Posted on 06/07/2006 1:56:16 PM PDT by abb
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.
MSNBC is just as big a mess as CNN is right now. It's going to take them a while to right that ship, and if they keep making some of the questionable programming decisions they've been making for the past few years, it could be a long time before MSNBC is at all relevant.
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."
good for you!
Yes, he directed news stories at CNN where he aided and abetted the Clintons.
He was the person responsible for the fraud of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
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