I knew about his reign of terror in the 1950s, when he falsely accused government officials, Hollywood figures and others of being communists, ruining lives and leading to the still-used ephithet “McCarthyism.”
What I didn’t know was that he consorted with and defended actual Nazis — that is, German war criminals and their surprisingly numerous supporters in the U.S. And that there are some echoes down to the present day.
That’s the main takeaway from the second season of “Ultra,” a podcast series hosted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. It’s good stuff, and you should listen to it if you get a chance. It’s a wide-ranging look at Nazis and their sympathizers in the U.S. after World War II — a follow-up to the first season, which examined the Nazi movement before and during the war.
And though “Ultra” features a wide cast of characters, the focus is on McCarthy, who defended German soldiers who massacred U.S. troops after they had already surrendered and whose entire Senate career was what you might call Nazi-adjacent.
Two interesting tidbits:
Although Richard Nixon graciously conceded after losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, behind the scenes both he and top Republican officials gave at least tacit support to efforts by extreme right-wing forces to overturn the results in several states and hand the election to Nixon.
And Trump thug Steve Bannon, currently behind bars, has favorably cited an Italian fascist who in turn wrote the introduction for “Imperium,” a Nazi screed written by American fascist Francis Yockey, a shadowy fugitive throughout “Ultra” who kills himself after he is finally taken into custody by the FBI.
The reference to Bannon is the only direct tie Maddow makes to Donald Trump and his ongoing efforts to subvert democracy. But the Trump parallels are clear throughout, as they were during the first season.
If there’s a hopeful takeaway from “Ultra,” it’s this: We’ve defeated fascism in the U.S. before, and we can do it again.
Ronna McDaniel is out at NBC News. Veteran media critic David Zurawick writes for CNN, “It was two days of the most aggressive, public and passionate pushback by employees against a decision by their bosses that I have seen in 35 years of covering the media.” His lead:
As wrongheaded as it was on so many levels, NBC’s decision to hire former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor might actually have done the nation a favor. The highly controversial move has helped drive a crucial conversation about the role of media in our political life at this moment of democratic crisis.
The NBC executives who thought this was a great idea really had no choice. Hosts on MSNBC from Rachel Maddow to Joe Scarborough said they wouldn’t have her on, and she was finished on NBC itself after she was eviscerated on “Meet the Press,” first by Kristen Welker, then in a post-interview commentary by Chuck Todd. It will be interesting to see whether anyone at the network will pay the price for this boneheaded move.
As I’ve said before, I’m trying to balance two impulses. On the one hand, I don’t think the networks should hire any partisan players to bloviate on their airwaves, Democrat or Republican. Let’s hear from journalists. On the other hand, since they’re going to continue making such hires, I think it’s useful to differentiate someone like McDaniel, who amplified Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, from your run-of-the-mill Trump-friendly commentator. Several observers have pointed out that CNN once hired the loathsome Corey Lewandowski, but that was during the pre-insurrection days when Trump was merely a racist sociopath rather than a budding authoritarian dictator.
Rather than learning the lesson that Zurawick is hoping for, my guess is that NBC executives are probably now going to feel pressured to hire a less toxic Trumper, someone like Marc Thiessen (currently on Fox News) or Byron York (ditto). And no, no one at Fox feels similarly pressured to bring in a liberal Joe Biden supporter. That’s not the way it works.
Previously published at GBH News. This is ostensibly a column about the Steele dossier. But it’s really a column about the media — or, rather, what we mean when we talk about “the media.”
You remember the Steele dossier, right? Just before Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in 2017, we learned that intelligence officials had briefed both Trump and outgoing President Barack Obama about a report that contained some lurid accusations. The most famous: that there was a video of Trump consorting with prostitutes in a Russian hotel room, which became known far and wide as “the pee tape.”
The dossier, we learned, had been compiled at the behest of Trump’s opponents for the Republican presidential nomination and later on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, arrived on the scene at some point after it became a Clinton operation.
Now that special counsel John Durham, appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in the waning days of the Trump administration, has indicted a crucial source and thus discredited the dossier, we are being subjected to some serious handwringing over the media’s credulous reporting.
Sara Fischer of Axios called it “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history.” Writing in The New York Times, Bill Grueskin of the Columbia Journalism School lamented that “so many [journalists] were taken in so easily because the dossier seemed to confirm what they already suspected.” Needless to say, Fox News has been having a field day.
But there’s a huge problem with the narrative that the Steele dossier drove the story that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russians, and that the media pushed it in order to destroy Trump’s presidency: that’s not what happened. Or, to be more precise, a few media outlets pushed it, but more didn’t. And most serious people understood from the beginning that the dossier comprised raw intelligence, some of which might be true, some of which almost certainly wasn’t, and some of which probably consisted of outright disinformation.
CNN, the first outlet to report that Trump and Obama had been briefed, left out any details in its initial story even though it had the 35-page dossier in hand. BuzzFeed News, which remains the only major news organization to publish the full dossier (a mistake, as I said at the time), called it “unverified” and noted that it included “some clear errors.” The New York Times reported that the dossier was “unsubstantiated” and “generated by political operatives seeking to derail Mr. Trump’s candidacy.” The Washington Post: “unconfirmed” and “unsubstantiated.”
To be fair, these articles also said that the allegations contained therein might be true, and that the intelligence officials who briefed the two presidents were taking them seriously. But that’s just accurate reporting.
By the time the dossier was made public, we already knew that Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, had vociferously denied he’d held a meeting in Prague with Russian operatives. But as the national security blogger Marcy Wheeler noted in a Columbia Journalism Review podcast last week, at the same time Cohen was telling the truth about the Prague meeting, he was also lying about meeting with Russian officials regarding a deal to build a Trump tower and lying about paying off women to keep quiet about their sexual liaisons with Trump. (How can you tell Cohen isn’t lying? When he’s not talking.) Wheeler, I should point out, has been casting doubt on the Steele dossier for a long time, so she’s hardly an apologist for the media.
Were there some media outlets that irresponsibly ran with the Steele dossier? Of course. On the CJR podcast, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, who’s been indefatigable in his efforts to debunk the dossier, cited MSNBC, CNN and the McClatchy newspapers. Grueskin pointed to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and McClatchy.
To which I would respond that MSNBC and CNN’s prime-time lineups consist of liberal talk shows aimed at keeping their viewers riled up so they won’t change the channel. They are certainly more careful with the facts than Fox News, but they are hardly the journalistic gold standard. I don’t think I ever saw McClatchy’s reporting at the time, and I don’t believe it made its way very far up the journalistic food chain. The Washington Post recently corrected and removed parts of two articles after Durham announced the indictment, thus making it clear that its sourcing had been wrong.
But how important was the Steele dossier to our understanding of Trump’s relationship with Russia? Not very, I would argue. Over the weekend, CNN.com published a lengthy overview by Marshall Cohen showing that the FBI began its investigation before it had any knowledge of the dossier. Cohen also reported that the dossier was not used as the basis for any part of the investigation except a probe into the activities of a minor Trump operative named Carter Page.
And let’s not forget that ties between the Trump campaign and the Russians were right out in the open. Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials met with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower in Manhattan after being promised “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The Mueller report found that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had multiple contacts with Russian agents. WikiLeaks, almost certainly under Russian influence by 2016, released emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee to damage the Clinton campaign — and Trump publicly expressed the hope that more of her emails would be dumped into public view. And on and on. Given all this, the Steele dossier was just one piece of the puzzle, and not an especially important one. I mean, come on. Trump engaging in water sports with prostitutes? Did anyone ever really believe that?
Which brings me back to the point I want to make about the media: there really isn’t any such thing as “the media.” Rather, there are a myriad of outlets, and at any given time some are acting responsibly and some are acting irresponsibly. Pointing to something that Rachel Maddow said as evidence of media malfeasance makes no more sense than blaming the media because Tucker Carlson used his Fox News streaming program to push the lie that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a false-flag operation. No, I’m not equating Maddow with Carlson. She tries to be careful with the facts, whereas Carlson just makes stuff up. But she’s the host of an opinionated talk show, not an investigative reporter.
“The ‘mainstream media’ — I’m going to stop putting that in quotes, but keep imagining that I’m saying it sarcastically — is probably made up of several thousand individuals and then a three-figure number of institutions,” the conservative commentator Jonathan V. Last wrote for The Bulwark recently. “At any given moment, on any given story, some number of these people and institutions will communicate facts that are eventually understood to be misleading or incorrect. Some of these people and institutions are better at their jobs than others.
“The point is that the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that ‘they’ are feeding ‘us’ false narratives.”
Most of the media handled the Steele dossier responsibly right from the start, even if much of what it contained turned out to be even less credible than it originally appeared. A few journalists and commentators got carried away. And, in any case, the dossier played only a minor role in the investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia.
Attempts to conflate it into more than that are not only silly but play into Trumpworld’s lies that the entire collusion story was a “hoax.” It was not a hoax, and I suspect we haven’t heard the last of it.
The golden age of cable news, in my curmudgeonly view, stretched from 1980, when CNN was founded, to 1996, when Fox News and MSNBC came along, ending CNN’s monopoly.
It’s not that I like monopolies. Competition is good. But after the one became three, the race to the bottom was on, with all of them going with opinionated talk shows in prime time rather than covering the news. It almost doesn’t matter that CNN and MSNBC are liberal and relatively grounded in the truth while Fox is firmly a part of the conspiratorial extreme right. The point is that if it’s news you want rather than hot takes, you need to turn elsewhere.
But if the golden age has long since passed, the green age only started to fade recently. From 2015 through Jan. 6, 2021, all things Trump drove cable news ratings and revenues into the stratosphere. So what’s next for cable news in the post-Trump era? As I wrote in March, the future looks uncertain, with cable news ratings — and, in fact, audiences for all news organizations — down considerably. When the news is more or less normal and inspires something other than horror and perverse fascination, well, maybe “Beat Bobby Flay” looks like a better alternative.
Earlier this week, Vanity Fair published a lengthy article on the state of cable news by media reporter Joe Pompeo. It’s filled with interesting details and insights. What’s depressing about it, though, is that there isn’t a single executive who’s quoted, either on the record or anonymously, who talks about how moving the focus away from Trump might give them an opportunity to serve journalism and democracy better than they do now. It was all about ratings before. It still is.
Pompeo quotes Rich Greenfield, a media analyst with LightShed Partners, on what the future is likely to hold:
It honestly feels like we’re back to the run-up to the 2016 election, like we’re going back in time five years to when cable news was really about old people. The volatility, the anger, the hatred that was spewed across cable news over the last few years, from both sides, clearly brought an audience. I would feel very comfortable saying I don’t think we’ll ever see sustained full-year ratings like we’ve just seen.
OK, so maybe that’s how cable news will serve democracy: by reaching smaller audiences.
At the beginning of 2019, I wrote a column headlined “Five Ways to De-Trumpify Your Life.” No. 4: Stop watching cable news. There are many superior sources of news and information. If there’s major breaking news taking place, sure, I’ll tune in to CNN. If Anderson Cooper is at the anchor desk, I might even stick around.
But the class of the television news universe is the “PBS NewsHour,” which has improved and toughened up considerably over the past few years. We record it every night; we rarely watch the whole thing, but we appreciate the intelligence and context, which you just can’t get elsewhere.
And yes, I’ll watch Rachel Maddow occasionally, too. She’s smart and well-informed, and her politics are pretty much the same as mine. But it’s entertainment as much as it is news, and what’s important isn’t always entertaining.
As described by Pompeo, it sounds like cable news is going to be the same as it ever was, only with fewer viewers. It’s a lost opportunity. But what did we expect?
Rachel Maddow was excited. The host of cable news’ top-rated show could barely contain her glee Wednesday night over the news that President Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had proven to be such a cooperative witness that special counsel Robert Mueller was recommending no jail time.
“Another few shoes are going to drop soon,” she told her viewers. She also pondered the mystery of why Trump never says anything critical about Flynn. “Not a peep about Mike Flynn since Flynn plead guilty and became a cooperator more than a year ago,” she said, adding, “There must be something else going on here. And, “The only other person he treats like this is freaking Putin!”
It was a different story on cable news’ second-highest-rated program. Sean Hannity was in full dudgeon over Mueller’s decision to go after Flynn for what Hannity called minor “process” crimes. Hannity instructed his viewers that Mueller had persecuted “a decorated military hero” for the sole purpose of building a phony case to drive Trump out of office.
“This is how desperate and how pathetic Robert Mueller is,” Hannity said, running through the reasons why Flynn might have decided to cooperate: finances ruined, his son facing possible jail time. “Is this,” Hannity asked, “what justice in America is supposed to look like to you?”
Welcome to the 2018 edition of the National Conversation. With the Mueller investigation on the verge of a possible denouement, I thought I’d spend Wednesday night watching “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “Hannity.” Hyper-polarization may be tearing us apart, but at the cable news outlets, it’s good for business. According to Adweek’s TVNewser, Maddow’s program on MSNBC this past Tuesday drew nearly 3.5 million viewers, more than anyone else on cable news in prime time (8 to 11 p.m.). Hannity, on Fox News, gathered just under 2.9 million.
And surely it’s no accident that that MSNBC, which leans left, and Fox, which has embraced the hard right, are dominating prime time while CNN brings up the rear. Though CNN, like MSNBC, is harshly critical of Trump and regularly draws the White House’s ire, the network has attempted to maintain at least some of its former image as a nonpartisan purveyor of actual news. MSNBC and Fox, bound by no such scruples, are free to toss bleeding chunks of raw meat to their aging viewers.
It should be noted that all three cable outlets employ actual journalists who do good work. It’s just that they are rarely seen during prime time, especially on MSNBC and Fox. Instead, the three networks offer a full line-up of talk shows, nine hours a night. And the queen and king of those talk shows are Maddow and Hannity, whose 9 p.m. programs have become appointment viewing for political partisans of the left and right.
Lest I be accused of false equivalence, let me make it clear that Maddow, for all her opinionating and speculating, helms a show that is grounded in facts. She’s smart, and you often learn something. Over at Fox, though, the Trump presidency has pushed Hannity and other hosts into an alternative universe of dark conspiracy-mongering in which the Mueller investigation is nothing but a corrupt attempt by the “deep state” to destroy a great president because of his willingness to stand up to the establishment.
Thus did Wednesday’s edition feature a conversation between Hannity and John Solomon, an investigative columnist with The Hill, who this week reported on an “email chain”purportedly showing that former FBI director James Comey and other officials had obtained a FISA warrant under false pretenses so that they could surveil Trump associate Carter Page. Inconveniently, Solomon admitted to Hannity that he hadn’t actually seen the emails, although they have been “described” to him. All right, then.
Hannity was apoplectic, calling Solomon’s story proof of a “conscious fraud upon the court” and saying it showed that Comey was trying to tilt the election toward Hillary Clinton — never mind Comey’s late hit on Clinton, when he reopened the investigation into her emails and found nothing, a move that may well have cost her the election.
The rest of Hannity’s hour was taken up with a visit from Newt Gingrich, who called the Mueller investigation “an anti-constitutional effort by the organized left” and who congratulated Fox News for being the only media outlet willing to tell the truth; an immigration “debate” with fellow Fox host Geraldo Rivera (Hannity and Rivera both support Trump’s wall, but Rivera, unlike Hannity, would do something for the Dreamers); and, believe it or not, an update on the war on Christmas, perhaps Fox News’ most enduring creation.
Maddow’s program was considerably less toxic than Hannity’s but not necessarily any more nutritious. Other than Flynn, her main interest was the fate of Maria Butina, an accused Russian operative who, we learned, stood up at a Trump event in 2015 and apparently became the first person ever to ask the then-candidate whether he would lift sanctions against Russia. (Trump responded that he’d strongly consider it.) Butina, Maddow observed, may be the link uniting Russian money, the Trump campaign, and the National Rifle Association.
Maddow was also visited briefly by the ubiquitous Democratic congressman Adam Schiff of California, who will soon become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Alex Isenstadt of Politico, who broke the news earlier this week that a foreign government had hacked the email accounts of several top Republican campaign officials.
Significantly, neither Maddow nor Hannity spent much time on the funeral of George H.W. Bush, which has brought a sense of unity to much of the country even if praise for the one-term president has been somewhat overwrought. Maddow, at least, provided a respectful overview of the day’s events. Hannity’s main interest was to bring on New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin and former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer so they could whine that Democratic praise for the late president was just another way of trashing Trump.
Cable news has long been a wasted opportunity. So much airtime. So little news. Imagine how it might be different. How about at least one hour of prime time combining news and analysis without any partisan overlay? I’m thinking of something like Anderson Cooper’s CNN program, only with more actual journalism. Or the “PBS NewsHour” with a zippier pace and better production values.
But no. Instead we have ideological talk-show hosts exploiting the passions of their audience for ratings and profits. It’s a sorry state of affairs — but one that perfectly reflects our deep and seemingly unbridgeable divisions.
The first results were coming in from Georgia’s special congressional election. And Tucker Carlson of the Fox News Channel had a theory to explain why Jon Ossoff, the Democrat, wasn’t heading toward a huge victory over his Republican opponent, Karen Handel: Ossoff was (gasp) a liberal elitist.
“Ossoff ought to be running away with it, but he’s not,” Carlson said. He sneered at Ossoff’s prodigious fundraising, saying that “all that money has come from angry liberals who live out of state.” As for whether Ossoff was capable of relating to voters in Georgia’s Sixth District, Carlson smirked, “He’s super-fit and way smarter than you are.”
What we were talking about, in case U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s diversionary tactics led you astray, was a televised debate, held before a neutral audience, to be moderated by Tom Brokaw. Everything else is baloney.
As you no doubt already know, Brown made two demands that had to be met before he would agree to a debate with his Democratic rival, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren.
The second was that the debate be carried only by local media outlets and not by “out-of-state cable networks with a reputation for political advocacy” — clear reference to the liberal outlet MSNBC, which had been mentioned as a possibility.
Both demands were ridiculous because they were irrelevant. But when Vicki Kennedy rejected the first of those demands, that was enough for Brown to say no.
(At this point I suppose I should include a non-disclosure: I’m not related to those Kennedys.)
Brown might have been able to make a reasonable case for asking Vicki Kennedy not to endorse until after the debate. But demanding that she refrain for “the duration” was just silly. If the media consortium that includes the Boston Globe schedules a debate, will Brown insist that the Globe not endorse? And what will Brown say if the Boston Herald, as is its wont, puts together its own debate? Surely he won’t ask the paper to withhold its all-but-certain Brown endorsement.
As for MSNBC, the debate organizers could prevent the channel from carrying it live. Afterwards, though, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and company would be free to show clips and comment on them whether they had carried the full debate or not. The fair-use provision of the copyright law guarantees that — not to mention the First Amendment.
And why did I say the debate would be held before a neutral audience? Because you can be sure the Brown and Warren campaigns would insist on equal numbers of partisans in the audience. So the Kennedy Institute’s sponsorship isn’t an issue, either.
I know some observers have questioned Brokaw’s alleged liberal bias. But since that hasn’t been raised by the Brown campaign, we have to assume he had no problem with Brokaw as moderator. When Brokaw moderated a debate between Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008, he seemed mainly interested in making sure neither candidate exceeded his allotted time. Liberal or not, Brokaw has earned his status as a fair-minded journalist who can be trusted not to throw the debate to either candidate.
It’s also hard to figure why Brown suddenly has a problem with Vicki Kennedy or the Kennedy Institute, given that he took part in a debate with Martha Coakley two years ago that was co-sponsored by the institute without setting any preconditions. As Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis points out, it was only a year ago that Brown couldn’t say enough good things about the late Ted Kennedy’s widow.
Globe columnist Scot Lehigh thinks Brown’s demands were “reasonable,” and he gives the senator credit for sticking to them. Yet Lehigh doesn’t tell us what Brown could possibly gain by failing to take part.
As my Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, an expert on political debates, puts it, “They’re making such an effort to portray Brown as someone with bipartisan credentials who can work with Democrats, and yet here’s this relatively mild example of cooperating with a Democrat, and they’re balking at it.”
Who knows what Brown and his advisers are thinking? Their political astuteness is generally beyond question. Maybe this will prove to be a smart move. Right now, though, it looks like a rare misstep, especially curious given that Brown initially made the Warren campaign look flat-footed with his rapid acceptance of several debate invitations.
My own bias is in favor of as many debates as possible, regardless of the venue. For instance, I don’t understand why Warren won’t say yes to WBZ Radio (AM 1030) talk-show host Dan Rea, who is conservative but is as fair as they come.
The candidates really don’t have anything better to do. How would we prefer they spend their time? Making television ads? Attending fundraisers? Of course not. They should spend as much time as possible side by side, talking about the issues. It’s not always the most edifying experience, but it’s better than any conceivable alternatives.
Photo (cc) by Michael Kwan and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
1. It looks like MSNBC’s response has been to give promotions to everyone rather than consider what might work best. The network is feeding Lawrence O’Donnell to the wolf (i.e., Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly) at 8 p.m. And Ed Schultz at 10? Really? Aren’t all his viewers in bed by then?
If I were MSNBC honcho Phil Griffin, I’d move Chris Matthews to 8. Matthews is much maligned (I’ve maligned him myself), but he’s still weirdly compelling after all these years. His energy and passion are likely to hold Olbermann’s losses to a minimum. Let Schultz have the 7 o’clock hour and see what he can do with it.
I agree with Griffin’s decision to keep Rachel Maddow at 9. I realize she would do better against O’Reilly than anyone else, but she’s now the franchise, and protecting the franchise is important. If her ratings were to drop below Olbermann’s, it would demoralize the whole operation. And I’d keep O’Donnell at 10, too.
2. CNN, which has slipped behind MSNBC in the prime-time ratings, has an opportunity to take advantage of the Olbermann mess. I’ll confess I haven’t seen Piers Morgan’s new talk show yet, but the clips look very promising — a huge step up from Larry King.
I’ve always liked Anderson Cooper better than “Anderson Cooper 360.” Whatever’s wrong with the show can be fixed. And here’s what’s wrong: inconsistency (you never know whether you’re going to get a solid newscast or tabloid trash) and the two-hour length, which has led CNN to use much of the 10 o’clock hour to flog what’s coming at 11.
The solutions are fairly simple. Cut the newscast to an hour, rebroadcasting Piers Morgan at 11; and up the intelligence quotient.
CNN executives will still need to deal with the toxic-waste pit that is “Parker Spitzer” at 8. I’d move John King’s politically oriented newscast to that slot and cross my fingers.
3. Barring any unexpected bombshells, Bill Carter and Brian Stelter’s take on why Olbermann left seems pretty definitive. But though Comcast, the incoming owner of NBC Universal, appears to have its corporate hands clean, my expectation is that at some point the company will blow up MSNBC.
Maybe it will happen soon. Maybe it won’t happen until Comcast wants to curry favor with a new Republican administration in the White House. But it will happen.
Olbermann addressing his suspension last night. Click on image to see video.
One thing I could have made clearer in what has proved to be a fascinating discussion about Keith Olbermann’s political donations is that my support for the principle of journalistic independence should not be confused with support for the specific NBC News policy that tripped him up.
The policy, as reported by Politico, is absurd, as it cites the need to remain an “impartial journalist” as its justification, and states that employees may make contributions if they seek permission:
Anyone working for NBC News who takes part in civic or other outside activities may find that these activities jeopardize his or her standing as an impartial journalist because they may create the appearance of a conflict of interest. Such activities may include participation in or contributions to political campaigns or groups that espouse controversial positions. You should report any such potential conflicts in advance to, and obtain prior approval of, the president of NBC News or his designee.
No one would consider Olbermann to be an impartial journalist, and I can easily believe he had no idea he was violating policy when he donated to three Democratic politicians. Not to be belabor the point, but the principle that I think matters is independence, not impartiality. Check out the nine principles in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s “Elements of Journalism.” You will note that two of them deal with independence, but objectivity isn’t even mentioned.
In his commentary last night, Olbermann implicitly described himself as a journalist by saying that the policy needs to be reconsidered in light of “21st-century journalism.” He is doing journalism of a sort. If you can find a meaningful difference between one of Olbermann’s “special comments” and Frank Rich’s Sunday column in the New York Times (one of my favorite reads), then you’re able to draw distinctions that elude me. And I don’t think anyone would argue that Rich isn’t a journalist.
Olbermann last night not only admitted he should have changed a “Worst Person” segment because of one of his donations, but he also quite properly pointed out the problems that would have ensued if he had contributed to Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva before having him on the show rather than after. That strikes me as a pretty good summation of why even opinionated hosts shouldn’t write checks to politicians.
A final observation: A number of people have criticized me and others for obsessing over Olbermann’s small contributions when Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity routinely donate to politicians, and when Fox News major domo Rupert Murdoch has no scruples about giving $1 million to the Republican Governors Association.
They’re right, of course. Fox News is strictly a talk-show operation — the video equivalent of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. MSNBC aspires to something higher than that. To say that MSNBC is a mirror image of Fox News is akin to arguing that the Nation is just like the Drudge Report. Rachel Maddow explained the difference quite well on Friday. But I don’t think it’s necessary to say “of course, Fox is worse” every time I write about MSNBC.
NBC handled the Olbermann matter badly right from the start, though the final result — a two-day suspension — strikes me as fitting the offense rather well. I’m glad Olbermann is back. And I agree with him that NBC ought to take another look at its policy. I’d make it tougher and clearer.
