Category: Media Bias

Why Keith Olbermann Is Failing

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Flipping through the channels this evening, I happened onto Keith Olbermann in media res. He was doing his “Worst Person in the World” list. Number 3 was just a dumbed-down rehash of a TPM item about Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams. Olbermann began by describing Williams as a “fired ex-Albany, New York, hate-radio host” and after excerpting the TPM item, added:

“And by the way, Tea Party Express? ‘Uh, I’ll have a large bigotry and, uh, some racism with secret sauce and, uh, a white power shake.’ “

What he was doing — using a “dumb guy” voice — was riffing on the idea (which he apparently thought funny) that “Tea Party Express” sounds like the name of a fast-food drive-through restaurant.

No. 2 on Olbermann’s list was a Greek TV news reporter suspected of murdering the boss who fired her, and No. 1 was Monica Crowley who, Olbermann said, “went insane this afternoon on Fixed News,” as he habitually refers to his network’s more popular competitor, Fox News Channel. The cause of Crowley’s alleged insanity? This story from the New York Post:

The Justice Department’s disclosure that nine of President Obama’s appointees had either represented or advocated for Guantanamo detainees has touched off a firestorm of criticism.
The surprising admission came three months after Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa asked Attorney General Eric Holder for a list of names of Obama DOJ appointees who had been involved in legal work for Gitmo prisoners.
Holder, in a letter to Grassley, admitted that nine of the agency’s appointees had done some kind of work on behalf of terror suspects.

Well, this is certainly a disturbing disclosure, but Olbermann mocked the concerns of both Crowley and Sen. Grassley:

Monica Crowley . . . went insane this afternoon on Fixed News because it was revealed five lawyers, now working for the justice department, once defended GITMO detainees. And four others who participated in arguments that were favorable to the GITMO detainees now work at D.O.J..
She [Monica Crowley] said, “…it seems that we have a D.O.J. that is relatively stocked with what could be assumed to be terrorist sympathizers, because if you think enough of those Guantanamo Bay detainees to represent them, what does that tell you about where these people are coming from?”
Well, it tells me they believe in, oh, the rule of law. Also, that’s nine attorneys out of at least 10,000 at the Department of Justice. So, ‘relatively stocked’ is like saying Monica Crowley is relatively intelligent.

Olbermann’s reference to “at least 10,000” attorneys at the Justice Department is, of course, an apples-and-oranges distraction. Grassley’s inquiry was specifically about Obama administration political appointees at DOJ, who certainly don’t number 10,000. So Olbermann was engaged in smokescreen tactics in defense of Obama while disparaging the intelligence of Crowley.

Regardless of how you feel about Crowley or Gitmo detainees (or the Tea Party Express or murderous Greek TV reporters), the larger point is that Olbermann’s show is bad television. His jokes aren’t funny and his selection of topics reflects a very narrow range of personal obsessions. You’ve got to watch the video to understand just how spectacularly bad Olbermann is:

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Olbermann does himself no favors with his annoying habit of recycling slur-labels like “Fixed News” and “teabaggers.” It’s a verbal tic, and is neither enlightening nor entertaining.

Olbermann followed that “Worst Person” bit with a segment accusing Rush Limbaugh of racism — a rehash of a day-old Media Matters item. You see that what Olbermann is doing, really, is a televised version of the left-wing blogosphere, and it is failing because (a) these stories only appeal to a narrow band of hard-core partisans, and (b) Olbermann is personally obnoxious.

Olbermann’s show may have had wider appeal during the Bush presidency simply because the people he was attacking daily — the bogeymen who then haunted the Left’s dreams — were the president, the vice president and other powerful administration figures. But now that Democrats control the commanding heights in D.C., that formula is no longer effective as a means of attracting an audience of respectable size even by the modest standards of cable TV.

Over and over again, Olbermann pounds away at his pet villains — Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement, Fox News — and who cares? None of these people are in any position of real authority, as were Bush and Cheney back in the day.

Olbermann’s Bush-era glory days, such as they were, are behind him. And it is only a matter of time until the executives at MSNBC figure that out.

MSM, GOP and NY23

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In an article about the Tea Party movement, the Los Angeles Times re-writes the history of Doug Hoffman’s campaign last year in New York’s 23rd District:

Many Republican Party leaders have welcomed [Tea Party involvement in local GOP organizations], particularly because they worried that the energy driving the tea party movement might create a third party that would split the conservative vote.
That scenario played out in New York’s 23rd Congressional District in a special election last year, a cautionary tale in Republican circles because it led to a Democrat capturing a longtime GOP House seat. . . .

Having spent so long covering that campaign, this blame-the-conservatives revisionism angered me, and I responded in the Hot Air Green Room:

From start to finish of the NY23 campaign, then, the Republican Party was exclusively responsible for electing the Democrat.
Any attempt to foist blame for the Democratic victory in NY23 onto Hoffman and his supporters is a willful perversion of the actual history of that campaign. . . .

Please read the whole thing. Don’t let yourself be bamboozled and misled by MSM spin.

Keith Olbermann Once Again Displays His Astonishing Lack of Self-Awareness

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He begins by chastising Rush Limbaugh for having a huge ego — never mind that Rush’s audience on is at least 20 times as big as Olbermann’s, or that Olbermann is a 24K-gold-plated narcissist — and ends by predicting that Michelle Malkin will die in obscurity:

Olbermann’s career is one of the most spectacular failures in TV news history. There is no opportunity so ripe that he can’t find some way of squandering it. Even in the Smug Lefty Rodeo competition that is MSNBC, he’s rapidly losing out to Rachel Maddow. Think about that epitaph, Keith:

Here Lies Keith Olbermann, Who Was
Even Less Popular Than Rachel Maddow

Just sayin’ . . .

If You Don’t Like Avatar and Anderson Cooper, You’re a Kook

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That’s the basic message of Jonathan Kay’s Newsweek column:

Like all populists, tea partiers are suspicious of power and influence, and anyone who wields them. Their villain list includes the big banks; bailed-out corporations; James Cameron, whose Avatar is seen as a veiled denunciation of the U.S. military; Republican Party institutional figures they feel ignored by, such as chairman Michael Steele; colleges and universities (the more prestigious, the more evil); TheWashington Post; Anderson Cooper; and even FOX News pundits, such as Bill O’Reilly, who have heaped scorn on the tea-party movement’s more militant oddballs.
One of the most bizarre moments of the recent tea-party convention came when blogger Andrew Breitbart delivered a particularly vicious fulmination against the mainstream media, prompting everyone to get up, turn toward the media section at the back of the conference room, and scream, “USA! USA! USA!” But the tea partiers’ well-documented obsession with President Obama has hardly been diffused by their knack for finding new enemies. . . .

Read the rest. Kay goes on to list his own enemies — Joseph Farah, Roy Moore, Pat Robertson — and seems to proceed on the assumption that all populist resentment of the elite is equally baseless and illegitimate, without regard to either (a) how the elite gain their influence, or (b) what the elite do with their influence.

Grassroots protest movements often attract “militant oddballs.” Opportunistic charlatans will seek to piggyback their narrow agendas on popular movements. This is nothing new.

But have you ever seen Newsweek (or any other major media outlet) make a big deal about the Marxist organizations who turn out at every left-wing protest event? Ten years ago, I covered the “A26” anti-globalization demonstration in Washington:

Once you got past the Socialist Workers, there were still more entrepreneurial leftists, hawking the Worker’s Vanguard. Then there was the guy selling yellow “Mumia Must Live” buttons for a buck each. . . .
The place was positively brimming with rage against corporate capitalism, from T-shirts (“Mean Corporations Suck”) to handmade signs (“Corporate Press Is Not Free”). At the International Socialist Organization table, you could get a nice blue-and-white sign reading, “Workers of the World Unite and Fight.” Another group distributed red T-shirts lettered in black: “Abolish the World Bank! End the IMF! Dissolve the WTO! Socialist Party USA.” . . .
I’m not up to date on the various Marxist outfits represented at the A16 rally — League for the Revolutionary Party? International Action Center? — so I don’t know which ones are Trotskyists, which ones are Mensheviks and which ones are Maoists, but I know the original Big Red when I see it. The colorful banner proclaims, “People & Nature Before Profit$ … Young Communist League USA,” and the kids at the table are handing out the People’s Weekly World, official organ of the CPUSA. The Bolsheviks — who seized power from a backward czarist regime and actually managed to make things worse, who spent more than seven decades proving the murderous futility of revolutionary socialism — are still at it.

The major media never mentioned the kooks and commies who infested the anti-globalization movement, who also infested the anti-war movement during the Bush years. Yet Newsweek‘s columnist insists that the Tea Party movement is defined by kooks and conspiracy theorists.

And the media elite wonder why we don’t like them . . .

To Be Fair to Rachel Maddow . . .

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. . . it was hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the MSNBC host meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the pudding in her mouth:

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Maddow’s quote:

Just for reference here, when Tom Tancredo talks about literacy tests, that’s what they used in the south to keep black people from voting before civil rights legislation and court rulings put a stop to that.
So the convention opened with a clarion call to bring back the literacy tests for voting. And as you could hear, the tea party convention crowd erupted in cheers at the suggestion, although, to be fair, it was sort of hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the crowd meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the white hoods.

Hat-tip to Ed Driscoll, who explains more. And kudos to the brilliant mind who produced this aphorism: 

“Breitbart said reporters put all news involving conservatives into two basic buckets: ‘racism and Watergate.”

Amen.

The Olbermann Rule

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“Anything done by any Republican is a scandal, if I decide it is, because being a Republican is such an inherently shady choice to begin with, you just know they must be up to shenanigans.”

Lefty journalists have operated by this principle for years now: “Hey, look, Joe Congressman (R-Somewhere) is on the banking committee and accepted X-thousand dollars in campaign contributions from — wait for it — bankers! Assign our Investigative Unit to this story immediately. We’ll do a five-part Special Series and win a Pulitzer. This could be bigger than Watergate!”

Meanwhile, Chris Dodd is whoring himself out to Countrywide and nobody really seems to notice. Can’t make an A1 headline out of that story, because front-page news about a Democratic scandal might lead to the election of (gasp) a Republican. Which brings us to the topic of the latest Olbermann rant: Sarah Palin acting as a distributor for her own book and perhaps making a buck or two in the process:

Olbermann decides to take a dig at Hot Air en route to suggesting that it’s somehow sinister and unethical — perhaps even felonious — for Sarah Palin to buy discounted copies of her own book and then resell them.

Arrest me, too, then. I’ve resold a few dozen books that way. Demand for Palin’s book is somewhat greater than demand for Donkey Cons, so that she’s ordering thousands rather than dozens, but so what? Lots of authors act as vendors of their own books on a smaller scale, and the fact that Palin’s book is a runaway bestseller is the only reason anybody notices. (Hint: If you click that Donkey Cons link, it takes you to my Amazon Associates page, and I collect a few cents for every book I sell. The shameful scandal of it all!)

Olbermann? He’s less popular than syphilis. And speaking of social diseases, Andrew Sullivan is operating by the Olbermann Rule when he pursues the paranoid certainty that, whenever a famous Republican woman has a baby, there must be a smoking gun somewhere.

We Feel Your Pain. Really. We Do.

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Bwaaahahahahaha!

Earlier that morning, CBS News executives and bureau chiefs, led by senior vice president Linda Mason, told their employees that 2009 had been a disastrous year in the ad market. They had no cable operation to buoy the sinking revenues. It’s not you, was the message, it’s us. Dozens of employees — including staff members in D.C., San Francisco, Miami, London, Los Angeles and Moscow — were being let go. The changes were effective immediately. There would be no buyouts. According to one longtime staff member, the network had long ago negotiated away most of the severance clauses in staff members’ contracts.
But in the end, the cuts were surprisingly deep. By Monday afternoon, staffers from Washington to L.A. were sputtering in disbelief as they heard of top producers on the chopping block.

“Add these to the jobs not saved category.” I think I just heard General Westmoreland‘s ghost laughing at that joke.