Keith Olberman Suspended Indefinitly by NBC

that what makes it so funny

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He is going to be back on Tuesday, so what was it, like 4 days??? (well, 2 working nights)

Money talks, stupid boss walks...

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This "Liberal media bias" was real and still is real on social issues like "gay marriage" and the abortion debate and gun control.

There never was a left bias on foreign policy or economic policy.

As far as I know other than Jon Stewart every other national TV personality that was not supportive of the Iraq invasion was fired or "resigned" within a year of the Iraq invasion. This included conservative Pat Buchanan and Ted Koppel who tried I think unsuccessfully to oppose the war while concealing his opposition to the war.

Phil Donahue's ratings were not good but he had the highest Ratings on MSNBC and he got fired. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue : "Although his ratings were less than 1/6th Bill O'Reilly, who shared the same time slot, Donahue was the highest rated show on MSNBC at the time it was canceled, managing to beat out Chris Matthews' "Hardball" in the ratings.[6] Soon after the show's cancellation AllYourTV.com reported it had received a copy of an internal NBC memo that stated Donahue should be fired because he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war".[6][7]


In the 8 months prior to the Iraq invasion support for the invasion averaged about 55% for 35% opposed and 10% undecided but on TV the personalities broke more like 85% for war 2% anti war and 13% undecided. That does not look like liberal media bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_opinion_in_the_United_States_on_the_invasion_of_Iraq.

II noticed that NPR swung to the right after Bush came into power. NPR supported the war. Under Bush NPR retained the style of liberal intellectualism but in it's overt political content it was no longer left of center.

Being blatantly biased even to the point of making campaign contributions does not seem to be wrong from a business stand point. Fox has done well by standing out from the pack and claiming a large niche of media audience for themselves.

With so many competitors for audience attention it makes sense that targeting niches would be more effective for capturing audience share than trying to appeal to everyone would. Back when PBS had it's niche (intellectuals) and ABC, NBC and CBS got to take everybody else by default trying to appeal to a broad audience made sense but cable TV changed everything though the industry has been slow to understand the change.

MSNBC Is still not committing to be taking the available left niche and abandoning it's attempt to be "balanced" and appeal to a broad market.

Liberals care more about facts than conservatives do. You would alienate most liberals if you told liberals lies that would be pleasing to liberals. This is not so true on the conservative side. There are some conservatives who are upset by conservative culture of lying and disregard for the facts to the point that some conservatives can no longer tolerate conservative media and the Republican Party. One slice of the conservatives became permanent politically homeless outsiders ever since 1980 when Bush senior lost to Reagan and Reagan's voodoo economics.

The dumbing down of conservatism and emotionalization of Conservatism probably began when Nixon decided to appeal to the racists and those appalled by the hippies. With Reagan Conservatism started to be chronic lying and then Limbaugh arrived and showed that unabashed lying can be very successful then came Fox.

Gingrich brought a sophistication about coordinated language and Gingrich shifted the Republican party more into win at all costs /politics is a game thinking. The Clinton impeachment was absurd and was essentially a lie and essentially a criminal conspiracy since a disingenuous impeachment violates the spirit of the law. I think the Republicans view the Clinton impeachment has having been a successful tactic even though the backlash against the impeachment helped the Democrats.

Anyway the majority of this conservative coalition that we are dealing with today is not troubled by blatant lying as long as the lies are pro conservative lies. These people are cheerleaders not scholars.

I wonder if it matters that General Electric which owns something like 80% of the company that owns 85% of MSNBC gets one to three billion dollars in defense contracts every year.

No MSNBC is not the equivalent of Fox. The equivalent of Fox would be as purely left as Fox is right and would be owned by somebody as left as Murdoch is right and would have as little regard for truth as Fox has for truth. MSNBC is however the closest thing to a left equivalent of Fox as exists.

The mainstream media is afraid of the "Liberal bias" charge and is afraid of loosing audience on the right. I would tell them that they already lost that audience on the right so stop worrying about them. Fox and friends will rip the mainstream media for being too far left no matter how far to the right the mainstream media swings so the mainstream media should stop worrying. The damage to their profits has already happened. They lost the right and it's just a matter of time before they lose the left. Eventually some business is going to appreciate the money to be made from targeting their broadcasts to the left and will do a competent job of targeting the the left. MSNBC is not clear on what they are doing and could be doing whatever it is they are doing better and Air America seemed a bit amateurish.

Exactly. The people talking about Liberal Media Bias have no Idea what Liberal media bias would look like.

But which kind of bias? Fox is the right point on TV and their equivalent should be as far left of Center as Fox is right of Center. Where the equivalent leftness of Center would be depends on whether you take the "truth" to be center or the median beliefs to be center. I am convinced that Median American beliefs are to the right of the truth.

I do wonder what the hell is up with supposedly liberal institutions that support the right on war and Wall Street Bailouts. Of course the right could point out that the right lead the opposition to Wall Street bail outs. Viewing the right as pro kleptocracy is not really accurate. It is more like kleptocracy is using the left versus right conflict to protect themselves from both the left and the right.

The NY Times and Wasington Post and La Times reportedly all refuted things that Gary Webb never said in their response to to the San Jose Mercury's Dark Alliance story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb Refuting something that somebody never said is how you can discredit somebody who is telling the truth while still being safe from libel suits.

I have suspicions that the national security apparatus and friends of kleptocracy are able to bend allegedly Liberal media sources to their will.

Anybody (regardless whether conservative or liberal) who is prioritizing truthfulness above everything else would never consider , FOX News, the Washington Times or the New York Post credible.

The Cheerleader part of people and the scholar part of people are not compatible. Facts are irrelevant to cheerleading.

 

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Exactly, but it's also demonstrably partisan when it comes down to things such as elections and scandals (the one notable exception on the latter being Clinton/Lewinsky).

As I've said many times, Fox would not exist if the media really were not so obviously partisan, and in being so, hostile to the sentiment or kind of stories Fox has no compunction about embracing.

I'm not so sure about that. There are plenty of liberals on this site who flinch at facts -- or are only willing to accept certain facts if they can take them and warp them to their own ideology. They're also rather fond of calling people "liars" and things "lies" whenever a person or piece of information doesn't suite their worldview.

More importantly, it's the closest thing that can exist, in this country anyway. Anything further to the Left would fall on its face.

Yes, but the problem is that this is still a largely conservative country with a value system that does not match up with "liberals" or "progressives" or whatever you want to call them (and we saw that in this year's election, where --rightly or wrongly -- the independents bolted from the Democratic camp). So when your newsroom is out of touch with what the majority thinks and believes and holds dear -- say something like religion -- and to top it off, your newsroom is aggressively pushing an agenda that does not square with the viewing public's beliefs, you have a problem when Nielsen comes to call with his clipboard.

It would look like WSD? A socialism that borders on Communism? That's never held a large audience in this country and never will. And it's not doing much better in other places, either. No media outlets like that could ever hope to survive in this country, as they truly are fringe. But defining Fox as an equal fringe does not quite work. There are millions of people watching Fox. So unless you hold there is so immovable political spectrum, then things aren't quite as you suggest. And if you do hold the spectrum is immovable, then you're accusing a huge chunk of the American electorate of being extremely right wing.

 

Fox serves a big constituency. I think another very large constituency could be pulled away from the mainstream media by a left version of something like Fox. I am not calling Fox a fringe.

Most people would not have believed Fox would have worked before it worked.

Obama won the presidency by selling a fictitious left of Center "change we can believe in". A lot of people hoped for this dream. A TV news network targeted at those people would probably work.

A network ten percent to the left of Olberman and Maddow but on the offensive rather than on the defensive and with a combative more earthy style rather than a whiny intellectual style would be the left version of Fox. Fox grew it's audience and a left Network could do the same.

But everybody who bought Obama's dream had a different Idea of what "change we can believe in meant". If conservatism and Fox can fuse the Traditionalists and Libertarians together than something can fuse most of Obama's voters together. The only thing Libertarians and Traditionalists have in common is their opposition to the liberals attempting to force people to be kind.

Communism failed. The left knows this. Greed must be worked with not denied because greed is real. Libertarianism also disregards greed when Libertarianism pretends that people don't need to be coerced to behave ethically.

Central planning fails both big government and big corporations. The trial and error of competition turns out to be smarter than smart people imposing their theories from the top down.

The appeal of Communism was directly proportional to the degree to which Kleptocracy corrupted the market economy and frustrated people's hopes of a good life for their children.

Right now both American organized conservatism and organized liberalism have been corrupted by Wall Street to the point that neither dare recognize that American trade policy has been a disaster for the next generation of Americans. If mainstream conservatism and mainstream liberalism choose to be stupid they open up space for something else.

Politics change. Who knows where this is going.

 

UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!!!

Period. No business, regardless of whatever shoddy "free market" or "capitalist" ideals they adhere to, should be allowed to violate a fundamental right to donate or vote for their candidate of choice. Especially when this voting or donation is conducted in one's personal life, away from the job. Having a corporation dictate your civil rights (in this case, freedom of speech, especially) outside of the workplace is unethical.

MSNBC should be ashamed, not only for violating someone's rights like this, but being so hypocritical. MSNBC is widely regarded as having a liberal bias in its punditry, and Keith Olbermann is not an exception. You would think he would have been encouraged to make donations, not get suspended.

My GOD! For once, it isn't those devil worshipers over at FOX News committing treasonous acts!

 

Actually, the Supreme Court said it is constitutional. Try again.

 

The Supreme Court, huh? Who are they?

Why? Sounds like they don't know what they're doing.

 

It falls under contract law, not the constitution.

 

So a company can dictate the finance interest of its employees, supreme court said so?

 

Not arbitrarily, but if you have a contract with them, yes. They can't tell him not to give money, but they can withhold employment under certain conditions, as long as they aren't discriminating based on race, age, yada yada yada.

 

On the Media (November 5, 2010)

NPR's On the Media this week explored some of the media controversies that have made the news in recent weeks. Various segments include:

• Take the Public Out of Public Broadcasting

• Keep the Public In Public Broadcasting

• Journalists as People

• Were the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs Ignored?

• Turning Off Election Coverage

• Pulling Back the Curtain (In Memory of John Solomon)​

The transcripts are not yet available, as of this writing; they should be up later today. Audio for both stream and download are presently available.

"Journalists as People" is an excellent segment, including various media figures discussing the role of personal (e.g., political) sentiment in journalism, and one editor who took the question so far as to stop voting altogether.

"Pulling Back the Curtain" is a wonderful piece as well, in which the late John Solomon discussed how NPR stories are edited together, the artifice of presentation, television and radio in the context of being the "honest" medium, and just how much the audience really wants to know about the technical wizardry and its effects on the final cut.

I highly recommend this piece for anyone taking part in the present discussion; indeed, for anyone at all.

 

Following up on that: I never voted when I was a journalist, didn't think it proper.

In addition to being my own ethical stance, it allowed me to tell the pols I was not personally involved in the election (and indeed, I wasn't), and this was always extremely well-received. I never gave money to campaigns or frequented anything that might be construed of as agenda-driven.

Covering events outside my immediate community was also helpful. At one point, I was intentionally assigned to cover federal roads projects in an adjoining district. This meant I could go to meetings and literally tell all the people there I didn't give two shits about where they put this road or that or how big an interchange was. Again, you'd be surprised how far that goes with people.

 

So nothing even remotely approaching the "left equivalent of Fox" exists.

The comparison should therefore be avoided - it serves only to confuse, lend a spurious legitimacy to the "both sides do whatever" propaganda line.

One of the reasons the "left equivalent of Fox" fails to exist is that Fox is not fundamentally a left or right operation. Fox has no ideology, and propagandizes for the corporate authoritarians not out of ideological agreement but because that's who signs the checks. Since no one in a corporate industrial society is going to line up hundreds of millions of dollars for decades behind a left libertarian viewpoint in TV "news", any left libertarian news operations would be ideologically motivated and guided: that would be an enormous difference, a non-equivalence of great significance.

Another circumstance preventing the "left equivalent of Fox" is Fox's nature as a propaganda outlet - including its structurally fundamental lack of interest in physical fact. Long term survival as a propaganda outlet, maintaining the rhetorical facade of a "news" organization without reference to physical fact, requires the backing of power. In the US, most power resides in corporate authoritarian centers - the rest has little ideological organization of even that rudimentary nature (the individual voter, etc). There is no left libertarian center of power capable of backing something like Fox, protecting it from its enemies and so forth.

Exactly.

 

Yeah but Olberman is not a Journalist. No one in there right mind should call a pundit a journalist.

 

Notes on the journalist

Well, it's a matter of definitions. The problem is that the public treats the word "journalist" in the Fourth Estate context. There is nothing wrong with that, in and of itself.

But Olbermann, in being a journalist, is neither reporter nor anchor. I prefer the British term, presenter, while we Americans would call him a host.

The sleight of hand—or tongue, as such—comes when people like Scarborough (MSNBC), O'Reilly (FOX News), Beck (FOX News), and Hannity (FOX News) are regarded as journalists. They are, but not in the Fourth Estate context.

Even respectable journalists in that context, such as Jim Lehrer, are abandoning the Fourth Estate.

But the pundit-presenters of the cable news complex are journalists more in an anemic sense derived from personal journalism. Joan Didion is often regarded as the founder of personal journalism—

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.​

—but it is more accurate to say that she is the mother of modern personal journalism. Indeed, one might find in Alexis de Tocqueville and other writers of the early American scene aspects that could be called personal journalism. And, if we want to really press the term, we might look all the way back to Cabeza de Vaca's La Relacion:

At sunset, the Indians thinking that we had not gone, came to seek us and bring us food; but when they saw us thus, in a plight so different from what it was before, and so extraordinary, they were alarmed and turned back. I went toward them and called, when they returned much frightened. I gave them to understand by signs that our boat had sunk and three of our number had been drowned. There, before them, they saw two of the departed, and we who remained were near joining them. The Indians, at sight of what had befallen us, and our state of suffering and melancholy destitution, sat down among us, and from the sorrow and pity they felt, they all began to lament so earnestly that they might have been heard at a distance, and continued so doing more than half an hour. It was strange to see these men, wild and untaught, howling like brutes over our misfortunes. It caused in me as in others, an increase of feeling and a livelier sense of our calamity.​

Of course, with that we might reach all the way back to Josephus and other ancient writers.

Certainly, the journalists of our American revolutionary pride were hardly the would-be impartial observers who, like Lehrer after them, would not call a lie by its name. Indeed, without many of the fiery writings of the time, one wonders what our Revolution would have amounted to. Jefferson, for instance, enlisted the controversial journalist James Callender in an effort to counter Federalist writings. The Prospect Before Us even brought Callender prosecution under the Sedition Act in June, 1800; he convicted, and jailed for the remainder of President John Adams' administration. Jefferson, naturally, pardoned Callender and others likewise prosecuted. The trial, incidentally, was one of the factors that brought Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase before the U.S. Senate for impeachment in 1805; he survived, acquitted of all counts.

Regardless, though, the fact remains that Olbermann, however we might classify him, presents under the rubric of NBC News, which expects of its personnel the neutral journalistic detachment that the pundit-presenters, bloggers, and columnists often claim for themselves. And while in the grand scheme of things, Olbermann's actions don't seem particularly severe, it comes down to the terms of the contract he signed with NBC News.

As for the rest, it's all a matter of how we define the word "journalist", and what we expect of the people who claim the title. While we are often disappointed with those like Lehrer, who often make excuses that sound like a Rob Corddry joke on The Daily Show, we also often find ourselves fighting about the nature of journalistic integrity and who stands for what.

Is there really a way to take that Fourth Estate stand against falsehood while retaining genuine political neutrality, or, at least, the appearance thereof?
____________________

Notes:

Didion, Joan. "The Santa Ana". Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968. Falcon.TAMUCC.edu. November 8, 2010. http://falcon.tamucc.edu/~tmurphy/writers/Ellis/ANA.HTML

Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar N. "The Narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca". Ed. Frederick W. Hodge. Original Narratives in Early American History: Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543. Ed. J. Franklin Jameson. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1907. Therblig.com. November 8, 2010. http://www.therblig.com/cabeza/narrative.html

 

To some degree I think the impartial journalist is a mythical creature like a unicorn. Josephus was accurate for his time but he was also very inaccurate and discernibly biased. As low as Fox's standards are I think they are higher standards than James Callender and Josephus and perhaps higher than most "Journalists" prior to some time between 1920 and 1940.

I read (but do not really know) that in the early 1900s print was like what the internet is today with diverse perspectives and a vast quantity of small publications many or most of which had very low journalistic standards.

But When the mainstream media talks about how irresponsible and inaccurate and in need of a "gate keeper" the the World Wide Web is my reaction is to point out that in the 1940s to 1970s supposed peak of journalistic professionalism there was much misreporting and little cross-examination of consensus and government scams like the Gulf of Tonkin incident were less likely to be exposed then than they are now.

From: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2261
Daniel Hallin's classic book The "Uncensored War" observes that journalists had "a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn't used.

Lehrer certainly had a bias and refusing to call lies "lies" is certainly a form of Bias. Being calm and polite and reluctant to clearly state your opinion is not the same as being unbiased. I thought Lehrer was a Bush senior / Gerald Ford style Republican. I think Lehrer disliked both Reagan, Bush jr and the Democrats. News Busters (strong conservative bias) thinks Lehrer had a liberal bias because in the Bush Kerry debate he did not bring up swiftboats and he asked Kerry “You've repeatedly accused President Bush – not here tonight, but elsewhere before – of not telling the truth about Iraq, essentially of lying to the American people about Iraq. Give us some examples of what you consider to be his not telling the truth.” which newsbusters considered to be Lehrer showing bias against Bush.

I thought MacNeil was to the right of Lehrer and more open with his opinions and I don't think he had the problems with Reagan and the emerging Republican indulgence in fantasy that began it's thirty year growth under Reagan. I just had this feeling that that Lehrer was cringing but saying nothing when people put forward lies while while MacNeil would call liberals on their lies from time to time and would occasionally put forward Republican lies himself. At least that is the way I remember it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS_NewsHour. Says they had a pro establishment bias and I think that is correct.


We can't be unbiased because we were all shaped by our environments but we can at least try to be honest and candid try to hold ideas that support our biases to the same scrutiny that we hold ideas that run counter to our biases.

I don't really like people like Lehrer trying to hide their bias and pretend that they don't have a bias. As a debate moderator refusing to let your bias affect your work as a moderator is good but as a journalist we are more informed if the journalists lets us know his bias so that we can take that into consideration. But if the Journalists have not psychoanalyzed themselves they may not be real clear on what their own unique bias is.

 

Perhaps you should realize that journalism is not monolithic. A news reader is supposed to read the news and we dont have a part in determining what news will be aired but it should be neutral with both sides told.

I never knew people actually confused news with editorials, weather in print or on t.v, until i read some posts here. In an editorial the writer will choose a side and does not really try to hide it because everyone has some opinion.

 

And it stings

I have a lot of respect for Lehrer, so his admission stings a bit. In case anyone is wondering what we're talking about (or, at least, what I'm referring to specifically), I would refer them to a post I wrote last December.

 

Evidence of that would be required.

Clearly the government scam of WMDs in Iraq was not and is not "exposed", a matter at least as significant as the Gulf of Tonkin. The gutting of FEMA and the Justice Department and similar agencies in the years prior to Katrina was and is not "exposed". The thirty year scandal of corporate dealings with Iraq and Iran, an important context of the Iraq invasion and occupation and the current siege of Iran, was and is not "exposed". The verdict on "exposure" of the context and events leading up to the most recent BP disaster, the latest one (the others of course faded into history), is still pending, but the apparent whitewash in progress (no subpoenas? c'mon) augers ill.

The availability of information to a small and publicly insignificant number of people paying attention to fringe sources and foreign informants is not new. Such people were also better informed about the Gulf of Tonkin.

For the rest of the country, here's the verdict from the "journalist" who replaced the targeted and fired Dan Rather as the head - the main man, the one in charge of asking the tough questions and doing the "exposing" - on one of the most influential news analysis sources on television: