Ted Koppel: Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news

[speppin]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111202857.html


Ted Koppel: Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news

By Ted Koppel
Sunday, November 14, 2010;

To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.

Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts. .....

[mmonk]

1. Thanks.

I'll write him.

[rurallib]

2. Uh Ted, buddy. Olbermann and Maddow do have facts and they interpret

such facts. All newscasters do, Ted.You did in your day. Remember nightline?

[oldhippydude]

3. keep in mind

Nightline.. appeared on the scene, during the Iranian Hostage Crises... the drumbeat of the days adding up, for the hostages was a big part of the Reagan landslide in 1980!! objectivity my ass!!

[sabrina 1]

5. Yes, I was going to say I'm not sure how non-partisan Koppel

himself was. He and Charlie Rose could have gone after Fox when they were in the process of destroying journalism but they did not.

NOW, he's complaining when someone else is doing the job they failed to do.

Looks like a campaign to lump Rachel and Keith in with Fox. How many is that now joining the campaign?

I don't remember any of these people questioning the Bush lies that took us to war either. They all should be ashamed of themselves. THEY failed to do their jobs as journalists, and have the nerve to point fingers at the only two people who actually are doing some real journalism.

I wonder who will be dragged out of retirement next to slam Keith and Rachel? All I can say is they must be doing something right that the PTBs are a little worried about.

[sabrina 1]

4. Funny how all these 'journalists' kept their mouths shut

about Fox and it's only now that there is someone actually doing the job THEY failed to do, countering the lies from the network, the only network, that killed journalism in the U.S. And it killed it because people like Koppel refused to point out what they were doing wrong.

Hypocrites, and it seems maybe even part of a scheme to kill any competition to Fox.

Who does Ted think he's fooling? I watched him during the Clinton years and airc, he did nothing to counter the Fox blitz of lies and their focus on Clinton's personal life, MAKING that the news instead of what he was doing as president. There was not a single mainstream reporter, like Koppel who had anything to say back then about Fox.

He's not exactly a reliable commenter on the state of our media. He contributed to it by his silence when it was under attack from Fox.