Msnbc

For all their ability to react instantly to a developing story, cable news channels can be surprisingly slow to make changes in their own houses. Until last week, Fox News had not altered its early evening lineup in eight years. But the cable landscape has been reshaped in recent weeks with each of the three news channels bringing in new talent to anchor some of their most competitive hours. And bucking a long-standing trend, two of the networks have ousted ideologically charged personalities in favor of more traditional and experienced journalists.

Last week on Super Tuesday, all-news cable TV made it plain that CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have displaced the major networks this primary season as the best on-screen source for political coverage. Last night, the 24/7 cable news channels were again dominant, but this time they stole the thunder from local TV news operations - making area broadcasters that were unwilling to cut into network prime-time programming seem all but irrelevant with their 11 p.m. newscasts in cities such as Baltimore.

When MSNBC moved a couple of months ago from its longtime home in New Jersey to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, Keith Olbermann got his pick of offices. It was a nice perk for the anchor whose bracing mix of irony and stridency made him the first big star the 11-year-old cable channel can call its own. Olbermann chose a room looking directly into the street-front studios of MSNBC's rival, Fox News. If you're walking up Sixth Avenue, look for the huge cardboard cutout of Bill O'Reilly's head gazing out of a third-floor window in the world headquarters of NBC. Rare is the night when Countdown with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's highest-rated program, doesn't take aim at something said on "Fox Noise" or "Fixed News," Olbermann's pet names for the channel.

I am not a media critic!" said TV commentator Chris Matthews when I asked if he had any thoughts on the Bill O'Reilly-Keith Olbermann "feud," which rages almost nightly on the Fox and MSNBC networks. Chris added: "You can never win criticizing someone in your own business." Although Chris works for MSNBC, he has high praise in person and in his new book for Fox tycoon Roger Ailes, who did so much for MSNBC before he went to the Rupert Murdoch empire. In fact, when we discussed ABC's late genius, Roone Arledge, Chris said that Roger is the only person in television who comes up to Roone, creatively.

Gorgeous green spring came suddenly to Minnesota this year after weeks of tedious budding and blooming, a great burgeoning of foliage, and Bleak Street became the Via Paradiso, and we pale stoics took out pen and paper and wrote, "O love love love you are the best who ever was" or words to that effect, and we sat outdoors in the evening and thought of various reforms we mean to institute. More joyfulness, kindness to strangers, a general quickening of spirit, etc. I once knew a man, a true iconoclast, who drank bourbon for breakfast and chain-smoked Pall Malls and held severe views about women, the church, American lit and society in general, a sort of post-beatnik, and every spring he vowed to reform and clean up his house, which had holes in the ceiling where he had poked his broom handle at the squirrels who ran around in the attic.

Fallout over the racially insensitive comments by radio talk-show host Don Imus intensified yesterday as MSNBC announced that it will immediately cease simulcasting the Imus in the Morning radio program. Meanwhile, two major sponsors suspended their advertising from the show, and a former NAACP president who is on the CBS board joined those who have urged Imus' dismissal. A week after Imus referred to the mostly black Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos" following the team's second-place finish in this year's NCAA tournament, opposition to the longtime radio personality continues to mushroom.

It's Easter weekend and Passover week, so why not get in the proper mood by checking out how a radio host in the world's largest market used his show, which is simulcast on a national cable news network, to acknowledge Rutgers reaching the women's national championship game. You may already have heard or seen this. On Wednesday morning, Don Imus, host of Imus in the Morning on New York's WFAN-AM and on MSNBC, called the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos." His producer referred to them as "hardcore hos" and described the national title game between Rutgers and Tennessee as "the jigaboos vs. the wannabes."

SECAUCUS, N.J. -- The Democrats may have wrested back control of power in Congress, but that hasn't quieted the ire of Keith Olbermann. Recently, he delivered one of his trademark blistering critiques of the country's leadership - this time charging that President Bush failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam by perpetuating the "monumental lie that is our presence in Iraq." And don't think the victors of the midterm election are going to escape his sharp tongue. "If the Democrats don't undo a lot of the things that have been done, like the Military Commissions Act and many of the other infringements on freedom, as I see it, there will be a special comment with their name on it," Olbermann vowed on a recent afternoon, wearing a crisp, striped shirt and suspenders, his large frame hunched over his desk at MSNBC's Secaucus headquarters.

Sharp questions of ideological bias in the media have been raised for more than three decades, but news organizations appear to be more vulnerable -- and sensitive -- than ever to the charges. In separate incidents over the past week, three major news organizations -- Fox News Channel, MSNBC and The Wall Street Journal -- have come under public fire for the perceived slant of reporters or contributors. The details provoking the three cases are starkly different. On the merits, readers and viewers may look askance at the behavior of any of the three media figures involved in the episodes.

With the approach of June 30, the "official" day upon which power was to be handed over by the United States to the Iraqis, American television networks sent big-name journalists to Baghdad and planned elaborate coverage of the event. So yesterday when a makeshift ceremony occurred two days early - with scant warning and at about 2:30 a.m. - TV journalists scrambled to air stories that, at least initially, were noticed by few. "We woke up and got a Monday surprise," said Jon Banner, executive producer of ABC News' World News Tonight.