SHOCKER! Olbermann in the tank for Obama...

[tagryn]

Per newsbusters.org. If Obama/Biden wins the POTUS race, MSNBC may as well fire Olbermann. He's lost any sense of objectivity, and there's no way he could criticize that Administration after throwing his support so heavily behind their cause. I can see Colbert and Maher having a future under O/B, much as Limbaugh was able to ride on his natural entertainment talent while Bush II was in power, but Olbermann? Nah. What does he have left to offer, if there's nothing for him to rant against?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The problem is that there are media representives on both both sides who are clearly biased (see Ron Fournier, the AP's Washington bureau chief, whose coverage is clearly slanted for McCain) - However liberals only attack the conservative bias and conservatives only attack the liberal bias -- The 'watchdogs' should aggressively point out the bais on both sides

[tagryn]

Agreed.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and pixies should dust all your flowers and carry off the bad bugs, but that's also a fantasy.


Really, Tom. If Bill O'Reilly wasn't fired for lack of objectivity, then why should Olbermann be fired? The myth of objectivity has been pretty well shattered over the last twenty years, and while there hasn't been much in the way of objective, mainstream-published discussion of this (for obvious reasons) most thinking people have long since realized that we failed to maintain the Ideals of the Fourth Estate. Being objective is astonishingly difficult and pragmatically every government knows and encourages that difficulty because it operates against the maintenance of control. Further, the objectivity of the press is tainted by the necessity for funding the day to day operations of the press.

There are people who are able to set aside their personal beliefs on a daily basis in the framework of a job. Many of them are quite good at it, and they use the cognitive and operational tools of the job to make those decisions. We can find them in the judiciary, especially, as a special requirement of the job, but there are fewer people in the press who do this than there used to be.
Olbermann, in recognizing that he has a personal bias, is doing much, much better than (specifically) the person who wrote that article you cited. His awareness of that bias is what allows him to write objectively.

[tagryn]

Objectivity is getting rarer, but there's still examples out there. Russert. Lehrer. (Brian) Lamb. Those are three off the top of my head. I also very much like the work that Factcheck.org does. That's the standard to be held to. Taking a "well, everybody's biased, so being that way is OK" stance is a cop-out.

While working an anchor - which is the big difference from O'Reilly* and Countdown, both of which are presented as commentary, not news - it isn't Olbermann's job to do editorial, and deserves to get called out on it when he does. Even Maher, no friend to the Bushes, thought Olbermann and Matthews went overboard in how they covered the D convention.

You are correct in that if O'Reilly isn't out of a job, neither should Olbermann be. But neither should be doing straight news anchoring anymore, either; they're both too associated with one side now, and the taint is too strong for them to be effective in that role. I still don't think Olbermann's talent is great enough to carry a show without having an animus to rail against, but we'll see.

* who we stopped watching a number of years back when he started talking over guests and not even pretending to be neutral.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

I occasionally have fits of Heinleinian fantasy, imagining what things would be like if there were a Fair Witness certification (and then I think of cognitive science studies which show that almost everything we perceive is heavily filtered before we even register it.)

It's probably not even possible for a recording device to be objective. (thinking of the "spiral" lifeforms that some photographers have caught, which are actually birds and insects with fast wings.)