WHITE HOUSE TEACHING LAPDOGS NEW TRICKS

MSNBC's president, Phil Griffin, recently made this claim: "This channel has never been the voice of Obama. Ever," he told Huffington Post. "People want to talk about Fox. Fox is the voice of the Republican Party." 

And yet on Tuesday, four of MSNBC’s prime time TV hosts were spotted entering the West Wing of the White House for a special meeting with the president. These hosts included, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton and Lawrence O’Donnell. Interestingly, Chris Matthews, a notoriously tingly Obama supporter, was not included on the guest list.  

White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest released the following statement on the meeting:

"This afternoon at the White House, the President met with influential progressives to talk about the importance of preventing a tax increase on middle class families, strengthening our economy and adopting a balanced approach to deficit reduction."

As Mediaite reported, MSNBC wasn't the only Left-wing outfit to get a special invitation to meet with the President:

A source familiar with the meeting tells Mediaite that MSNBC personalities were only the most recognizable among the attendees, but there were many other “progressive media” members in attendance, including from the Washington Post, Daily Kos, and the Huffington Post. 

So if Phil Griffin is serious about promoting his network as anything other than the propaganda arm of the Obama administration, he's off to a very poor start.

In a November article in Huffington Post titled MSNBC Battles 'Pro-Obama' Label Heading Into President's Second Term the obvious Left-wing tilt of the network was discussed at length.  

MSNBC President Phil Griffin labels his network's sensibility as progressive, but the cable news channel could also be described these days as simply pro-Obama.

In the final week of the 2012 election, MSNBC ran no negative stories about President Barack Obama and no positive stories about Republican nominee Mitt Romney, according to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

MSNBC's afternoon and primetime hosts kept their sights on Romney and the Republicans during the election cycle, while spending considerably less time holding Obama accountable on issues like civilian casualties from drone strikes, use of executive power and the Afghanistan conflict, the nation's longest-ever war, which escalated under the current White House. Instead, the network's top partisan hosts –- with the exception of former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough –- seemed to circle the wagons around the Democratic president during his reelection bid.

Former President Bill Clinton remarked earlier this year that MSNBC "really has become our version of Fox," the conservative cable network owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by veteran Republican operative Roger Ailes. While such comparisons invite charges of creating a false equivalency between the two networks, it's generally accepted in political circles that MSNBC hosts are likely to favor Democrats as Fox News hosts pull for Republicans.  

I don't agree with the assertion that MSNBC and FNC are simply two sides of the same coin.  The fact of the matter is that Fox News was created in 1996 to serve the needs of a majority of Americans who were already painfully aware of just how biased the so-called "mainstream" media had become.  More specifically, Fox News was intended to be a more right-leaning network in opposition to the left-leaning CNN.  It didn't take long for the astuteness of providing an alternative to "liberal" programming to become evident.  Fox News has been dominating it's rivals for well over a decade. 

The reason is simple: Fox News is more in tune with the center-right sensibilities of the average American than its counterparts in the Obama Media Group.  It's simply good business to provide a more fair and balanced look at current events than what is offered at MSNBC.  The reality is that Fox is much more mainstream than anything found among the "mainstream" media outlets.

Jim Treacher of the Daily Caller sums it up as well as anybody:

MSNBC does for the left all the things they claim Fox News does for the right. Except in MSNBC's case, it’s actually true. And now they've given up even pretending not to be Obama's lapdogs. I just hope they keep in mind what Obama does to dogs…