In an interview with Michael Calderone in The Huffington Post, MSNBC president Phil Griffin said that the network’s viewpoints are progressive, and not simply pro-Obama.
“This channel has never been the voice of Obama. Ever. People want to talk about Fox. Fox is the voice of the Republican Party.”
That seems to fly in the face of a new study that was released this week by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which showed that MSNBC reporting on Obama was overwhelming positive, and extremely negative about Romney, during the final week of the campaign.
If the network wasn’t the voice of Obama, then how does Griffin explain the fact that they didn’t report one single negative story about Obama in the last week of the election?
As for Fox News being the voice of the Republican Party, a charge first issued by the White House in 2009, the same Pew study showed that while the network favored Romney over Obama, it was by a smaller margin than MSNBC’s flag-waving for Obama. It showed that they weren’t afraid to criticize the GOP when they thought it was necessary or justified.
http://www.aim.org/don-irvine-blog/msnbc-president-phil-griffin-we-are-not-pro-obama/
http://www.zimbio.com/photos/Phil+Griffin/Rachel+Maddow
Phil Griffin is President of MSNBC, a United States cable news channel that Griffin has stated is “the place to go for progressives”.
He was named President in July, 2008.
Griffin orchestrated the launch of several popular MSNBC shows, including “The Rachel Maddow Show”, “The Ed Show”, “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” and “Morning Joe”. Griffin was with MSNBC from its start in 1996 and previously was executive producer for shows such as “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and “The Big Show with Keith Olbermann”.
Griffin was born in Chappaqua, New York. At age 11, he moved with his family to Ohio. In 1979 he graduated with a BA degree in literature from Vassar College where he wrote his thesis on Milton’s Paradise Lost. Soon after, he moved to Atlanta and started work with CNN during their early years where he met and worked with Keith Olbermann who worked there as a sportscaster. After several years with CNN working primarily as a writer-producer-editor in their sports department, Griffin began work at NBC in 1983 as a sports producer for the Today Show.
Vassar was a girls’ college.