Somebody should call a doctor. Keith Olbermann is off his meds — again.
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 …

The kerfuffle over MSNBC’s “indefinite suspension” of Keith Olbermann for giving contributions to three Congressional candidates is hilarious in one respect: That MSNBC’s brass thinks of Olbermann as a journalist and their own network as a “news” network. Puh-leeeze.
The rules at NBC News about political contributions by employees are not only sound, they are pretty standard throughout the world of journalism. Most news organizations think it’s important that the reporters, editors and producers who are responsible to telling fair and balanced stories don’t create the appearance of bias by working …

Check it out! After a verrrrry long dry spell I decided to plant my face in front of a camera in honor of a guy who has inexplicably become the host of a national cable “news” show.
The problem with Eliot Spitzer being given the seat at CNN in prime time is not that he hired a hooker. Or liked to have sex with his long black dress socks on. It’s that he basically abused his authority as Governor the same way Richard Nixon did as President.
Remember Troopergate? Spitzer’s Administration directed …

While I’m an equal opportunity critic of cable “news” I can’t pass up this opportunity to share a clip that offers compelling evidence that Fox is, at times, in the business of completely and utterly lying for the sake of pushing a partisan agenda. Journalism by any standard other than that of Chairman Mao, Josef Stalin, or Big Brother is simply not practiced much of the time at Fox “News”. As I wrote last week, the Not-at-Ground-Zero-not-a-Mosque pseudo controversy  is yet another case of cable “news” and its taboid breathren …

First off sorry about the verrrrry long lapse in postings. As I recently explained to a follower of Get Real, the whole point of this blog was not just to spout off but to bring facts to bear on the issues and arguments we often are drowning in. That means it can take a few hours to write each post and frankly, I haven’t had the time lately. I gotta make a living and running a media production company is more than a full-time job. (Obvious plug opportunity: Please visit …

On Saturday 95,000 of my closest friends and I poured into the Big House at the University of Michigan to see my nephew Chris graduate from college. It was gratifying to see such a nice turnout for him. Of course it is possible the enormous crowd also came to see the other grads and the commencement speaker. He was a man named Barack O-something and boy, what a speech he gave.
Lost amidst the appropriately non-stop coverage of the failed car-bombing in Times Square, the predictably masturbatory coverage of the White …

Earlier this week I was having dinner with a noted pollster when the topic turned (naturally) to Obama and the Democrats — how bad was November looking? I argued that the hype over the coming Democratic debacle was both totally premature and wildly overblown. Surprisingly my polling pundit agreed. We both understood two things about the electorate — they have very short memories (Bush’s approval ratings are back up!) and care almost exclusively about one thing: their pocket books. And so, November is a lot farther away than the …

As health care reform becomes law and we either A) become a socialist nation on the brink of collapse, or B) like every other first and second-rate country in the world and have something approximating universal health insurance, it’s time to ask a really frank and important question.
Are Americans too uninformed to be part of the process? OK that’s a little over the top but after the last year it’s really difficult for someone who’s spent a career trying to find the facts and then report them to watch the …

At the end of the day there is simply nothing more stunning about the Conan-Leno-NBC meltdown than this: Jeff Zucker still has a job.
Zucker-bashing has been a tried-and-true sport among entertainment reporters, business analysts, and Hollywood insiders for years. No one, the storyline goes, has done so much to destroy something so valuable and been rewarded so handsomely in the process. I won’t pile on lest I get a nosebleed on the way up….
But at the risk of further angering the guy who works for GE Medical in the UK …

It’s almost too easy to take apart “reporters” and “newspapers” that claim to be practicing journalism. But when they go after actual journalists doing actual journalism it’s worth a note.
Tuesday’s review of Diane Sawyer’s debut in Tuesday’s NY Post is a case in point. Kyle Smith goes on a spleen dump and gets almost everything comically wrong. He’s one the the paper’s TV writers but you wouldn’t know it from his lack of knowledge, writing ability, or research acumen.
First let me say for the record that I don’t have strong …