Good for MSNBC!

And it's purely market-driven. As it should be. As it hasn't been, with the corporate media.

New York Times:

iding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.

Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.

The O'Donnell negotiations didn't pan out, but MSNBC clearly understands that there's money to be made bucking the right-wing television hegemony.

But here's the interesting part:

Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.

“It happened naturally,” Phil Griffin, a senior vice president of NBC News who is the executive in charge of MSNBC, said Friday, referring specifically to the channel’s passion and point of view from 7 to 10 p.m. “There isn’t a dogma we’re putting through. There is a ‘Go for it.’”

That the Times would mention this in such an off-hand way is very telling. A free and independent media should not have to worry about the political ramifications of playing to the market, and a government that might punish a corporation for producing profitable news programs that criticize said government is not a democratic government.