The Hollywood Reporter published a softball interview by Marisa Guthrie with NBC News president Noah Oppenheim, but there was one question that granted an unintentionally funny answer. When asked how the leftist tilt on MSNBC might shade public opinion of NBC News, he suggested the difference was that MSNBC offered “informed opinion in prime time,” while NBC defined “objective journalism.”
The executive wasn’t asked how comparing the Trump children to Saddam Hussein’s sons can be described as “informed opinion” rather than childish mudslinging. It’s amazing liberals still pretend that their product is “objective,” with no follow-up, such as “So how did hiring Chelsea Clinton as a reporter reflect an image of objectivity?” But in the Trump era, they love to pretend their shows are all about the “objective facts.”
THR: What's the biggest challenge facing the news business?
OPPENHEIM: One of the most pernicious is the equivalency granted by many to the "news" they read on social media and the content produced by professional journalists. I cling to the old-fashioned belief that there are objective facts, and there should be a process and standards that govern how we ascertain them and how we correct our mistakes. Not everyone plays by those rules, and the confusion that results is frightening — not just for our business but for our democracy.
THR: How does MSNBC's ideological identity in prime time affect the perception of NBC News among potential conservative and independent viewers?
OPPENHEIM: I think NBC News viewers are sophisticated enough to understand the difference between informed opinion in prime time and objective journalism. And as NBC News has powered MSNBC dayside, hard news reporting has become more of MSNBC's identity.
So putting Joy Reid and Ronan Farrow on the shelf in dayside translates into “hard news reporting.” It might be more traditional like CNN in its format, but there's still a lot of opinion bubbling up. At least Oppenheim mildly dissed MSNBC by suggesting cable is on the ascent under Trump because some viewers want an “echo chamber” to reinforce their personal beliefs. Perhaps Oppenheim thinks only Fox News fits this definition.
THR: The transition to Trump has been a boon for cable news but not for the legacy broadcast programs. Why?
OPPENHEIM: There is probably a section of the audience that can't get enough of political news. There's a subsection that wants to live in the echo chamber of hearing their own beliefs reinforced. That's fueling a lot of cable's rise.
Then came the obligatory Oppenheim sermon about how Trump’s attacks on the media’s liberal bias are not “healthy for democracy.”
THR: Has the administration's combative stance with the media affected your reporters' work?
OPPENHEIM: I don't think it's healthy for democracy when the press is attacked in that way [by the White House]. But my advice to our [team] is to keep their heads down and do their work. We're not going to allow ourselves to get sucked into a back-and-forth over who should be trusted.
Baloney. NBC and MSNBC will tout poll results that Trump has low approval ratings, and ignore the “back and forth” of noting the inconvenient truth that the media’s trust ratings are historically low. (Besides, you can see in the THR picture that Oppenheim has a blown-up Trump tweet trashing the Today program behind him, so he's not so "heads down.")
The interview ended with a real softball from Guthrie: Would you please denounce Bill O’Reilly?
THR: Last question, if you were running Fox News, would you have brought back Bill O'Reilly? (Editor's note: This interview took place on Tuesday, April 18, the day before Fox News ousted O'Reilly.)
OPPENHEIM: Let's just put it this way: If I were running any organization, I would never allow a culture like that to exist.
Guthrie never asked about a newsroom culture that would allow Brian Williams to keep broadcasting on MSNBC while Oppenheim lectured about the devotion to facts and objectivity. (Or about the feminist whispers that Billy Bush's behavior at NBC might have been tolerated too long.)
PS: The liberal Ivy League bubble at NBC isn't disproven by how this article starts:
Noah Oppenheim's career in TV news (with a stop in Hollywood along the way) began back in 2000, when he was a senior at Harvard. Chris Matthews and Phil Griffin (then his producer) were marooned on the Harvard campus because of a snowstorm. Waiting it out in the offices of The Harvard Crimson, "Phil read an article I wrote for the student newspaper," recalls Oppenheim, 38, then the paper's editorial chairman, "and ended up offering me a job on Hardball."
He started right after graduation, in June 2000. "Technically I was a $12-an-hour production assistant. But Chris and I hit it off," he says.
