The Philadelphia Inquirer's Gail Shister perfectly sums up the decision to replace Rick Kaplan with Dan Abrams at MSNBC:
They chose an inmate to run the asylum at MSNBC....
...Though Abrams says he jumped at the offer, NBC News chief Steve Capus says he took a little convincing. They started talking a few weeks ago; the deal wasn't finalized until Friday.
"Dan's not a guy blinded by ambition," Capus says. "He wasn't sitting here thinking, 'I've got to do this.' It took a lot of conversations to figure out how it was going to work."
Abrams' dearth of management experience - he was a Court TV anchor and reporter before joining MSNBC in '97 - is no biggie, Capus says.
Now, call me old-fashioned, but I tend to believe that being totally consumed with ambition is a GOOD thing in one's career. Capus makes it sound like the decision process went something like this:
Capus [dialing phone...phone rings]: Hey, Dan, it's me, Steve.
Abrams: Hey, man. What's going on?
Capus: Not much. Usual crapola. Hey, you want to replace Rick? I mean, it's, you know, whatever. The job's basically a pain in the a#$, so, you know. Whatever.
Abrams: Um. I dunno. Hold on, my sandwich just got here.
But hey, if NBC brass wants to run its cable news division the same way Jeff Spicoli ran his educational career in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," then...well, it'll be good for a laugh, if nothing else.
