The American Spectator

As we noted in this space last week, Microsoft is getting a divorce from NBC News.

This week the news is official — and who will head the new NBCNews.com?

That would be Vivian Schiller — who, you will recall, became such a liability for NPR in the wake of the Juan Williams firing debacle that she was thrown under the NPR bus.

Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center has dissected with his usual sharp eye. Here’s the link (with embedded links) but I confess Brent’s statement is so dead on that I have pasted it in its entirety below:

Microsoft’s ill-advised marriage of convenience to NBC News has finally landed in divorce court, and it couldn’t have happened soon enough. Like any marriage built on a lie — in this case that MSNBC would be a legitimate news organization — it was doomed to fail.

The MSNBC brand is a tumor, corrupting everything it touches, and it’s good to see that Microsoft is finally cutting it off. Even though Microsoft untethered itself from MSNBC TV in 2005, MSNBC.com was still a stain on one of the most valuable, respected corporations in American history.

Since the cable network’s inception in 1996, our Media Research Center analysts have worked diligently to track and expose MSNBC’s bizarre descent into madness where the news is contorted into some sort of liberal fever dream. From Keith Olbermann’s anti-American hot air and Ed Schultz’s ‘right-wing slut’ attack and urge to ‘rip out’ Dick Cheney’s new heart, to the most recent rantings of Al Sharpton to incite racial violence in the Trayvon Martin shooting and Andrea Mitchell’s attempt to fabricate a “super market scanner moment” for Mitt Romney, MSNBC has sent journalism back to the partisan hackery of the 18th century.

MSNBC’s embarrassing mockery of the news and deliberate refusal to Tell the Truth has tainted the NBC News brand with a layer of stink so thick it could take generations to cleanse. Is it any wonder that a titan of industry like Microsoft would want to distance its valuable brand from MSNBC’s radioactive stench?

Maybe, just maybe, Comcast has finally suffered enough embarrassment thanks to its NBC News and MSNBC divisions to muzzle their frothing, rabid liberal attack dogs and go back to reporting the news.

Of course with former NPR President & CEO Vivian Schiller at the helm of NBCNews.com, that’s hard to imagine. 

Ouch.

NBC has become a network with deeply serious problems. The news brand, once impeccable, has been tossed into the media equivalent of a sewer. The symbolism involved in putting Schiller at the head of this restructured ventured is stunningly dense.

Here’s Schiller telling the world that Juan Williams needed a psychiatrist because of his political views. And here is the event that finally got Schiller fired from NPR, a James O’Keefe video sting in which an NPR official (also named Schiller, but no relation) went off on conservatives. Mediaite wrote it up this way.

The fact that NBC has zero understanding of the symbolism involved with Schiller sends an in-your-face message to millions of Americans who once looked to NBC News to tell them the facts, the news of the day.

The appalling treatment of Juan Williams has not been forgotten.

Schiller’s well-on the record liberal elitism is only going to exacerbate the image of NBC News as home to a brain-dead, reflexive left-wingism that openly exploits racism, gay bashing, misogyny and religious bigotry to get ratings — which, surprise, surprise, it never gets.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but one gets the impression that NBC News is so intellectually incestuous it makes the network look like some perverse version of all those old jokes about hillbillies sleeping with their sister. 

They haven’t a clue internally that something is amiss.

At the end of the day, NBC News is dead because of its lack of intellectual curiosity and a high tolerance for things most Americans abhor. One doesn’t have to agree with same-sex marriage to know that calling someone a “punk faggot” or the “n-word” (as Al Sharpton has done) is wrong. One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that calling a woman — any woman but surely the wife of a US Senator — a “whore” (Ed Schultz) is wrong. One doesn’t have to be the smartest knife in the drawer to understand that a full-fledged attack on a presidential candidate’s religion is bad enough. But not applying the same standard to the Senate Majority Leader when that senator (Harry Reid) practices exactly the same Mormon faith as Mitt Romney — and somehow thinking no one will notice is — outright idiocy on the part of Lawrence O’Donnell.

In essence, all these people are sleeping with their sister — intellectually speaking.

MS is gone from MSNBC.

And quite obviously chaos reigns.