Mostly out of habit from the days before my cable company carried MSNBC, I've been reflexively a viewer of CNN when I feel the need to get my blood pressure up by subjecting myself to what passes for the mainstream news media these days. When I want to "see what's on the news," it's CNN I go to. I have gone through bouts of watching Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC in the evenings, though I'm often not home during prime time -- I'm at film screenings -- so that's a habit that it's easy to fall out of.
But when I discovered that Olbermann was anchoring MSNBC's election coverage, I found myself reflexively turning on MSNBC during the conventions... what little of them I could stand to watch. Olbermann made them somewhat more endurable with his unwillingness to accede to all the bullshit or to take as truth press releases and the spin of campaign spokespeople. Olbermann is not progressive or even really terribly liberal -- or if he is we don't regularly see that on Countdown: he's middle-of-the-road with no tolerance for fools, which is hardly a political stance. That he gets labeled "liberal" for espousing the opinion of the majority of the country, the 70 percent who can't wait for Bush to leave the White House, is part of the cancerous problem with our cultural discourse.
And that problem just got even bigger: Olbermann has been pulled from MSNBC's election coverage from the network bosses over complaints from right-wingers that he's "biased" (because he doesn't carry water for them). Salon's Glenn Greenwald -- who'll be one of the first hauled away to the workcamps when President Sarah Palin is sworn in after John McCain is mysteriously incapacitated two days after taking the oath of office -- has a long, brilliant piece up about all the many ways in which this is something worth screaming about, but here's one of the most notable bits:
Throughout the primary season, Clinton supporters were furious at what they endlessly complained was MSBNC's biased coverage in favor of Obama and, more so, its intensely hostile coverage of Hillary Clinton. 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...
[R]egardless of what one thought of the primary wars or even MSNBC's coverage of the Clinton/Obama race, the contrast between (a) MSNBC's dismissive reaction to complaints of bias from Clinton supporters and (b) its obedience to similar complaints from the Right is stark and revealing. The overriding attribute of the Liberal Media is a deep and abiding fear of angering the Right.
I'm really quite terrified at the state of this country.
Sad to say, I was not surprised. When a corporation doesn't do something to appease a demand from the Right, then I'm surprised.
And as much as I am an Olbermann fan, frankly I thought some of the on-air back-and-forth was embarrassing. While I decry the state of the media these days, I'm finding it hard to get worked up over this particular case.