Lean Forward

The reactive progressive answer to Fox. A posture, not an epistemological argument. Abandoned in 2015 for a slogan that said even less.

MSNBC spent more than a decade looking for an identity. The Microsoft-NBC joint venture had cycled through formats and anchors, never quite finding its register. By the mid-2000s, with Keith Olbermann openly attacking Fox News on air as Fixed News and Faux News, the network discovered there was a paying audience for a left-of-center cable brand. Lean Forward, launched in October 2010, was the formal version of that bet.

The slogan is interesting precisely because it is weaker than Fair and Balanced. It does not claim a methodology. It does not accuse anyone of lying. It elects a posture - forward-leaning, optimistic, progressive - and asks the viewer to inhabit it. The 2010 Declaration of Forward spot layered weddings, marching bands, a child sledding, a birthday party, over voiceover from the Declaration of Independence. The argument is affective. Look toward a brighter future. Lean toward it with us.

This worked, partially. In the 25-54 demographic, MSNBC narrowed the gap with Fox to roughly 300,000 viewers by 2012. But the network never matched Ailes’s reality-defining aggression. Critics, including from the left, called the result an echo chamber - hosts agreeing with each other in front of a loyal audience. Because Lean Forward made no claim about reality, it could not be defended as journalism and could not be weaponized as politics. In 2015 it was replaced by This Is Who We Are, a phrase so emptied of argument it functions as a retreat. The progressive cable bet had given up on slogans.

Sources: www.cambridge.org ↗en.wikipedia.org ↗undergradjournal.history.ucsb.edu ↗