Say this for MSNBC: Love it or hate it (or in my case both, depending on the day and time), not many TV channels out there inspire such strong feelings.</p><p>But this is not a story about Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or their nemeses Billo, the Manatee or Rick Warren.</p><p>This is a story about the stuff that MSNBC puts on its air when its celebrity hosts are taking time off. This is when MSNBC acts differently than its rivals, when it acts differently than even its own commercials that tout MSNBC as &#8220;The Place for Politics&#8221; (and unofficially as the official cable-news alternative to Fox).</p><p>Say what you like about Fox News, but it pretty much fills its schedule 24/7 with news and talk. MSNBC, however, adds a third component, broadly known as its &#8220;documentary block,&#8221; an umbrella term that covers everything from docs to schlock.</p><p>Because MSNBC is not as flush with cash as CNN and Fox, management has opted to use docs to fill up much of the time when viewing levels are down.</p><p>This cost-saving decision has already produced one major embarrassment for MSNBC. The Mumbai hostage crisis started the day before Thanksgiving.</p><p>That day, David Shuster (filling in for &#8220;Hardball&#8221; host Chris Matthews), Olbermann and Maddow were all providing updates as they unfolded.</p><p>Then they went home and MSNBC forgot Mumbai even existed. For the rest of the weekend, with the exception of short news breaks at the top and bottom of the hour, MSNBC showed &#8220;Lockup: Raw&#8221; &#8212; an ongoing series of inmate video from some of the country&#8217;s most notorious prisons &#8212; and &#8220;Caught on Camera: Video Vigilantes,&#8221; which is about what you think it is.</p><p>On Thursday, as the Mumbai crisis showed no sign of ending, Air America radio personality Lionel tuned in to see a &#8220;Lockup&#8221; marathon.</p><p>&#8220;Look, I want MSNBC to succeed,&#8221; he said later. But &#8220;what could have possibly been the reason not to blow off the Folsom Prison Hour for live coverage of a terrorist attack?&#8221;</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">High road, low road</span></strong></p><p>Yet even as MSNBC peddles this crap to its viewership, it is also trying to build a high-quality documentary division in-house.</p><p>In the next few days you&#8217;ll have two opportunities to see what MSNBC can do when it doesn&#8217;t take the low road.</p><p>At 7 tonight, &#8220;Witness to Jonestown,&#8221; a two-hour documentary compiled from NBC news archival footage and featuring interviews with survivors of the Jim Jones-People&#8217;s Temple massacre.</p><p>And then at 10 p.m. Sunday, you must see &#8220;Dear Zachary.&#8221; This documentary, which has been wowing festival audiences, is a personal tribute by filmmaker Kurt Kuenne to his beloved friend Andrew Bagby, who was murdered by his girlfriend in 2001 &#8212; but not before he got her pregnant.</p><p>Whereas &#8220;Jonestown&#8221; was produced in-house, &#8220;Dear Zachary&#8221; was acquired from the filmmaker as the very first for a new division called MSNBC Films.</p><p>What surprised me was that the same person &#8212; MSNBC vice president for long-form programming Michael Rubin &#8212; not only put those two programs on MSNBC but &#8220;Lockup&#8221; and &#8220;Caught on Camera,&#8221; too.</p><p>&#8220;Let me tell you something,&#8221; Rubin said. &#8220;&#8194;&#8216;Lockup&#8217; is not done any differently than any other piece of journalism. I daresay that &#8216;Lockup&#8217; is a jewel. It is probably the greatest collection of video shot inside an American prison ever done.</p><p>&#8220;I work in a new world. I look for everything my viewers are interested in. They&#8217;re as interested in the inside of a prison as much as they are interested in &#8216;Dear Zachary.&#8217;