Floundering MSNBC’s latest personnel move — picking up ethically challenged FOB Rick Kaplan to run the whole shebang — ought to get cable news junkies’ tongues a-waggin’. (Get the scoop on Kaplan’s Clinton shenanigans here.)

Hey, it’s a new decade, and perhaps viewers can forgive Kaplan’s past liberal bias, not to mention the lawsuit-magnet journalistic disasters on his watch (Food Lion at ABC and the “Tailwind” nerve-gas slander at CNN). But for conservatives, renewed skepticism starts when Eric Alterman breaks out his tap-dancing shoes over the chance he can take the “So-Called” off his Liberal Media:

Rick Kaplan is the perfect choice to take it over and turn MSNBC into something in which everyone associated with the network can (finally) take pride. He helped build Nightline into the best news show on network television–(and the second best, and the third best) by hiring a crack staff and letting them do their jobs. [Like putting the phony “October Surprise” slur on Reagan….] He paid attention both to news values and to production values. And CNN made a great deal more sense under his watch than it has in the recent past, though it’s fair to say, not as much as it might have. At Harvard and at ABC during the war, Kaplan has had time to rethink what works and what doesn’t and apply it to a place that has too much of the latter and precious little of the former. With MSNBC he’s got a near clean slate and plenty of resources to work with. Not everything he tries will work, but I’m guessing the days of Faux-Fox are over.