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

[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.)