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Chris Hayes on Fox News vs. MSNBC

Chris Hayes, the MSNBC weekend host, talks to TPM and argues that MSNBC and Fox News are not mirror images of one another:

[T]here is an impossibility of any symmetry between Fox and MSNBC. And the reason is because of the two men who run the networks. Roger Ailes is a lifetime, hard-right, conservative ideologue and Republican partisan. He worked in politics. He helped get Nixon elected. This is his vision. If he wasn’t doing this, he probably would be doing something else that would be furthering those goals. Our network is run by someone who worked in TV. And he wants to make a TV network that performs well, that gets viewers, that attracts advertisers, that lives up to certain standards. There’s such a big difference in that.

What Hayes is getting at: Fox president Roger Ailes is a staunch conservative who launched the Fox News Channel as a voice for the right. (Its slogan, "Fair and Balanced," is not as insincere as it seems if you believe, as Fox does, that it is simply balancing the scales of the hyper-left mainstream media -- i.e., ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, etc.)

MSNBC president Phil Griffin, on the other hand, is a businessman, pure and simple. Having watched Fox News surge from 0-to-120 in no-time flat, leaving cable news founder CNN in a cloud of dust ten years ago and never looking back, he came to the realization that, from a ratings perspective, partisanship was the golden goose. The network took a soft left in 2008, when Griffin took the helm; a sharp left in 2010, when it launched its "Lean Forward" marketing campaign; and now, in 2012, you have an evening filled with Martin Bashir, Chris Matthews, The Rev. Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell, which speaks for itself.

The problem with Hayes' distinction is that, no matter how you get from point A to point B, you get there. Fox may be hitting for the right because Ailes has a dog in the political fight, whereas MSNBC may he hitting for the left because its good for Griffin's bottom line -- but at the end of the day, everybody's playing baseball.