Centrism's back baby! And Michael Steele's Got It!

Now that the MSNBC/Bulwark axis has completed the rehabilitation of Michael Steele and, after MSNBC race purge, given him one-third of his own weekday show, Steele is now firmly a member in good standing of that inner circle of recently-former Republicans who will control the direction of the last little corner of the "liberal" media on cable teevee.

And in his ad on The Bulwark for his own podcast, Steele gives us a hint about who he thinks the "liberal" media should be leaning towards:

Politics.  Culture.  You name it, we're talkin' about it.  And we're keeping 100% real right here on the Michael Steele podcast.  I'm Michael Steele.  I'm the host of the podcast. Each week I'm having conversations with political analysists, writers and activists who aren't afraid to shake things up.  A little bit like yours truly.  It doesn't matter if you're on the Left, the Right or somewhere in that strong Middle, this is the space you wanna be in...  

If I had to guess, as a complete outsider with no network contacts at all, but with a pretty good track record of making these sorts of predictions, I would guess this gives us a preview of where MSNBC is headed in the near future.  

Fact is, MSNBC is dying.  We'll, truth be told, cable news as a whole is dying, but MSNBC is leading the race to the cemetery.

From The Independent, December 18, 2024:

More bad news for MSNBC as they hemorrhage viewers and are now losing to NewsNation in weekend ratings battle

Amid plummeting ratings since Donald Trump’s election last month, several of the liberal cable news network’s programs on Saturday finished behind the centrist cable news upstart in the key 25-54 demographic.

From (so sorry) The New York Post, February 26, 2025:

‘Fox & Friends’ extends ratings lead as MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ loses nearly half its audience since election.

Thanks to a long series of stupid mistakes made by the network's stupid shot-callers, MSNBC has put itself in an impossible position.  

They don't want to lose whatever is left of their Liberal audience...

But they also refuse to sack Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough and his side piece and his menagerie of hacks, which is one of the major reasons liberals are staying away in droves...

Which means they very much need to attract replacement viewers so their ad rates don't drop to the point where only dick pill and prepper survival pack purveyors are willing to spend coin on advertising on MSNBC, because then it's back to six hours of LOCKDOWN! in the evenings...

But the chances of attracting any MAGA Republican viewers are slim to none, unless they pull a Newsome and start stunt-casting MAGA mopes like Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens.  Which will definitely drive away even more of their liberal viewers, because if I want to watch that trainwreck, I'll just wait until someone posts it on YouTube...

So, sooner or later,  the cable new shot-callers will once again begin listening to the siren's song of the same old snake oil salesmen peddling the same old nonsense about there being a vast and underserved audience of politically active and aware Centrists out there just over the horizon.  

And if the shot-callers just had the courage to lard their lineups with Third Way/No Labels/Country Over Party/Purple Project/Forward Party talking-heads, by jiminy, they could not only put on the best show this hick town has ever seen, but save the family farm to boot!

And that is where I believe MSNBC is headed.  

And it is for circumstances just such as this that, in the early 1600s the writer M. Day coined the expression "a fool's errand".

I Am The Liberal Media