The Philidelphia Inquirer, an American newspaper, published an editorial Thursday severely critical of the American news channel MSNBC.

The main point of criticism was the networks decision to let two political commentators function as anchors of its political coverage.

Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, the PI said, made the coverage veer ‘off into on-air spats between the anchors that began to sound more like talk radio.’ This ‘left the cable network open to valid criticism of having a liberal bias. Serious news readers.’

In effect MSNBC became ‘the liberal counterweight to the conservative Fox News Channel. Both are preaching to their respective choirs rather than providing objective news coverage and useful analysis,’ the editorial said. MSNBC, however, ‘went too far by putting blatantly biased commentators in the role of news anchors. Even Fox knows better than to have Bill O’Reilly anchor its political coverage. So far, anyway.’

The conclusion: ‘the real losers have been viewers hungry for substantive political coverage of the issues.’

The Political Inquirer joins a wide arrange of newspapers, (online) news and opinion magazines, journalists, political commentators and analysts who believe that American news channels are becoming to obviously and openly biased. This news and opinion site, PoliGazette, published a similar article on Tuesday criticizing MSNBC executives for encouraging its reporters to act like biased partisan hacks, instead of credible journalists.

Some progressives charged, however, that MSNBC’s move to the left was important in order to ‘counter the propaganda’ at Fox News. A network had to ‘counter the propaganda spread by conservatives,’ they argued.

Be that as it may, MSNBC’s recent coverage of political news has caused it to lose a lot of respect from conservatives, moderates and objective viewers (and readers) alike. The main complaint against the network was not that it lets ‘angry liberals’ like Keith Olbermann have their own show; it was it allowed them to cover news that should be brought in an objective manner, to inform the public, not to convince it of one opinion or another.