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.

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 us at dedappermedia.com and check out our new service at vidlab101.com). But then the news bug bites so hard I can’t resist. So for this fleeting moment I am back.

This whole “debate” about the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan had me recalling (not so fondly) what has become an annual rite of August. In my business August was always a slow news month in which producers yearned for a big story to rescue them from their torpor. At some point though news producers stopped waiting and hoping and began acting. We’ll find a dead horse and beat it.

Who can forget the summer of 2001 when Chandra Levy dominated the news — and not just cable news? Her story was a mainstay of the nightly network newscasts and even received significant coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post (where it was, at least, arguably a local story). Then there was the summer of 2003. The swiftboating of John Kerry was that August’s main course lead by Fox News but then picked up by everyone else. Last summer was all about the death panels coccooned deep within the heath care reform bill. And now we have the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

What’s become increasingly apparent with each passing August is that cable news networks should no longer be referred to as “news” networks. News used to mean a measured reporting of facts — because once upon a time back in the Age of Reason western civilization recognized that facts actually mattered. No more.

Now instead of having journalists go dig and interview and report, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day is filled with “experts” — a term now loosely applied to anyone who is reasonably telegenic, able to spit out invective on cue, and lacking any doubt in his or her righteousness. So rather than having journalists uncover the fact that Congressman Gary Condit apparently did NOT kill Chandra Levy, or that the Swift Boat ads were wholly untrue, or that there was no provision to off grandma in the health care bill, or that the “Ground Zero Mosque” is neither at ground zero nor a mosque, the cable “news” networks simple repeat lies as often as necessary to fill their vast voids of time.

Calling Fox or MSNBC a “news” network is about as accurate as calling whole grain Pringles (check ‘em out!) a health food. Any resemblance to the real thing is pure fantasy.

Further, this particular story is an especially egregious example of how partisan political narrative is hijacking just about everything in this country. Start wit the obvious FACTS:

1. It is not a mosque — it is an Islamic Center. See no difference? I guess you think a Catholic school is a church then.

2. It’s not at Ground Zero — it is two blocks away. For those of you unfamiliar with Lower Manhattan two blocks can be a different neighborhood entirely. For instance there’s a dirty sex club two blocks from Ground Zero.

3. Islam did not bring down the World Trade Center or fly a plane into the Pentagon. Terrorists did. Yes, they were Muslim but so what? Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist who happened to be Christian. Should we ban any Christian church from anywhere near the Oklahoma City bombing site? (Full disclosure: I am a family member of a OKC victim.) Or maybe since James Knopp killed Dr. Bernard Slepian in a fit of rage motivated by Knopp’s radical Christian beliefs any Christian church proposed for construction around Buffalo should be prevented. Let’s be honest about this: Opposition using this argument is quite simply anti-Muslim. I’m guessing hypersensitive Catholic Bill O’Reilly might devote a segment or two to me as an anti-Christian zealot if I opposed a church in Oklahoma City.

4. Who cares if “the families” don’t want it built? Seriously.

This is where we tread on delicate soil. From the start the families of victims have been given a lot of deference at every stage of the recovery, design and rebuilding processes. And for good reason. Their pain is by definition more acute than those of us who were there, or watched on TV. But they aren’t a “they.” I covered lots of stories with family angles while working at WNBC for a eight years after 9/11 and I’ve talked to a lot of family members. A couple of things you should know.

First, the ones who talk on camera and to reporters may represent the sentiments of some faction of families but not all. Second, many of those who put themselves out front have political motives (“It was Clinton’s fault! It was Bush’s fault! Giuliani is a hero! Giuliani is a goat!). Third the vast majority of the people who lost relatives do not speak to reporters and have not been polled in any real sense. They have moved on. Finally think about how many family members there are.

About 2800 people died in the towers and on the two planes that brought them down. If each victim had an average of three direct family members that’s almost 9000 family members right there. But add in the in-laws, parents, grandchildren who are sometimes speak to the media as family members and you’ve got tens of thousands of people who might legitimately be called family members of the victims. They are not a bloc. They do not share a single common goal or belief structure. I imagine if you could poll them you’d find a pretty similar pattern of belief about any given issue as you would the general population of the tri-state area.

So why should all of these peoples’ opinions be more important than those of, say, the tens of thousands of workers who have to walk through, around, or past Ground Zero every business day? Or the residents of Tribeca, Lower Manhattan and Battery Park City? The crutch of finding one or two people who lost a loved one on 9/11 who happen to share the ideological bent of the storyline as presented by Fox or MS is really old and dishonest. But honesty, like facts, have largely vanished from the cable “news” world.

Recently I was talking to someone about these networks and the idea that what is presented is not in any way, shape or form news. He, like many others outside the business, didn’t recognize that neither Fox nor MSNBC air actual reports any more. Television news was once the place where journalists went to locations to find facts, interview people with local expertise, and then write a report that helped viewers better understand a piece of their world through narrative. No longer. Not on cable.

Now reporters — when they appear at all — pop up in front of a camera to talk. Maybe you’ll get some video or a sound bite but not a carefully reported and crafted report that is the product of experience, time and effort. Not on your life. That costs money. Sending out a reporter, photographer and producer in order to create a 2 or 3 minute taped piece long ago was left to the nightly network shows. Cable won’t spend that kind of money. Sticking people in front of cameras and then sparking an argument fills far more time far more cheaply. That facts are not a part of most of these “discussions” doesn’t seem to bother the bosses or the relatively small audiences that tune in to Fox or MS all day long.

(Yes, they are small. Ratings are all relative so when you hear about Fox winning big it still means they have fewer than a million people watching at any given hour during the daytime. Prime time is a bit different but the biggest show still only gets about 3 million on a good night. Low-rated teen dramadies on the CW do better.)

I left out CNN only because with their huge staff of journalists around the world along with international channels the network does try and work in actual stories during the day. Not as many as they used to and the producers there love a chat fest as much as their competitors but at least CNN still sort of tries. Nonetheless the “mosque” story has been covered ad naseum at CNN as well and without much more regard for facts.

And so here we are with the Fourth Estate that our Founders saw as a critical watchdog against tyranny, instead being as venal and petty as the politicians they seek to demonize. Cravenly serving up whatever mindless nonsense that will draw in a few hundred thousand retirees with free time on their hands.

We deserve better. But until we demand it, we get what we pay for: August bullshit.

I Know Nothing!

It’s nothing new. Humans seem to prefer faith to facts. And I’m not talking about religion.

Howard Kurtz got lots of (liberal) blog links early this week with an article about the health care “debate” and how facts have been relegated to the sidelines. Kurtz now reports that it was Monday’s most commented piece on the paper’s website as people poured forth their vitriol from both sides of the health care aisle.

Kurtz’s main point was pretty simple: Despite the fact that many reporters demonstrably proved that the death panels myth was indeed a myth, almost half of the Americans surveyed by NBC News believe death panels are a part of the President’s health care reform proposals. Sadly this is not surprising. Jay Leno has played the often incredible ignorance of Americans for laughs on the Tonight Show for years. Likewise Comedy Central’s The Daily Show openly laughs at ignorant Americans (especially those in the media and politics) almost nightly.

It’s all pretty funny until someone gets hurt. And that’s what’s happening. It’s not so much someone but something. America.

It’s one thing to simply decry how uninformed or ignorant people are about things in the news but that misses the point. The problem is that many Americans are eager to be misinformed and wear it as a badge of honor.

Not long ago I gave a talk about politics and media to a small group of people upstate. These were people who paid attention. They read the papers. They watched the news. They listened to the radio. But when I suggested that media hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, and Sean Hannity are not journalists and that no one should pretend otherwise, I was greeted with dismay. There was nothing I could say, no data I could cite that would convince one woman that what came out of Limbaugh’s mouth was not a stream of facts. Rush says he’s 100% correct in his assertions and this woman could not be persuaded otherwise. Others in the room were aghast until I suggested that Rachel Maddow was hardly different.

“But Rachel doesn’t make things up!” “She’s not like O’Reilly and Limbaugh because she tells the truth!” Indeed she traffics in a completely different drug. She does focus in on facts but often only those facts that support her point of view. Facts that don’t help don’t generally get a big airing on her show.

That’s all fine if people understand that prime-time cable news is not the province of journalism but of opinion. The problem is the avid fans of these shows don’t see the difference. The opinions they share with their favored hosts are the facts — according to them.

It’s easy to blame the media for all this and in some respects it’s accurate as well. In their drive to stay relevant (and alive) newspapers have been hacking away at the things that made them a critical part of American democracy. Reporting facts.

When the television networks were freed from producing newscasts and documentaries as a condition of “borrowing” the public airwaves the result was inevitable. Real journalism is expensive. Sitting two people with opposite opinions down in a TV studio is cheap.

When was the last time you saw a well-produced, thoroughly reported story told by an experienced correspondent — a journalist — on CNN, Fox, or MSNBC? Their days are filled with yakking lightweights chatting up current events with whoever will come on free. Their nights are filled with screaming sarcasm and anger from highly-paid hosts trading knowing lies with a small stable of favored “experts”. There is no news here. This is “news” as a game played with a nod and a wink.

As America’s most trusted news anchor (John Stewart) pointed out recently, Fox News hosts have made a healthy living railing against the “mainstream media” while simultaneously trumpeting the fact that Fox News is the number one rated all-news network by a very large margin. Can’t have it both ways? Sure you can in a country where huge numbers of citizens can’t even grasp the concept of cognitive dissonance.

But the media is the dealer feeding the fix. It didn’t create the addiction.

You talkin' to me?

Somewhere along the line that whole Age of Reason thing has failed to stick. Logic is the province of eggheads. Facts are ephemera. Belief is all that matters.

This is an epidemic no one will confront because it hits all the buttons Americans are afraid of: Intelligence, education, real dialogue. Thinking. The American creation myth since Andrew Jackson is built on action. Never mind that our oft-lionized Founding Fathers valued intelligence far more. We are a nation of Rambos and Dirty Harrys. Reagans and Rumsfelds. Doers not thinkers. And in that reality facts don’t really matter.

So let people point out that there are no death panels in ObamaCare. That there is no evidence whatsoever that the World Trade Center was brought down by: a) bombs; b) U.S. missiles; c) Isrealis; d) UFOs. That Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. For many Americans conclusive absence of evidence is no barrier to belief in a thing.

This is where our leaders fail us. Politicians refuse to tell the truth. When Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley (widely seen as a responsible adult) parrots the death panel fiction he aids and abets our decline. He and his ilk are cowards.

When cable news claims to be “Fair and Balanced” or “The Place for Politics” Orwell’s fictional future becomes our factual present. When being “The Coolest News on Earth” gets ratings it can’t be long before one network adopts that as it’s slogan.

And it will only get worse. As we splinter into ever smaller social networking groups, subscribing to our selected Twitterers, monitoring our selected Facebook friends, reading our selected websites, watching our selected cable shows or You Tube channels, we will become a shattered mirror. Each of us living as if the world is really just a reflection of…ourselves.

Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe the rest of the world will follow us down this rathole. But if not, the decline of America won’t be as a result of an overextended empire, a reckless war, a bankrupt financial system, or a permissive culture. It will be because we gave up on reason.

Bill O'Reilly

OK so it’s not the most surprising headline and many people probably believe it could be a daily column but this is a special episode of “Bill O’Reilly is Allergic to Facts.” Today’s episode: Newspaper circulation.

O’Reilly’s syndicated column is essentially a hearty har-har-har over the troubles at the New York Times which is, of course, a favorite topic among the legions of Americans who hate the “paper of record.” There’s certainly plenty to write about on that score but Bill takes the super lazy way out insists the paper’s problems are because it’s “the nation’s largest left-wing newspaper.”

The New York Times is most definitely a committed left-wing concern that is openly contemptuous of the conservative, traditional point-of-view. That is the primary reason the paper may soon dissolve.

O’Reilly supports his argument by noting that recent newspaper closings have all been at similarly “lefty” publications.

Over the past few months, newspapers in Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Denver have either folded or filed for bankruptcy. With the exception of The Rocky Mountain News, all the papers were committed left-wing enterprises. The truth is that most Americans are traditional-minded folks; they believe their country is noble, they want respectful discourse. Fanaticism of any kind is not the American way.

Neither is making sh*t up and that’s what BillO’s up to today. First off when did the Chicago Tribune become a “committed left-wing enterprise”? When they backed George W Bush over Al Gore in 2000 or when they backed George W Bush over John Kerry in 2004? Supporting Obama in 2008 was as much of a surprise as the fact that no major Texas newspaper failed to endorse their home-state guy in 2000.

Then, even if you accept that those other closed papers were super liberal, is that really the reason they folded? After all the survivors in Denver and Seattle are certainly no more conservative than their fallen brethren. The Denver Post endorsed Gore in 2000 while the Rocky Mountain News went with Bush. And both supported Bush over Kerry in 2004. Commies indeed!

The truth (Bill loves that word — too bad he doesn’t practice what he so pompously preaches) is that newspapers across the country are in dire straights and it has nothing to do with their editorial pages. Look at what’s happened to the circulation at the top 10 “conservative” papers from 2007 to 2008 (new figures are out on Monday) [see below for update]:

WSJ                                                  0.0%
NY Post                                           -6.3%
Chicago Trib                                   -7.8%
Dallas Morning News                     -9.3%
Boston Herald                                -9.9%
San Diego Union Tribune               -3.0%
Tampa Tribune                               -2.4%
AZ Republic                                     -5.5%
Indy Star                                          -3.3%
Columbus Dispatch                        -2.9%

And the three most prominent “lefty pinko rags”

New York Times                              -3.6%
Washington Post                             -1.9%
Newsday                                           -2.6%

Other than the Wall Street Journal which, along with America’s other national newspaper USA Today held circulation steady, every major paper left and right suffered circulation declines. If readers are abandoning the NY Times at a rate of 3.6 percent because of it’s leftward leanings then we (and Bill) have to conclude that readers are abandoning the NY Post at a rate of 6.3 percent because of it’s rightward leanings. The only logical conclusion? Right-wing rags are in bigger trouble than liberal ones.

C’mon Bill. you can do better than that!

[UPDATE] Now that the new numbers are out the news is even worse for the newspaper business and further demonstrates how far off base Bill is. The “liberal lions” are losing readers far more slowly than the biggest conservative newspapers with the exception of the Wall St. Journal. Indeed the right’s most prized paper, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post lost more readers than almost any other paper in America. Here’s the same list as above showing the most recent circulation figures which were released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations:

WSJ                                               +0.1%
NY Post                                         -20.6%
Chicago Trib                                 -7.4%
Dallas Morning News                   -9.9%
Boston Herald                              -13.6%
San Diego Union Tribune             -9.5%
Tampa Tribune                             -11.4%
AZ Republic                                  -5.7%
Indy Star                                       -9.0%
Columbus Dispatch                     -2.0%

And the three most prominent “lefty pinko rags”

New York Times                           -3.6%
Washington Post                          -1.1%
Newsday                                        -3.0%

Keith Olbermann

Orginally posted 3/29, updated 4/11

Hey if the New York Post can write great, if somewhat misleading headlines, why can’t I?

The equation that liberal Keith and conservative Bill were essentially separated at birth may not apply in all ways but in at least one they are equal: Both are blowhards who seem almost incapable of admitting mistakes.

(Each has one major exception to this: Olbermann famously wrote the “Mea Culpa” essay for Salon in 2002 about his experience at ESPN and O’Reilly admitted in 2004 he was wrong in believing President Bush’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).

The latest incident involves a bizarre Olbermann attack on a supposedly fake Twitter account set up in his name that the acerbic host claimed was set up by one of his enemies at Fox News. A week and a half ago Olbermann did is usual over-the-top routine on Twitter and made it his “Worst Person in the World” for the alleged transgression. But it turns out almost no part of the story was true and Olbermann and MSNBC refuse to respond.

Red State summarizes all this here and a post on Daily Kos confirms a key part (that NBC set up the Twitter account for Olbermann and had staffers post to it — see item #5). It seems that Olbermann went on a rhetorical rampage without doing much, if any, checking to see if his claims were true.

Olbermann apparently got almost everything wrong:

• The Countdown Twitter account was not a fake  — and in fact there were two of them. Here’s Twitter founder Biz Stone’s Tweet on the matter:

Funny story about the @keitholbermann account—MSNBC was running it and Keith didn’t know when he called us the Worst in the World (D’oh!) 5:22 PM Mar 24th from web

• The man he accused of setting it up is not a Fox News stooge but a very critical former employee who sounds much more like somone Olbermann would quote instead of slime.
• It’s hard to set up a Twitter account (“I’m not on Twitter. I tried to sign up last summer but abandoned the project.”).
• And that the “junk email” Olbermann claims tipped him off was actually junk email. It was, apparently, a invite to follow someone on Twitter which would have been familiar to any Twitter user has Olbermann actually shown it to one.

One unremarked part of this story is how little coverage it has gotten from obvious Olbermann fans like the HuffPo. After an initial report showing video of Olbermann’s rant there has been no follow up. Can you imagine what the liberal netroots would say if the shoe were on O’Reilly’s foot?

The point is not that the liberal or conservative netroots and media are one-sided and sometimes right or wrong — that goes without saying — but that partisans who believe only they speak the truth are dangerously deluded and add nothing to helping people understand what’s really going on in the country and world.

Get Real is all about casting a skeptical eye on our nation of loudmouths. This is why.

UPDATE

Well it took some time but Keith finally admitted he was wrong. Sort of. It’s obviously incredibly painful for him. Like giving birth to a hippo. Watch and see for yourself. I’m thinking this doesn’t really deserve a Mea Ciulpa….

Note: this is video contains the Olbermann “response” and was produced by Caleb Howe of the ActiCons blog.