by Blue Stockings | Tweety & Olbermann won't be covering the election anymore because they are too "incendiary." Certainly their behavior during the last convention might be called a bit, er, "erratic."
After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage. (NYT)
Glenn Greenwald---who I never wish would lighten up because he always turns out to be right---says that this is an instance of the right dictating MSNBC's programming decisions.
First, nothing changes the behavior of our media corporations more easily than vocal demands and complaints from the Right, which petrify media executives and cause them to snap into line.....There is no question whatsoever that the Bush administration, the McCain campaign, and the Right generally have recently made it a top priority to force MSNBC to remove Olbermann (and Chris Matthews) from playing a prominent role in its election coverage, and MSNBC has now complied with the Right's demands...
Second, in response to media criticism that the press is insufficiently substantive and adversarial to political power, the claim is frequently made that media outlets are simply driven by the profit motive, and that their programming choices are nothing more than a by-product of ratings. But in MSNBC's case, that is plainly untrue. Back in 2003, they actually canceled their highest-rated program, Phil Donahue's show, for purely ideological reasons -- because, at a time when the establishment "liberal media" were systematically amplifying the Government's pro-war views and excluding anti-war views, that short-lived MSNBC show was one of the only venues in America where one could hear anti-war viewpoints, and NBC's fear of angering the Government and the Right clearly caused them, first, to impose extreme and unusual restrictions on the show's content, and then to cancel it altogether....
....And now here is MSNBC publicly removing (and therefore diminishing) the person who is, by far, its most valuable asset: Keith Olbermann....The irrefutable fact is that nothing attracts ratings for MSNBC -- and nothing has attracted ratings in the entire history of that channel -- the way that Olbermann does. Yet here is MSNBC removing him from the anchor position, reducing his role in its political coverage, and clearly diminishing his stature (and implicitly criticizing his coverage). That is extraordinary for a media company to publicly embarrass, diminish and tarnish its own principal asset....
Third, this episode demonstrates what Eric Alterman documented several years ago: that the greatest and most transparent myth in American politics is that the U.S. has a "liberal media." That is a myth that is maintained, first and foremost, by defining anyone who isn't Rush Limbaugh as a "liberal....
Perhaps nothing demonstrates this absurd dynamic more than the painfully inane perception that Chris Matthews -- for years a prime target of liberal media critics -- is some sort of "liberal."...
Finally, and perhaps most notably of all, Olbermann's role as anchor somehow destroys the journalistic brand of both MSNBC and NBC, while Fox News continues to be deemed a legitimate news outlet by our political and media establishment. Fox does this despite (more accurately: due to) its employing Brit Hume as its main anchor -- someone who is every bit as partisan and ideological as Keith Olbermannn is (at least), who regularly spews the nastiest and most vicious right-wing talking points, yet because he's not a liberal, is deemed to be a legitimate news anchor....
The proper analogy to Olbermann as anchor is not O'Reilly as anchor, but Brit Hume as anchor. Hume explicitly acknowledges his political conservatism. His entire show relentlessly promotes a right-wing narrative. Every night, he convenes panels composed of right-wing partisans such as Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, and Mort Kondracke, and -- at most -- sometimes "balances" that with one of those allegedly neutral journalists such as Mara Liasson....(Salon)
At first I thought it was a bit odd that Olbermann says this as if it's a bad thing and then seems to oppose the removal of Olbermann, whose own ass Greenwald so thoroughly and righteously handed to him over his defense of Obama on FISA.(Salon)
But he does make the valid point that MSNBC merely sneered back in the day when Clinton and her supporters were complaining of media bias.
Whatever one's views on the primary war were, there is no question that Olbermann and Matthews in particular were extremely hostile to Clinton and supportive of Obama. But MSNBC executives ignored those complaints, even derided and mocked them, with MSNBC executive Phil belittling angry Clinton supporters in The New Yorker as nothing more than abused, disillusioned girlfriends with nowhere else to go.(Salon)
And his overriding point isn't that Olbermann's a great guy, or that you ought to like him, but that he was the fair-haired boy till complaints from the Right turned him into the red-headed stepchild.
And Greenwald pointed to this far more concise summation by Chris Matthews:
I don't, in the abstract, object to replacing them, and indeed would never have given them the job in the first place. The unprepared, trivia-obsessed Matthews has no business anchoring anything. I don't watch Olbermann; I accept the need for a liberal O'Reilly but I'm not interested in watching it, and he's far from an ideal choice as anchor (as opposed to pundit.) The problem is the double standard, and the circumstances of their firing.
The other thing to note is that replacing people because they're too biased and don't meet Brian Williams's journalistic standards is pretty farcical. (Lawyers, Guns, & Money)
Steve Benen says:
Fox News announced over the weekend that it, too, was shaking up its coverage, and, in response to complaints from Democrats, would no longer allow Brit Hume and Bill Kristol to anchor the network's coverage of major political events.
No, no, I'm just kidding. MSNBC doesn't want those perceived as biased anchoring its coverage, but Fox News remains unconcerned about charges of a Republican bias. (Political Animal)
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