Rick Kaplan Resigns (Dinosaur Media Extinction Alert)

Wednesday, Jun 07 Rick Kaplan Resigns: "He Has Led MSNBC Through A Period Of Impressive Growth"

"I want to thank Rick for his service to MSNBC," NBC News president Steve Capus said in a message to MSNBC employees at 4pm. "Over the last two and a half years, Rick has been a tireless champion for the network and all the hard work you do each and every day. He has led MSNBC through a period of impressive growth especially in primetime. You, the staff at MSNBC, are enormously dedicated and have built a rock-solid foundation for our future growth. MSNBC has been and continues to be an enormously important asset in the NBC News portfolio.

Soon, I will have an announcement for all of you about MSNBC's new leadership. During this period of transition I will call on the department heads at MSNBC to manage their respective units and report to me."

In an e-mail to all NBC Universal employees, Capus said "the message of this day is a continued commitment by everyone at MSNBC to excellence. The channel has some real momentum behind it now - and we intend to build upon that foundation for an extremely bright future."

Rick Kaplan Resigns: Effective Immediately, President Of MSNBC Steps Down Rick Kaplan's goodbye to MSNBC staffers:

"I want to let you all know that today I'm leaving MSNBC. It is not often in professional life that someone has the opportunity to end his tenure on such a high note. I couldn't be more proud of the progress we've made together over the last 2 and a half years. Together, we've increased MSNBC's viewership 25% in primetime and 19% in dayside. Over just the last year, we've had great success across the board, with Hardball and Countdown coming into their own. All of our primetime programs have improved tremendously in their production and content. Together we had a great election year in '04 and you're poised to improve on that excellence this fall. It truly has been an honor to work with all of you who make up the best team in TV news. My genuine hope is that you continue to grow and build on the momentum we've achieved together at MSNBC."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/07/AR2006060702355_pf.html

Rick Kaplan Out At No. 3 MSNBC

By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, June 8, 2006; C01

Two and a half years after he was named president of MSNBC and about two years after rumors started to fly about his imminent departure from the job, Rick Kaplan has stepped down from the network that continues to finish a distant third to its cable news rivals in the ratings.

"Rick has done a good job . . . stabilizing the place and putting it in a good position," NBC News President Steve Capus told The TV Column, adding, "It's time to push . . . and grow the channel in a way it hasn't to date."

The decision was "mutually agreed upon," he said.

"NBC News knows a thing or two about transitions; we've done them from positions of strength at 'Nightly,' 'Today' and at our front office and maintained a leadership position at all those places," he said.

"This was a time, while we have momentum at MSNBC, to capitalize and make a change from a position of strength."

Kaplan's contract reportedly was scheduled to run to February.

Though MSNBC has made ratings gains this calendar year, the network remains stuck in third place, despite its close connections to genre leader NBC News and its own successful Web operation.

Weekdays in prime time, MSNBC's ratings rose 14 percent compared with the same time last year, though it is still only clocking about 360,000 viewers. CNN and Fox News Channel are both down compared with last year but still laps ahead of MSNBC with 800,000 viewers for CNN and 1.7 million for FNC.

Rick Caplan, a Clinton activist and extremist liberal has just taken over as the head of MSNBC. Caplan was formerly with CNN and ABC and has a reputation as a Clinton ideologue who uses his position of power in the media to promote his leftwing agenda.

While at CNN and during the Clinton Whitewater scandals, he ordered CNN reporters to "limit the use of the word 'scandal'" in reporting about his close friend Clinton. And when the Monica sex scandal erupted, Caplan used the power of CNN to vilify Clinton's critics.

FrontPage Magazine has a lengthy article describing Caplan's shameful leftist bias and his misuse of the media to promote his ideology. As author Lowell Ponte notes, "With Caplan's entrenchment, MSNBC will, like the other establishment networks, almost certainly become just another cookie cutter stamping out a daily batch of predictable one-sided, pro-Democrat, anti-Republican, pro-Leftist propaganda."

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