months later to worse than that as the war got closer. We were ordered by management that every time we had one anti-war guest we had to have two pro-war guests. We were....
RM: You were literally..., MSNBC management said to you that for every anti-war guest...,
JC: yeah
RM: ...you had to have 2:1 ratio pro-war to anti-war?
JC: No. We always had to have one more from the right. If we had two guest from the left you had to have three from the right. At one meeting of our show, a producer said: well, I'd like to book Michael Moore, and the bosses said: well then you'd have to have *three* right-wingers for balance.
RM: (laughter) well that's a compliment to Moore.
JC: yeah, and I used to fantasize about booking Noam Chomsky on the show, but I realized that our studio couldn't accomodate the three-hundred and thirty-eight right-wingers we would have needed for balance. more...
http://pnews.org/portal/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=89
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