When I heard about Ted Koppel's editorial in the Washington Post, entitled "Olbermann, O'Reilly and the Death of Real News", and later that Olbermann would respond — I though "food fight."
The kind of complaining I expected from Koppel is, after all, the faux-adult high ground, the "reasonable" man's meme-du-jour. Jon Stewart put on his "above it all" cloak during the interview with Rachel Maddow and wore it like a flag. And as you many have heard, our own president is doubling-down on the bipartisanship. (Way to keep those check-filled cards and letters coming.) And so I expected counter-complaining. Sigh.
It's true that there is a lot of screaming; it's true that the right-wing guys almost always start it; and it's also true that the rest of us are truly tired of it. Thus the mask of the "reasonable" man, a perfect public face for a public figure. Thus Koppel and his editorial.
But there are two things I didn't count on. One was the sneering tone of Koppel's writing — the man has a serious bone to pick. There's meanness and dig in almost every paragraph. The second was that Olbermann would respond on non-personal grounds — that Koppel was in fact precisely wrong — and that Olbermann would say exactly why.
First, Koppel being precisely wrong (I'll skip the sneer):
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.And Olbermann telling him exactly why:
Olbermann is right about Cronkite and Murrow. These juxtaposed thoughts capture the point perfectly:
Most of the highlights of [Cronkite's] career had been those moments when he fearlessly threw off the shackles by saying what was true, not merely what was factual.And Olbermann is right about Koppel as well. Keith says it differently; I'll speak for myself. Koppel is a closeted rightie, angry with the left for having a winning argument and using it (go back to the sneering), while at the same time revealing his own agenda — as every one of the faux-journalists did — in the run-up to the Iraq war.
[And yet] the deserved and heart-felt sadness at the lost of the journalist and the man turned into a metaphor to the loss of a style of utterly uninvolved neutral "objective" reporting.
I'll say it again. If you are an unreconstructed Bush War apologist, you're at least a right-wing sympathizer, and at most a Movement operative, no matter what comes out of your mouth. No reasonable-man argument for you, sir. Or, to borrow from a currently-raging religious debate, good deeds really do matter; it's not just about the words, or what you imagine is in your heart.
Very good segment from Olbermann. He nails it. Real news, defined.
GP
