During an interview with Joy Reid, whose new MSNBC weekday show -- The Reid Report -- begins airing at 2 p.m. on Monday, February 24, the perennial network guest stated she is taking a radically different approach than most of her counterparts on the “Lean Forward” network.

“I’m not on there to do an hour of why Republicans suck,” the African-American woman said. “I don’t think I have to do that. I think what MSNBC does really well is to have a really smart conversation both with the left and the right. We may not get that right all the time, but I don’t know a mean-spirited person in this building.”

Michael McAuliff, a former New York Daily News reporter who now writes for the liberal Huffington Post website, stated on Wednesday that people who oppose the Affordable Care Act refer to a report released by the Congressional Budget Office that the shift of full-time employees to part-time work would result in employees losing working hours equivalent to about 2.5 million jobs during the next 10 years, “thereby raising unemployment and forcing others to pay for their health care, and adding to the federal deficit.”

However, McAuliff -- who covers Congress and politics for the site -- quoted CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, who in a hearing on Wednesday “asserted that this is not so: His office's report, he noted, says that ObamaCare will actually produce a net increase in employment and cut the deficit” while giving workers the freedom to do things most Americans praise, such as spending more time with their children or starting their own businesses.

During an interview with Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast website, MSNBC president Phil Griffin strained at gnats when he stated that his network “has never had an ideology” but insisted that the dominant Fox News Channel does.

 “An ideology is a single thought across all programs,” he said. “We’ve never had that.” However, Griffin asserted, MSNBC instead has “a progressive sensibility,” which he claimed is not the same as an ideology. “Obviously, I hire people who fit the sensibility” because “we do stay true to facts. You have to build your argument. That's why I call it a sensibility.”

Cable News Network president Jeff Zucker used his keynote address at the RealScreen Summit in Washington, D.C., on Monday to promote his “new vision” for CNN that he said has expanded beyond reporting breaking news while including documentaries and films in its programming, which he described as “more shows, less newscasts.”

“We’re never going to stray from breaking news,” Zucker stated before noting that CNN “provides more news coverage on a daily basis than any other TV network in America” while broadening out “our offerings to the public, and we have moved into the nonfiction world with some success thus far.”

Phil Griffin, head of the MSNBC cable television channel, told Marisa Guthrie of the Hollywood Reporter that he accepts responsibility for recent embarrassments that led Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir to leave the network and Melissa Harris-Perry to offer a tearful on-air apology.

"These were judgment calls made by some of our people. We handled them. We were transparent. That is our philosophy: Be factual, and step up when you make a mistake,” Griffin asserted. “We took responsibility for them and took action. They were unfortunate,” but “I don't think it hurt us in any way.”

During Wednesday night's edition of Piers Morgan Live on the Cable News Network, a panel of four media analysts joined their liberal host in agreement that The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News -- and Divided a Country, a new book written by New York Magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman, will not have much impact on readers' views of that cable network.

“People who are skeptical of Fox News are going to read this book and are going to be sure, once and for all, that Fox News is an arm of the Republican Party,” said media critic Brian Stetler of the New York Times. However, Amy Holmes -- a host on TheBlaze TV -- asserted that the book is filled with “pretty thin gruel.”

Since Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of president Lyndon Johnson’s announcement of an “unconditional war on poverty” during his State of the Union address in 1964, MSNBC used the occasion to promote a poll conducted by a far-left think tank to assert that a government program providing “affordable access to quality child care could help lift millions of Americans out of poverty.”

According to an article by Morgan Whitaker on MSNBC.com, “a vast majority of people polled in a new survey” conducted by the Center for American Progress “includes results from focus groups and a major survey of more than 2,000 American adults.”

How much do you need to know about a subject before expressing a strong opinion during a panel on MSNBC? Apparently very little, as Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart took part in a Monday afternoon discussion on the future of the Washington Redskins National Football League team since coach Mike Shanahan had just been fired.

Kristen Welker -- fill-in host for that weekday's edition of Andrea Mitchell Reports -- asked: “Are the Redskins stronger moving forward without Shanahan?” Capehart replied: “You’re asking the wrong guy here. I don’t know anything about football.” Instead, he turned to a liberal talking point: “But this much I do know: The name of the football team, personally speaking, is an abomination and that they should change it.”

Just when it seemed that proponents of the Affordable Care Act couldn't sink any lower, they've gone ahead and approved an offensive advertisement trying to get gay men to enroll in healthcare exchanges that has managed to get everyone disgusted.

The ad -- which features muscular men dancing in colorful underwear and Christmas headgear as they tout the benefits of enrollment in insurance exchanges -- was praised by Rep. Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey who said he supports “whatever it takes to get people enrolled.”