Journalism had been, was and still is in the throes of a radical makeover and to this day I don’t think anyone really knows what the thing is going to look like whenever this transitional era is over (if it ever ends…but that’s another story). What was clear at that time was the big traditional news organizations were losing their audience, clout and in the desperate search for a way forward, often their purpose. The local television station where I had worked first lost many of its viewers even while doing consistently excellent journalism. It wasn’t anyone’s “fault” — it just “was.” People, especially the slightly wealthier, slightly more sophisticated viewers that NBC attracted were the first to take advantage of the opportunities technology offered for accessing information any time, anywhere. Broadcast television is a crappy medium for trying to do that.

And so I set out to find a new platform. Blogging seemed like a good way to stay in the game since there was virtually no barrier to entry and I’d already developed a brand and idea from an earlier effort to pitch a cable news show (also another story). Get Real was my attempt to cut through two trends in journalism that both drove me crazy and I believed were partially responsible for the craft’s decline. Bland “objectivity” and pure bald-faced propaganda.

The blandness is practiced every day in newsrooms across the country — every network newscast, every local television newscast, most newspapers do it. Steering away from drawing any conclusions whatsoever from the evidence presented in a story. If some official says up is down, the story will inevitably say, “Commissioner Simpson says up is down. Critics disagree arguing that up is up because that’s the definition of up.” What happened to “Commissioner Simpson says up is down but he is wrong”? As Keith Olbermann has argued repeatedly, just because there are two sides to a story, it doesn’t mean both of them should be given equal weight if one is factually in coherent. Try telling that to the Nightly News.

The reaction to this has been the increasing popularity of one-sided “news” that is, in reality, nothing more than lightly disguised propaganda. Fox News is the master purveyor of this but MSNBC decided, with the success of Olbermann, to dive right in when it became clear there was money to be made in peddling bias. Equating Fox and MSNBC never pleased some of my readers who thought I was equating the degree of their hosts’ bias. But as I wrote repeatedly, just because someone like Sean Hannity makes factual errors nightly and Rachel Maddow does not (the proof here is the Maddow-bashing blogs go on and on about how snarky she is while the Hannity-bashers cite the specific factual errors made and back it up with evidence), doesn’t mean they are trafficking in the same drug: news as a pre-determined narrative.

I thought, and continue to think that coupling the performance aspects of prime-time cable (faux outrage, personality, humor) with hard line on facts is something people would like and use. And so….

In April a group of like-minded journos joined forces to create Buzz60. It’s a web channel of on-demand video clips, available any time, anywhere that are short (60 seconds) and sharp, entertaining and informative. My signature role is something we call Cable Kooks which, based on what I’ve written here over the last two years, is probably self-explanatory.

So Get Real isn’t over, it’s just moved. Come visit at buzz60.com, check out a couple of videos, share the ones you like with friends and then bookmark it. We’re putting up 10 new videos a day. Always something fresh for your eyes, ears and brain.

And again thanks for checking in, commenting and encouraging me to keep reporting, analyzing and speaking my mind.

Last night Olby went Kujo on Ted Koppel. Koppel? That nice old news man who once did that dry and somber news show called Nightline? Yep. That Ted Koppel.

In case you missed it, this past Sunday the Washington Post gave the former ABC News anchor a chunk of its Op-Ed page to get something off his chest. Koppel wrote about what’s happened to television news in the last decade or so and what he thinks it means for the country. Playing off the suspension a week earlier of MSNBC’s lefty pitbull Keith Olbermann for giving campaign donations to Democratic candidates, Koppel painted a larger picture of how the opinion-driven cable news networks are bad for democracy. Me and about a thousand other pundit/blogger/experts have said the same thing. He also lamented some golden mythical bygone era of television news as a font of objective, important journalism. Yeah that Camel Caravan sure was a great news program.

But here’s the bit that probably most got under Olby’s skin:

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly – individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

Olbermann truly believes that he is different from the likes of Beck and his archnemesis O’Reilly — that he is a journalist digging for truth as opposed to their slinging pure propaganda for their corporate paymaster. Here’s what KO said last night (OK, here’s some of what he said last night since he thought this subject deserved 12 minutes of airtime — I’ve chosen the more salient points):

The great change about which Mr. Koppel wrings his hands is not partisanship nor tone nor analysis. The great change was the creation of the sanitized image of what men like Cronkite and Murrow, and Kaltenborn  and Davis and Daly and Baukhage and Smith and Sevareid and Rather and Jennings and Polk and Koppel did. These were not glorified stenographers. These were not neutral men. These were men who did, in their day, what the best of journalists still try to do in this one, evaluate, analyze, unscramble, assess, put together a coherent picture or a challenging question, using only the facts as they can be best discerned, plus their own honesty and conscience.

——

Insist long enough that the driving principle behind the great journalism of the television era was neutrality and objectivity and not subjective choices and often dangerous evaluations and even commentary, and you will eventually leave the door open to pointless worship at the temple of a false god.

——

But, as long as there are two men, as long as they are fair and balanced, is not the news consumer entranced by the screaming and the fact that his man eventually and always outscreams the other? Is not he convinced that he has seen true journalism, true balance, true objectivity?

I have read and heard much of late including from Mr. Koppel in the Washington Post yesterday about how those who succeeded his grand era of false objectivity are only in it for the money or the fame or the chance to push a political party. Mr. Koppel also implied as others have that the men behind this network saw in the success of Fox News, a business opportunity to duplicate the style but change that content. Mr. Koppel implied that yesterday.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, and the very kind of fact-driven journalism Mr. Koppel seems to be claiming he represents and I fail, would not stand for his sloppy assumptions and his false equivalence of “both sides do it.”

We do not make up facts here and when we make mistakes we correct them.

Demonstrably so as I have noted repeatedly in this blog. Legions of people watch Olbermann looking for mistakes and a few of them write blog dedicated to that pursuit. Look them over and you’ll find precious little those critics can point to that Olbermann gets wrong factually. But the absence of objective error does not, in Mr. Olbermann’s own construct, mean his show represents an honest reporting of stories. Anyone can align a series of carefully curated facts into an argument. That’s what attorneys do every day. But that doesn’t make them journalists and it doesn’t make the stories they tell true.

In beating up Mr. Koppel Olby goes for the low hanging fruit. The old broadcast news model is dead. I gave a college lecture last night and said the very same thing. I’ve been saying it for a couple of years. The audience is literally dying off as younger people (charitably defined as those under 50 in this case) get their information elsewhere. The problem lies in Olbermann’s belief that MSNBC represents the phoenix rising from the ashes of that old news world. Listen to how he defines what lies before us:

To equate this network with Fox, as Mr. Koppel did, to accuse us of having our own facts is another manifestation of a dangerously simplified understanding of modern news.

In the end Olbermann is simply delusional. Look at his final point:

I may ultimately be judged to have been wrong in what I am doing. Mr. Koppel does not have to wait. The kind of television journalism he eulogizes failed this country because when truth was needed, all we got were facts most of which were lies anyway. The journalism failed, and those who practiced it failed, and Mr. Koppel failed.

I don’t know that I’m doing it exactly right here. I’m trying. I have to. Because whatever that television news was before we now have to fix it. Good night and good luck.

Of course Olbermann worships at the alter of Murrow (“Good night and good luck”) but to equate what he does each night — sifting through facts and cherrypicking those that support the Olbermann world view — with Murrow’s crowning achievements is pure fantasy. Murrow didn’t come to his interviews with one set of facts to the exclusion of all others. His was great journalism because Murrow interviewed people, confronted them with facts and asked them to explain. If people were exposed as fools, knaves or worse, it was with their own words this was accomplished. When was the last time Keith Olbermann had on anyone with whom he disagrees?

Hell isn’t freezing over any time soon methinks.