Steve Capus glances at the eight video feeds on the flat-screen monitors in his Rockefeller Plaza office, smiling as he spots Andrea Mitchell in a head scarf, doing a morning live shot for MSNBC.
The 46-year-old NBC News president ticks off Mitchell's contributions while covering the Iranian regime's release of an American hiker: She was on "Today," she will be on "Nightly News" that evening, and she will host her MSNBC afternoon show from Tehran. And those multiple platforms--plus the ability to share costs with a cable channel--is what he believes separates his network from CBS and ABC.
MSNBC was once an afterthought; Capus himself repeatedly turned down a request to move there until his NBC boss ordered him to do so soon after its 1996 launch. But the channel's improving fortunes have buoyed the mothership. "Nobody had any idea how important it would be to this news division," he says. "It gives us a running start. There are no nap times around here."
With its lineup of liberal firebrands, MSNBC can also be a headache that blurs the straight-news reputation of the broadcast network, especially as such stalwarts as Mitchell, Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie spend more time on the cable airwaves. But the channel brings in revenue, in the form of cable subscription fees, and it puts NBC in the 24/7 game. Despite recurring rumors that ABC is flirting with Bloomberg or CBS might join forces with CNN, those deals, with their inevitable complications about editorial control, never seem to get done.
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