After his last few days of antics, actor Alec Baldwin hints today in a lengthy blog post at the Huffington Post that his MSNBC show may not return at all after its two week suspension.
Another issue I want to address is the decision by MSNBC to suspend my show. Whether the show comes back at all is at issue right now. My producers and I had a very enlightening and well-researched program prepared to air on November 22nd itself, dealing with John Kennedy’s assassination. That show is off the air now. I am deeply apologetic to Ron Fried, who worked extremely hard with me on that show. It’s heartbreaking to me that the show, meant to coincide with the actual anniversary, will not be aired that night. The show is no doubt a work in progress and one that I believe featured some interesting guests and disseminated a good deal of interesting information. But if the show dies, its fate ends up being no different than the vast majority of start-up TV programming, and so be it. We do take a small amount of pride in knowing that we beat CNN in the ratings each of our nights. (I forget who they had on at that time.)I have been a fan of MSNBC for some time. Its left-leaning tone never bothered me. I still believe that they are more enamored of and devoted to the truth in any single hour than Fox is all year long. I think Rachel Maddow is perhaps the single most important television journalist on the air today. And if my show does disappear, I will be grateful in so far as her good work, along with that of O’Donnell and Hayes and Sharpton and Matthews and Jansing, will not be sullied by my problem.
Baldwin goes on to complain of the country’s obsession with the private lives of famous people. Personally, I can’t disagree with him much there. However, he somehow seems to manage making his private life far more public than that of other famous people by way of his own behavior. Nonetheless, he chalks it up to people’s frustration with the economy and Washington, which he believes is what fuels everyone’s need to post and make comments online about the “celebrity debacle of the day.”
“That is your right. It’s also fatal misdirection of your voice and need to judge. Occupy Wall Street, on their worst day, had more integrity than the comments page of a website ever will,” his blog post continues.
Baldwin concludes by requesting of readers, “Don’t allow my problem to be MSNBC’s problem,” and asks that people respect the privacy of his wife and family.
Read the full blog post at Huffington Post.
h/t Twitchy
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