Olbermann's Return Won't Restore Sanity

Two weeks of media melodrama bracket a tumultuous election that shook up American politics, putting a spotlight on the people who presumably report on the spectacle but more and more are out there strutting on the stage.

Keith Olbermann will be back from the on-camera dead tomorrow night after his constituency, and many journalists, showered NBC with Tea Partyish rage. But there should be no unalloyed joy over his resurrection, which only confirms what critic David Carr calls "the Foxification of the cable universe."

Olbermann's return will correct an absurdity but do nothing for what Jon Stewart calls Sanity. As Carr points out:

"The shift of audiences toward cable news outlets--with their manifest agendas--as sources of truth and transparency may have something to do with a credibility gap that now confronts more mainstream news outfits. Lately, the idea of objective journalism has been on a pretty rough ride (that means you, CNN), with viewers deciding to align themselves with outlets that share their points of view--warts, agendas and all."

Stewart's rally was held on the weekend before the voting. Significantly, when the President appeared on the Daily Show just before it took place, he ruefully suggested that the reminder was coming two years late.

Looking back on 60 Minutes yesterday, Obama remarked that "this country doesn't just agree with The New York Times editorial page...I can make some really good arguments defending the Democratic position, and there are gonna be some people who just don't agree with me. And that's okay. And then we've got to figure out a way to compromise."

So Olbermann is back, which is all to the good as balance for the growing Fox dominance of the tower of babble, but the underlying problem is worse than ever.

In a cameo appearance on Election Night, the ghost of Journalism Past, Tom Brokaw, observed that "almost nothing is going the way that most people have been told that it will. And every time they’re told in Washington that they have it figured out, it turns out not to be true."

On cable news, "true" is not the highest priority.

Update: Olbermann apologizes to his viewers but not to his bosses for all the furor. Just so. Now we can all get back to watching the PBS NewsHour to get the news of the day.

Olbermann Remake of "Network"

The angry anchorman in the 1976 movie gets high ratings for a while and, when they drop, network honchos have him killed on camera.

As the Keith Olbermann saga unfolds, the only new wrinkle is doing him in offstage with fine print instead of bullets. In the face of declining ratings, a pending change of ownership and a Republican tide rising, the left-leaning "mad as hell" style is obviously expendable.

Yet, in the cesspool called "cable news," it's disheartening to see Fox News and Rupert Murdoch tightening their grip on what passes for journalism but is little more than a political cockpit for venomous opinionating.

In an interview for tomorrow's New York Times, Olbermann objects to pairing "MSNBC as the lefty version of Fox News" at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity:

"To present all this as the same is both unfair and injurious to the political system at the moment. One of the big flaws now is that there is all this noise on the right. When I yell there is a reason for it. There is a political and factual discernment behind it. I am not doing it gratuitously."

Olbermann unwittingly offers his own professional epitaph by quoting Joe Biden when he was still a senator at a lunch with him, "I just come across like I’m angry and out of control, and you seem to focus it and make it look useful and expressive."

Back then, as now, not everybody would agree with Joe Biden, but this is a sad time to be losing Olbermann's expressive voice.

Non-Profit-News News

A report in today's Washington Post raises questions about what's happening to the American economy, government and journalism.

Headlined "How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue," it details how the world's largest company wormed its way into the Obama bailout and profited from issuing almost a quarter of the $340 billion in debt backed by the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, qualifying by owning two small Utah banks but at the same time escaping regulation of its huge financial operations.

The story exposes one element in a complex process but, beyond that, in its provenance, reflects wider problems in helping the public understand what's going on under the surface of government handouts and conventional reporting in these days of shrinking investigative journalism.

The Post notes: "This article was reported jointly with Jeff Gerth of ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. ProPublica is supported entirely by philanthropy and provides the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations."

It's not only disturbing to find such charity behind the work of Washington's hometown news source but to consider the complications of how much attention it will generate in such GE-owned media outlets as NBC, MSNBC and CNBC.

Half a century of working in journalism and as a media critic have made me leery of conspiracy theories, but it will be interesting to see how much, if any, play this particular news gets tonight from Brian Williams, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer and other corporate employees.

It's same to assume that the President of GE won't be on the list of contenders for Worst Person in the World.

Sound-Bite Coming of Age

Grownups are just children who owe money, said a character in the 1992 movie "Peter's Friends" and now, with the economic crisis, they owe even more and, thanks to 24/7 cable TV, seem less mature than ever.

"Republicans, Let's Play Grown-Up," Peggy Noonan urges in the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that "idiots" in her party rise above temper tantrums in opposing Sonia Sotomayor:

"Don't grill and grandstand, summon and inform. Show the respect that expresses equality and the equality that is an expression of respect. Ask and listen, get the logic, explain where you think it wrong. Fill the airwaves with thoughtful exchanges."

As a grown-up White House tries to deal with overheated attacks on Obama's nominee as "racist," thoughtful exchanges are in short supply.

In his weekly address, the President observes, "There are, of course, some in Washington who are attempting to draw old battle lines and playing the usual political games, pulling a few comments out of context to paint a distorted picture of Judge Sotomayor’s record. But I am confident that these efforts will fail; because Judge Sotomayor’s seventeen-year record on the bench--hundreds of judicial decisions that every American can read for him or herself--speak far louder than any attack; her record makes clear that she is fair, unbiased, and dedicated to the rule of law."

But how many Americans will read any of those hundreds of decisions? How many more will make up their minds based on Keith Olbermann's rage about G. Gordon Liddy's radio rant comparing La Raza to the KKK and hoping that "key conferences" of the Supreme Court don't take place "when she's menstruating or something"?

Noonan says, "Comment-thread conservatives, like their mirror-image warriors on the left ("Worst person in the woooorrrlllddd!") are perpetually agitated, permanently enraged. They don't need to be revved, they're already revved. Newt Gingrich twitters that Judge Sotomayor is a racist. Does anyone believe that? He should rest his dancing thumbs, stop trying to position himself as the choice and voice of the base in 2012, and think."

Sounds good, but don't hold your breath from now until 2012 waiting for them all to grow up.

Flying Turkeys of Yesteryear

It's not every day you get to write a sentence like this:

As Keith Olbermann was making a pumpkin pie with Martha Stewart yesterday, they discussed the video of Sarah Palin cheerfully pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey with others being slaughtered in the background, as he recalled the classic 1978 WKRP sitcom episode of turkeys being dropped from a helicopter on the mistaken assumption that they could fly.

In the context of politicians scrambling around to give Citibank, AIG and other plummeting turkeys a soft landing, there is something symbolic about Palin's rescue plan for one bird while others are going down.

After all this, the nostalgic may opt for a Thanksgiving dinner of moose chili and watching tapes of Jimmy Carter's fireside chats about the ailing economy back then.

Upstaging McCain's Acceptance Speech

Pass the smelling salts to Keith Olbermann, when he finds out that Barack Obama will be appearing on Fox News with Bill O'Reilly Thursday night just before John McCain's big moment at the Republican Convention.

Call it payback for springing Sarah Palin on the media the next day to overshadow the afterglow of Obama's acceptance speech last week, but Olbermann, who has been Obama's most ardent media fan, is learning the hard way about the axiom, "No good deed goes unpunished."

Being interviewed by Olbermann to counterprogram the Republicans would be fairly ho-hum, but making his first appearance with O'Reilly qualifies as man-bites-dog news for Obama. And if past history is any guide, O'Reilly will turn into a pussycat in the face of real star power.

Tipping Point: Journalist-Free Journalism

As newspapers cut 1,000 jobs last week, Americans are getting their sense of the world less and less through human eyes and ears than from TV cameras abetted by well-groomed mannequins gushing over an endless flow of images.

Talking heads on cable and bloggers online parse and pick away at what the cameras see but there are fewer and fewer reporters to find out what's hidden by using such old-fashioned skills as observation, questioning and legwork.

Where is the tipping point at which "news" becomes all opinion all the time about "facts" supplied by self-interested sources?

Newspapers are drowning in red ink even as Americans depend more heavily on what they do but don't pay for the information they get from them digitally and advertisers don't cover the costs of allowing them to continue providing it.

The challenge, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, is to "reinvent their profession and their business model at the same time they are cutting back on their reporting and resources." A top news executive is quoted as saying, "It’s like changing the oil in your car while you’re driving down the freeway."

Meanwhile, Timothy Egan argues on his New York Times blog, "there’s plenty of gossip, political spin and original insight on sites like the Drudge Report or The Huffington Post--even though they are built on the backs of the wire services and other factories of honest fact-gathering. One day soon these Web info-slingers will find that you can’t produce journalism without journalists, and a search engine is no replacement for a curious reporter."

Meanwhile Rush Limbaugh gets a new $400 million contract for spouting off on one medium, while Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann (bless his splenetic soul) dominate another with their points of view.

The pay and job security are nowhere near as good in the mills that provide their raw material.

Why Is NBC So Touchy?

Ed Gillespie only wants to help. Karl Rove's successor in the White House has embarked on a new career as media critic, judging NBC guilty of "deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline" and create an "utterly misleading and irresponsible" impression of a Presidential interview about his speech to the Israeli Knesset.

In times like these, Americans need all the media criticism they can get, particularly corrective analysis coming from such an informed source as a lifelong lobbyist whose clients have included Enron and, perhaps more pertinent in this case, Viacom, owner of CBS.

In 2003, the watchdog group Public Citizen called Gillespie an "embedded lobbyist" to further the interests of his "corporate benefactors" as Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

In his new incarnation, the Counselor to the President is urging NBC news honcho Steve Capus to reassure Americans that "blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don't hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division."

Capus reassured him that the Presidential interview "has been available, unedited, in its entirety, for the past day, on our website. Our reporting accurately reflects the interview...NBC News, as part of a free press in a free society, makes its own editorial decisions."

But why can't they see that Gillespie just wants to help?

Will Glib Be Good Enough?

Sooner rather than later (see below), Barack Obama has had to confront his twin albatrosses, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the decidedly secular Tony Rezko. In his rounds of the cable news shows last night, Obama was articulate, as always, but for the first time, glib bordering on shifty.

On Countdown with a deferential Keith Olbermann, he distanced himself from Wright's racist rants but asked voters to believe that, in 17 years of churchgoing, he did not hear any of the venom or he would have condemned it.

Even more tenuous was Obama's attempt to paint Wright as a spiritual leader caught up in the anger of his generation at racial injustice, a pissed-off Martin Luther King, if you will. That won't wash with those who remember how King stressed rejection of such attitudes at a time when Black Power advocates were promoting them. Senator, Wright is no Martin Luther King. Not even close.

In his attempt to "disgorge" Rezko, along with his campaign contributions, Obama stressed that he has not been accused of any wrongdoing or connected to any of the issues involved in the current federal corruption trial, but his opponents won't be deterred from harping on their long, close association, including the buying of the Obamas' Chicago home.

Obama's most fervent admirers will be tempted to pass off these iffy relationships as part of a misguided search for substitute fathers by a man who lost his own at an early age, and there may be truth in that. But Obama is now attempting to become the national father figure, and just asking him to show better judgment than George W. Bush would be setting the bar very low.

Pimping Out the News

Last week's Chelsea Clinton furor marks a low point in cable network competition for eyeballs and ears during the 24/7 news cycle and raises broader questions about their prime-time "journalism," which has degenerated into a babble of idiot ids vying for attention.

David Shuster's "pimped out" remark exemplifies a trend reported almost a year ago by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, that "cable news channels...are moving more toward personalities, often opinionated ones, to win audiences.

"The most strident voices, such as Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck, are among the biggest successes in winning viewers, as is CNN’s new crusader, Lou Dobbs. How much those individual shows affect a channel’s overall audience is harder to gauge. Their growth in 2006 was substantial, particularly among 25-to-54-year-olds, but those gains were not enough to stanch the overall declines.

"The shifts toward even edgier opinion are also probably a response to another change. Cable is beginning to lose its claim as the primary destination for what was once its main appeal: news on demand. That is something the Internet can now provide more efficiently."

Something even more basic is involved as well. Unlike newspapers, magazines and even blogs, TV news has always been a zero-sum game. If a viewer loses interest and switches channels, it's over, so the premium is on attention-getting and holding. Blowhards and gasbags are the means of choice.

So Olbermann, as much as he rants at Bill O'Reilly, is driven to his own extremes as are Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough and the trash-talking heads they assemble every night.

Only when there is immediate news to analyze, as on election nights, are the more rational voices heard--the Andrea Mitchells, Candy Crowleys, Jeffrey Toobins, Jeff Greenfields and even the Tom Brokaws of TV's greatest generation.

The rest of the time, it's hyperbole and hype, with the news, you might say, being pimped out.

Stupor Tuesday

If you haven't started the day with a headache, chances are you'll end with one. The mathematics of today's primaries would stupefy Einstein--super delegates, bonus delegates, caucuses, district splits, threshold percentages...

Last night Keith Olbermann and reporter David Shuster started out to explain it all and ended up in Abbott and Costello's Who's-on-First routine. Click on "Deconstructing delegates" and watch.

What ever happened to people going into a booth, pulling a lever and counting up the votes to see who wins?

Iffy Expert on White House Crime

After the Scooter Libby commutation, Keith Olbermann interviewed two people this evening--former Ambassador Joe Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame, the object of Libby’s lying and obstruction of justice, and John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel in his new career as the Bush Administration’s harshest critic.

For someone who lived through and reported on the Watergate years, Dean’s resurrection is a little hard to take. It’s like listening to sermons from a whore. For those too young to remember, this from Wikipedia’s will serve as a catch-up:

“Dean pled guilty to obstruction of justice before Watergate trial judge John Sirica on November 30, 1973. He admitted supervising payments of ‘hush money’ to the Watergate burglars, notably E. Howard Hunt, and revealed the existence of Nixon's enemies list.

“On August 2, 1974, Sirica handed down a sentence of one to four years in a minimum-security prison. However, when Dean surrendered himself as scheduled on September 3, he was diverted to the custody of U.S. Marshals and kept instead at Fort Holabird (near Baltimore, Maryland) in a special ‘safe house’ holding facility primarily used for witnesses against the Mafia.

“He spent his days in the offices of the Watergate Special Prosecutor and testifying in the trial of Watergate conspirators Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson, which concluded on January 1, 1975. Dean's lawyer moved to have his sentence reduced, and on January 8, Sirica granted the motion, adjusting Dean's sentence to time served.”

Civilized human beings believe in redemption, but does that extend to making the fallen experts and moral arbiters? Dean was a willing White House accomplice to criminal activity until he saved his skin by helping expose the people he worked for and with.

That’s understandable, but more sensitive souls will pardon me for not wanting to hear his opinions on today’s public morality ad nauseam. Olbermann might think about finding instead some of the people who risked their careers opposing Nixon’s criminality while he still had power.

If Alberto Gonzales or any of his cohorts finally spill the beans on Rove and Bush out of fear of going to prison, that will be fine for American democracy. But will it mean having to listen to them as moral exemplars during some scandal decades from now?