TVNewser links to the videos I posted this morning and characterizes this one and says the following…

The video is full of grandiose and ultimately unrealistic quotes about the channel, like this one: “You’ll see all the NBC stars, bringing credibility and experience to MSNBC.” But my favorite comes from Bill Gates: “We’re going to really be able to change newsmaking, to do something very unique.”

I think this smacks of too much second guessing. Sure it’s easy now to say that MSNBC didn’t bring the stars and credibility and experience to MSNBC and it’s easy to ridicule Bill Gates now for saying that MSNBC is going to change newsmaking and do something unique.

To analyze MSNBC’s launch you have to put it in proper perspective and view it through what was going on at the time. The internet was the California Gold rush. Everybody wanted in. Everybody had grandiose plans. And everybody thought it would work. Why do you think Time Warner and AOL merged? In 1996 AOL was today’s Google and Microsoft was playing catch up. Today you can’t even find the AOL in AOL-Time Warner…

Did NBC bring the stars and credibility and experience to MSNBC? Yes, that is clearly the case. When it launched NBC threw everything at MSNBC.

Did MSNBC change newsmaking and do something unique? The answer to that is also yes. MSNBC was way ahead of the times, going for the instant internet reaction that you see happening today on “The Most” and CNN’s blog watch segments. If anything MSNBC was too far ahead of its time as there wasn’t a big enough internet presence to sustain and grow the viewership. The intenet wouldn’t get big enough for another five or six years and by then it was too late because the MSNBC that existed beared little resemblence to the MSNBC that launched. Even now the argument can be made that TV harnessing the internet is still a work in progress.

MSNBC started out with a contributor panel that would in a few years become a who’s who of the pundit crowd. Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Niger Innes, Eric Alterman, the list goes on and on…they were all there and all at the same time. Try getting them together now. You can’t. I don’t care for talking head TV but I have to acknowledge that MSNBC tapped into something that has taken over not just TV but the internet.

So what went wrong? NBC got nervous that it didn’t take off like gangbusters and started making changes way too soon. While FNC stuck with its game plan, with minor tweaks here and there over the years, MSNBC got overhauled time and again. If anything FNC took advantage of MSNBC’s dissaray. I watched over the first few years as anchors and contibutors I used to see on MSNBC started popping up on FNC; Brigitte Quinn, Linda Vester, John Gibson, Greg Jarrett, Oliver North, Laura Ingraham, etc, etc… FNC saw something in MSNBC that NBC didn’t apparently.

While NBC did provide the stars at first, it didn’t maintain that effort. And MSNBC is still being overhauled to this day because nobody has any patience. This is all the more alarming because the people that are in charge now; Steve Capus, Phil Griffin, and Dan Abrams all went through the changes at MSNBC so they know that reinvention and change isn’t always a good thing. It’s amazing how MSNBC execs once they move over to 30 Rock seem to develop a selective memory problem…they can’t recall what they experienced while at MSNBC and apply it to good use. At least I haven’t seen much of that so far, particularly when Rick Kaplan, who brought up MSNBC’s ratings and stabilized the network, got canned.