I was pondering how to respond to the news that Keith Olbermann was leaving MSNBC, ending his run on Countdown, when I read this posting from Will Bunch this morning. He says it a lot better than I could.
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| AP file photo from MSNBC |
(Update below)
MSNBC has suspended host Keith Olbermann indefinitely because he apparently made political donations to three Democratic candidates.
Perhaps, we shouldn’t be surprisd — Olbermann has been pushing a highly partisan brand of commentary for some time. This wouldn’t be a problem except it is more than just a philosophical or ideological bent. It literally has been pro-Democrat/ant-GOP, which oversteps the boundaries.
Some on the left — or the partisan left, meaning Democrats — will point to Fox’s partisan faux news and say Olbermann offered a counterweight. And I can understand the argument. But my question is this: Since when do we lower our ethical expectations to the level of Rupert Murdoch and the GOP chain gang?
I listen to both Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on podcast most days, and often to The Young Turks and I’d been growing dissolutioned with Keith and Rachel’s creeping partisanship, especially when compared with Cenk Uygar’s unapologetically progressive, but nonpartisan commentary.
The contributions were the final straw in a growing push not to the left but toward the Democrats.
I assume Olbermann will return, but it is unclear when. For now, expect substitutes to babysit the chair (Chris Hayes from The Nation will sub tonight).
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Hayes apparently is not hosting the show tonight, but more significantly The Nation reports that Olbermann was just one of many political hosts on cable who have made contributions. This doesn’t change my criticism of Keith — he had grown too partisan (and apparently had one of the candidates he gave money to on just before his donation was made, as per The Nation).
It only expands my criticism of a news industry that is built on personalities and not journalists. The fact that Sean Hannity gave money to Republicans does not excuse Olbermann’s political contributions. Neither should be giving money if they want to pretend to host news and commentary shows.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
Keith Olbermann stepped over a line last night in attempting to defend the president and the administration from criticism by Republicans.
Sens. John Cornyn and John McCain and U.S. Rep. Peter King attacked the decision to Mirandize the man charged in the failed New York truck bomb incident, reviving an argument that is just dangerously dismissive of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.
They are advancing the idea that reading Faisal Shahzad, the now-detained the Pakistani-born American, his rights cut off potential avenues of information, potentially endangering Americans. I don’t want to argue the Mirada issue here. It is pretty clear where I stand (read the above paragraph).
What is interesting is the way in which Olbermann flipped the argument, creating a strawman to knock down and then building up a new, equally questionable argument of his own. Read this exchange between the TV host and Major General Paul Eaton, retired U.S. Army general who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004, and who is now a senior adviser at the National Security Network:
OLBERMANN: If you are the FBI agent and the police officers who spent 53 hours straight on the manhunt that was successful and as Mike Sheehan pointed out, you throw in the time of the flight that they had as a pad to Dubai, they didn‘t catch him at the last second before he left the country or would have gotten out of the grasp of this country. They got him about a day before and got him after about two days and a few hours‘ work.
What would it feel like to have done this job and have lawmakers back at home of any stripe criticizing you in the job that you just did?
EATON: Well, not good is the answer. Since January of 2009, we have seen a relentless attack on our FBI, on our armed services, on our policemen by the Republican Party. Any opportunity that they can find to see a seam to get in there and lay in an attack they have pursued. And, frankly, as a retired soldier and as a guy who supports my police, who supports my FBI, I want them to cut it out.
Olbermann offers a softball question and then gets the answer he was hoping for, one that casts the critical Congress members as anti-law enforcement and un-American. Cornyn, McCain and King are off-base and playing political games, but they are well within their rights to criticize the Obama administration, the FBI and/or the military. That’s the system we’ve erected here and one that Olbermann, himself, vociferously defended during the dark days of the Bush administration.
Olbermann is guilty of what many on the left have been guilty of since the election of Obama to the White House — a willingness to argue for things they were against, their intellectual U-turns tied to a political expediency that clouds their reason. Democrats now hate the filibuster, though they were prepared to defend it and demanded its use during the Bush years. Republicans have become so committed to it — after nearly eliminating it with the “nuclear option” — that they have stopped the Senate from functioning.
On issue after issue — torture, Guantanamo, rendition, oil drilling — liberal supporters of the president, or liberal commentators critical of the GOP, refuse to see that the arguments they have accepted just would not pass the flip test. If Bush were to have proposed the oil-drill compromise, would liberals have offered the kind of tame rebuke most offered? Would they have credited Bush with having an uncanny political mind and some kind of long-term strategy?
I think we know the answer.
As for Mr. Olbermann: I ask that he imagine the critics being Russ Feingold and John Kerry and the TV host being Bill O’Reilly. Would he have stood for O’Reilly’s blustering attack against the liberal senators? I think we know the answer to that one, as well.
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Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments,” his occasional editorial comment, are often pointed and say things that need to be said.
Some on the other hand, miss the mark completely.
Last night’s, as Mike Madden writes on Salon.com, just fell flat. It was overly long and offered little to the people who watch his show, the vast majority who support reform. It was a good, old-fashioned venting, one he may have needed to perform, but one that we did not need to hear and that did not move the debate forward. Olbermann, as Madden says, “mostly ignored what’s actually happening, in favor of preaching to the choir, rather than explaining the situation.”
The entire hour was dedicated to a “Special Comment” — Olbermann-ese for an editorial — about healthcare reform. But the point didn’t seem to be to pass reform legislation; the point appeared to be to chastise everyone involved in it, on either side, and to declaim about the nature of the system. Where Olbermann could have explained what the legislation would do — and taken on the myths against it — instead he spent his time making solemn pronouncements.
The questions he raised and did not raise, the myths he magnified and dismantled, did not get at the basics of an argument that has gone horribly off track (my Progressive Populist column, which will be published later this month, focuses on this) — the need to expand care to the uninsured and to make sure the insured actually get the coverage they pay for, the need to change how we pay doctors and the need to uncouple health coverage form employment.
Spending an hour spitting venom on a dysfunctional system should have functioned as a call to arms for single-payer, but instead he offered nothing more than an angry salvo in a healthcare battle the contours of which have been decided by politicians without imagination or guts or both.
OK. My commentary on last night’s Olbermann special comment was quoted in The Raw Story. Reading the story, I was concerned that my comments might be taken out of context, but they used my piece the way I intended it.
Hank Kalet 