Why MSNBC pulled Olbermann and Matthews

Did the news anchors show a liberal bias in their election coverage?

MSNBC “tried a bold experiment” by having “politically incendiary hosts” Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews lead the channel’s election coverage this year, said Brian Stelter in The New York Times, but “that experiment appears to be over”—they’re being replaced by David Gregory. This move is clearly “a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.”

“MSNBC has finally come to it senses,” said Jeff Bercovici in Portfolio.com’s Mixed Media blog. Both Olbermann and Matthews are “opinion journalists” that lean to the left, and they obviously don’t have the “whole hat-switching thing” down—especially Olbermann. He’s just not capable of separating “news and editorial”—too bad he “knows frighteningly little about his chosen profession.”

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