NBC News Chair Andy Lack Gives Hyper-Partisan Right Wing Pundit Hugh Hewitt His Own MSNBC Show

Viewers and Loyalty to MSNBC’s Base Mean Nothing to Andy Lack

Andy Lack, chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, has been on a very personal crusade to turn both networks into Fox News. Over the past two years he’s made sure Republican politicians are given a tremendous amount of air time, and right wing, hyper-partisan pundits are brought on as contributors and even hosts of their own shows. 

Lack hired Megyn Kelly from Fox News. After months of creating a new news show for NBC to compete directly with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Kelly’s show has gone from poor ratings to very bad ratings, in just three weeks. Her disastrous interview with Vladimir Putin kicked of her first episode. Her disastrous interview with Alex Jones her third. The outrage from all sides has been palpable.

Lack also hired former Fox News host Greta Van Susteren. Even a personal plea and endorsement from Rachel Maddow has not been able to get Van Susteren decent ratings. That’s likely because she’s just not good at her job. Van Susteren repeatedly hosts conservatives, and then engages in casual and apparently unscripted conversation with them on air, leading to frequent false claims from the journalist who is expected to know basic facts about the issues she’s reporting. 

There’s also former Bush 43 communications chief and McCain-Palin ’08 senior advisor Nicolle Wallace, who has her own daytime show at 4 PM. Of the three, she’s hands down the best.

And now, Andy Lack has bagged himself another hyper-partisan right wing hack and given him his own show.

Hugh Hewitt, whose analysis is just embarrassingly bad – he went from “Never Trump” to “Trump! Trump! Trump!” – will be getting his own show on MSNBC, thanks to Andy Lack and his dream of re-creating Fox News.

Hewitt will not get his dream job, a weeknight gig on MSNBC, but rather a 30-minute show Saturday mornings.

Expect that to grow to an hour, then to include Sundays, and then to weekdays or even weeknights. 

In April, New York magazine reported, “the fact that he’s on the verge of getting his own program is alarming to some staffers at MSNBC. Among their concerns is that Hewitt, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and Trump supporter, doesn’t represent the values of the liberal network. While Hewitt flirted with never-Trumpism during the campaign — most notably when then-candidate Trump attacked Mexican-American judge Gonzalo Curiel, and after the infamous Access Hollywoodtape was leaked to the Washington Post — he always came back to Trump, and ultimately cast a ballot for him in the November election.”

Some staffers have inferred a link between Lack’s directive and the decision to pull Today’s first black woman host, Tamron Hall, off the show to make room for former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. Ultimately, Hall chose to leave both NBC and MSNBC — where she had her own 11 a.m. program — rather than accept a diminished role. Lack also hired former Fox News host Greta Van Susteren and gave her the 6 p.m. slot on MSNBC’s weekday schedule. Since Van Susteren’s show debuted in January, the ratings have been, by any objective measure, abysmal. In a rare occurrence for that spot, her numbers have actually been lower than those of her lead-in program, Chuck Todd’s Meet the Press Daily. Van Susteren’s hire was not well-received internally at MSNBC, with Chris Matthews being especially frustrated by the decision, according to two network sources.

Last month, HuffPost explained Lack’s desire to jump to the right, and why it is a problem.

Tossing those primetime hosts overboard while they’re raking in viewership and revenue has so far proved an elusive task.