Glenn Reynolds points to a post at WizBang that suggests perennial cable news also-ran MSNBC is moving to the right in a quest for ratings.

As perhaps the only American to have watched MSNBC regularly for the past few weeks (and not just to gaze into the eyes of Chris Jansing, mind you), I have to say that they’ve found a fairly winning formula of late—regular news updates every 15 minutes, coupled with decent analysis and good use of NBC’s newsgathering resources, without all the annoying sound effects that accompany Fox News’s coverage (which are downright comical when listening to the audio feed on XM). This despite the following liabilities:

1. Neither Buchanan nor Press represent any mainstream political movement in the United States (this also applies to CNN’s Bob Novak fetish).

2. Matthews is just plain annoying. I find his politics enigmatic at best.

3. Scarborough is sort of a lame ripoff of O’Reilly (he even does the “talking points” thing O’Reilly does) crossed with Fox’s weekend Kaisch show; the upside is he isn’t as annoying as O’Reilly.

On the other hand, they actually have some ethnic diversity (although my mom took some convincing that Lester Holt is black), unlike Fox’s Aryan Brotherhood approach to newscasting, and you actually get the sense that they take news seriously. (By contrast, Brit Hume and Tony Snow are the only two personalities on FNC that actually seem to act like they’re involved in a newscast. Compare that to John Gibson and Shepard Smith, who behave more like overexcited puppies than newscasters.)

Are they ripping off the Fox formula? To an extent; MSNBC feels like the “kinder, gentler” FNC in a lot of ways. And the news-watching audience is older, wealthier, and skews more male than the population at large—all conservative demographics—so it makes sense to go after that audience, especially if you can attract an audience that might agree with FNC’s ideology but dislike the Fox “attitude” approach to news.