There is nothing more amusing than when two people known for being non-objective argue over objectivity . This is the summation of Keith Olbermann vs Ted Koppell.
Koppell name-checked Olbermann in his Washington Post editorial, writing:
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?
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They [Fox, MSNBC, CNN] show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.
That slap had to sting, and sting it did. Olbermann countered by saying that Koppell wasn’t … partisan … enough.
Interesting strategy, let’s see how this plays out!
I cannot prove it, so I’ll have to estimate it here, and if I’m proved wrong I’ll happily correct it, but my intuition tells me I criticized President Obama more in the last week than Fox’s primetime hosts criticized President Bush in eight years.
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Just as the story of Mr. Murrow’s career emphasizes McCarthy but not the fact that the aftermath of the McCarthy broadcast buried Murrow’s career, the stories of Mr. Koppel’s career will emphasize the light he so admirably shone on the Iran hostages. Those stories, though, will probably not emphasize that in 2002 and 2003 and 2004 and 2005 Mr. Koppel did not shine that same light on the decreasingly coherent excuses presented by the government of this nation for the war in Iraq.
Olbermann added that Koppell “worships before the false god of utter objectivity.”
Bill O’Reilly also struck back:
Koppell’s argument rests on the premise that true journalism isn’t dead, that objectivity and bipartisanship still exist and that the average American needs the news, they need the news to tell them what’s going on because they don’t want to find out for themselves. Koppell believes that the media still has a right to the public’s trust, or that there exist journalists today so far removed from the zealotry in today’s political climate that they can work on earning back the public’s eroding respect for the media.
I believe he’s wrong. And I believe that Koppell is the parent of the new Editorialist, the passionate brand of journalistic zealotry he condemns because Koppell, despite whatever effort he believes he made, contributed to its creation by believing that he himself was non-partisan. People like Olbermann, Beck, et al. at least have enough fly their partisan flag for all to see. The biggest danger to media, and what ultimately drove it apart from the public’s trust, are the people who believe that they are uncorrupted when their body of work doesn’t support such a belief.
Koppell writes:
The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me.
A sadness? It shouldn’t be a surprise.
Koppell says of cable news:
They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.
The difference between Koppell and Olberman types is that one gives editorializing in all its editorial frankness so there are no mistakes as to bias and the other passes off a subtler bias as objectivity.
In many ways, the media idealism that Koppell seems to think that Americans possess is dead. The bias masquerading as truth in today’s media helped to breed a new generation of super cynics, people who recognize the bias in the media – but the decades-long work of the media only resulted in the media pulling the wool over their very own eyes. It’s another retelling of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
This is why I cannot disagree with Olbermann’s “Special Comment:”
And once you’ve got a false god, you’re going to get false priests. And sooner rather than later, in a world where subjective analysis is labeled evil and dangerous, some political mountebank is going to see his opening and seize the very catechism of that false god, words like “objective” and “neutral” and “two-sided” and “fair” and “balanced,” and he will pervert them into a catch-phrase, a brand name, and he can create something that is no more journalism than two men screaming at each other as a musical duet.
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I may ultimately be judged to have been wrong in what I am doing. Mr. Koppel does not have to wait. The kind of television journalism he eulogizes failed this country because when truth was needed, all we got were facts most of which were lies anyway. The journalism failed, and those who practiced it failed, and Mr. Koppel failed.
“I think Keith Olbermann is a very bright and clearly passionate man, but I think he has his perspective a little screwed up, and he has his facts screwed up too,” Koppel said.
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