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With the surprise appointment of Dan Abrams to MSNBC's general manager, has come a flurry of moves.

Some of those moves included moving Tucker Carlson's show to the late afternoon to be inserted in Abram's former time slot. It has been renamed "Tucker."

Joe Scarborough's show has been realigned to cover news in the U.S. specifically.

The biggest news was of course the cancellation of Rita Cosby's show and starting some meatier two-hour long documentaries beginning at 10 p.m. EDT. This is prime-time territory in the West.

The documentaries have been tested out on the weekends and are drawing more viewers the the MSNBC talk shows. It is also one thing that the network believes it does better than its competitors.

Always being told that CNN is its main competitor, Abrams responded saying, "I have no interest in being anything like CNN, the biggest weakness of CNN is I often find myself dozing off as I am watching. I rarely find CNN's coverage to be compelling." He believes that CNN is a boring, vulneralble company that he can compete against by making things "a little edgier, a little faster and more urgent" than in the past.

All of this is needed and gives some shakeup and shakeout, but it doesn't deal with MSNBC's real problem, which is not having any type of specific identity or direction it is going in. This has always been its weakness and it must be addressed if it is to grow. After 10 years it has been the consistent ratings loser behind Fox News and CNN. 

One report says:

NBC executive Phil Griffin said "We can do it the old conventional way, or we can break ground, when we do break ground, we will succeed.

"MSNBC intends to forge an identity by emphasizing what it considers its strengths compared to CNN and Fox _ long-form documentaries, political coverage and personalities with a passion for what they do."

Easy to say, but hard to do. The problem as I see it is that they still aren't saying or identifying what they are. The parent network NBC is part of the problem as they are still in denial about their no longer being such a thing as mass media. They are still trying to shuffle things around when they simply need to destroy it.