MSNBC’s top brass and leading anchors have finally “come out”: The network is officially a liberal news channel. Naturally, the New York Times is the venue for the party:

Riding 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. […]
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.’” […]
Mr. Olbermann comes on after “Hardball” with Mr. Matthews, whose longtime opposition to the war — and to what he describes as Vice President Dick Cheney’s outsize role in the administration — has become only more pointed since he took on the title of managing editor of his broadcast over the summer.
Since then, he has talked, both on the air and off, about the “criminality” of the Bush White House, as epitomized, he says, by the role of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the vice president’s former chief of staff, in the C.I.A. leak case. Mr. Matthews’s overall ratings have edged up in the process, though not on the scale of Mr. Olbermann’s.

The piece ends with this mangled analogy from Olbermann himself:

That said, in a separate interview last week, Mr. Olbermann acknowledged that for MSNBC’s nighttime lineup to ultimately work, viewers needed to be able to follow at least some common themes from one show to another. He likened himself and his fellow hosts, collectively, to the menu of a hamburger restaurant with several variations of the same dish.
“If you go into a burger place, and you go in there for the fish, you might want the fish occasionally but it’s probably a mistake,” he said. “Could you be utterly different politically and succeed in this format? You’d basically be throwing your audience away.”

I for one congratulate MSNBC on its refreshing honesty and openness. And what better time than “green week” for its parent network to make a similar announcement?