On Wednesday, Inside Cable News released an in-depth, multi-part report on MSNBC’s failed rebranding effort to a news and information destination in the dayside and the cable network’s subsequent rebirth into one dominated by progressive opinion and analysis.

Wow…Joe Scarborough put out a statement on Pat Buchanan on Politico. It had to have been cleared by MSNBC, otherwise he’d be in a peck of trouble right now. Given that it was cleared doesn’t lessen the impact of this “Bad call by my bosses” statement

We still don’t know what Phil Griffin and MSNBC will ultimately do in regards to the Pat Buchanan situation. What we do know is that if Buchanan is taken out permanently, there will be blow-back. And let’s start with what will likely become the focal point for those who take issue with Buchanan getting taken off permanently.

Reading what Phil Griffin had to say Saturday about the Pat Buchanan situation made me think about why this is happening. “During the period of the book tour I asked him not to be on,” Mr. Griffin said. “Since then the issue has become the nature of some of the statements in the book.” Mr. Buchanan argues in “Suicide of a Superpower” — which has the subtitle “Will America Survive to 2025?” — that the “European and Christian core of our country is shrinking,” which is damaging the nation “ethnically, culturally, morally, politically.” The book also contains a chapter titled “The End of White America.”

MSNBC’s new info blog listed a couple of job postings today. Both wanted candidates to have strong knowledge of progressive news. The very idea that MSNBC is looking for political editors whose knowledge of progressive news matters, but knowledge of conservative news apparently does not matter, seems to run entirely counter to what NBC News professes to be about.

All day yesterday there was talk about a Politico/MSNBC relationship. This talk all started because of a poorly thought out, selective memory-riddled, a bridge- too-far piece in The Daily Caller by Jeff Poor. I’d hoped that someone would have come out and knocked Poor’s article down by now but nobody has so I guess I have to. I have no interest in whether Politico is a liberal publication or not because it doesn’t concern cable news. I only care about Poor’s attempt to tie Politico to MSNBC.

The dust has hardly begun to settle in the wake of Cenk Uygur’s departure from MSNBC but already we can see the two distinct storylines being pushed by the respective parties involved. Uygur says MSNBC wanted him to tone it down and MSNBC says it wanted Uygur to tone it down but where they differ is what exactly needed to be toned down and who was concerned about the tone in the first place. However, ultimately none of that is relevant because it doesn’t matter what the truth is…what matters is what does the audience that Uygur catered to think is the truth. And to begin to answer that question we need to first look at how MSNBC went left in primetime.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Norah O’Donnell’s departure to CBS may be the biggest defection NBC has endured in nearly two decades – since Brian Ross jumped to ABC in 1994…and certainly since Chris Wallace jumped to ABC a few years before that.

I know, I know…”What about Katie Couric? What about Soledad O’Brien? What about Campbell Brown?” The difference between those defections and O’Donnell’s is how it impacts NBC long term. There was little to no collateral damage done to NBC when Couric, O’Brien, and Brown left. Today and Weekend Today easily survived and flourished. But O’Donnell’s departure creates a long term hole for NBC to address – who will succeed Andrea Mitchell?

Over the past ten years we’ve repeatedly read stories in the MSM that the big three nightly newscasts are a dying breed. We’ve read that viewership continues to decline.

But a strange thing happened in the last five years – the broadcast news programs remained relevant while cable news began to become less relevant on a daily basis for almost everyone except political junkies.