Inside The MSNBC Shake-Up

Phil Griffin, the president of cable-news network MSNBC, is getting sick of defending his decision to replace Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews with David Gregory as anchor for big political events.

Griffin is claiming that a report from the New York Post, which stated that the change came from Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of NBC’s parent company General Electric, after “a lot, maybe thousands” of shareholders had called up to complain about Olbermann during the DNC and RNC, is categorically false.

“This makes me so mad, because it’s so untrue,” Griffin said. “Somebody is spreading rumors. It’s wrong. It’s getting into the echo chamber.”

The “beauty of my job,” he said, was that nobody from GE had ever big-footed his domain. He said he dealt purely with NBC Universal’s president and CEO, Jeff Zucker, and NBC News’ president, Steve Capus. He had come to this decision, he said, after consulting first with Olbermann and later with  Matthews.

The new philosophy of the station is said to be: Edge out and caution in.  “Every day-side anchor, every producer, everybody was told the word on high is that no more edge,” a source tells the NY Observer.

“Be especially careful not to inject any sort of opinion or ridicule or anything like that. Play it straight down the middle. If you say something is not true, you have to say who’s claiming that it’s not true. The managers were saying, ‘Go for boring. That’s all we care about right now, be boring.’”