A success: MSNBC has decided to pull the plug on the Frank Luntz focus group they had planned to run as part of their presidential debate coverage tomorrow evening.
(As noted in the earlier post, Luntz is not only a partisan pollster — like, say, Stan Greenberg or Celinda Lake on the Dem side — but a strategist and message massager who continues to work actively for GOP candidates and organizations.)
As recently as yesterday, I’ve now learned, he was slated to be part of the show. But according to a late report in Roll Call, MSNBC has decided to pull the plug on this extremely ill-advised plan. And that is at least in large part because of some very effective mau-mauing on the part of Media Matters, David Brock’s (still relatively) new media watchdog outfit.
For the moment, that’s a real feather in their collective cap.
It’s also an important step in what will be a long and difficult — but I believe eventually successful — effort to provide a center-left counterbalance to the right-wing noise machine that creates such a skew in the contemporary media landscape.
Now the conversation should turn to how it was that this was ever going to happen in the first place. NBC giving a hard partisan the mic to himself to shape first impressions of one of the central events in the presidential campaign?
What does that tell you?
