Pajiba

I'm not much of a talking head fan and had never even heard of him or Beck till fairly recently and that was only thanks to The Daily Show. I thought KO sounded like a nutcase even back then and Beck scared the shit out of me. When did this brand of 'editorial' come into popularity? They all come across as hysterical attention seekers.

Well, that was absolutely infuriating.

You're right Dustin, Olbermann used to be kinda funny and maybe even rational but now he sounds like a smug windbag. O'Reilly may actually have more humility (but just a teensy, tiny bit more).

I find it just a bit ridiculous for Olbermann to be making horrible attempts at jokes and then to almost in the same breath seem to take Stewart's jokes as serious.

You can't call yourself a journalist and openly support political candidates. Sorry, that's just the way it is. If you don't like it, you're absolutely free to pursue a different career.

As a journalist you're supposed to be unbiased so that people can feel that they're getting the truth and not the truth + slant, and that DID exist once, and there's no reason it can't exist today--even with 24 hour news stations and the internet.

I think the gradual acceptance of slanted news stations has further led to the polarization of conservatives and liberals in the U.S. I think that it's a crime that people in a free, democratic state have almost no resources where they can feel like they're getting objective, service-oriented news.

We have more access to information than ever before and yet our lives are muddled by endless misinformation to the point where you're either a sheep who believes every conspiracy put forth by Fox News or Huffington Post because you're tired of trying to ask questions, or you are a cynical bastard who believes and believes in nothing.

How are we supposed to learn about and elect better leaders when the system put in place to check on these people is broken beyond repair? How can anyone trust what Keith Olberman reports on his show about those three political candidates or their opponents from now on? If he just chooses not to report on them, you're requiring those constituents to learn about the people governing them from somewhere else and it's your job to be doing that for them! That's why you exist!

*sigh* I'm going back to my bunker.

This is a big reason as to why I pretty much checked out of politics just about 2 years ago. I still vote in every election. I do what due diligence I need to make an informed decision at the polls, but after that I'm out. I have no interest in it anymore. There is no real debate. Issues are complicated and there are more than just "two sides" to them. I no longer get anything out of recretational indignation over stuff like this.

I think we're all forgetting about the really important question here, which is what will happen to Miss Precious Perfect when they cart him off to the looney bin.

Olbermann can't own that much of a percentage on smug. There's still Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck....you know the rest of the batshit talking heads who couldn't have an original thought if one of their staffers handed it to them.

I'll be the lone ranger in disagreement here. I don't think he's any more smug than he ever was. He apologized and seemed genuinely surprised by the overwhelming public support he received.

The pundits are smug, what's new?

Btw, Jon Stewart is appearing on Rachel Maddow's show tomorrow.

"You’ve all heard enough about Keith Olbermann the last two days, and the way the comments have gone, you probably have no more desire to talk about him."

Have you read the amount of verbal diarrhea that's been spouted on here the last couple of days?

Shit, most people on here just love the sound of their own voices. (Err. look of their own words doesn't seem to have the same effect.) And you've been just a little too happy to stir the pot, you cheeky bastard.

Grizzled old bastard commentary:

Anyone remember if Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner, or Howard K. Smith was either a Dem or Rep?

Neither do I. Probably because it never came up, or came out of their mouths. Cronkite was like your grandad, he'd tell you how it was then bounce you on his knee a few times and give you a nickel. Reasoner was the som-betch who didn't give a shit what you thought. And Howard looked like he had an all night bender, showered with his suit on, then read the news through his blood shot eyes.

Never once did I hear these dudes give their opinion on the political process, or politics in general without proclaiming loudly and obviously that what comes next is my opinion, or what I just said is my opinion. Never saw those guys go off the deep end, or sacrifice objectivity on the altar of their opinion.

Keith's driving a two ton smug truck on the bombastic highway to Prick City. I guess he used to have a sense of humor, but now he reminds me of Jerry Lewis. When he's trying to make me laugh, he doesn't. When he's not trying to make me laugh, he does. I'm not laughing when he shrugs his shoulders, arches his eyebrows and pulls a face. I am laughing when he get's all 'jealous Jr. High Girl-ly' because someone made him the butt of a joke. Which is what all of these pundit/commentators/op-ed people are, butts and jokes.

Of course everyone, journalists included, have opinions and biases. The whole point was that you left it at the door of the newsroom and you reported the news. You can't leave your bias at the newsroom door if everyone knows you contributed to a candidate's campaign--no matter how hard you honestly tried to be objective in your reporting, you can no longer be trusted.

When you're out and feel free with your political views as a journalisr, what happens is you form factions. So, say you're a conservative and you're fine with being open about it, so you discuss your politics freely. You meet others in the newsroom who now also feel free to express their political opinions because you did so first. All of a sudden you're the Young Journalist Republicans Club and then you all decide you're tired of working in what you now all view as a "liberal" organization, so you leave and form your own news organization that only tells it how YOU want it told.

The problem is, you're openly conservative, and thus you continue to attract a more and more conservative base. There is no other view point to balance you out, so you continue to skew more and more right and farther and farther from reality. All of a sudden, you wind up with a NEWS station REPORTING to its viewers that Obama is spending $200 billion to travel to India, when, in fact, that is not even remotely accurate or true. You have actual journalists speculating if Obama is a Muslim, or if he is a U.S. citizen, while providing absolutely zero REPORTING or hard facts to back up their speculations. And you justify it all by saying you're the balance to the liberal left news organizations when, really, neither is balanced at all anymore! It's just lies upon fear mongering upon skewed statistics and the ones who are really harmed by it all are the people of the USA who once had the greatest journalists in the world and who now have politicized pundits selling them daily doses of journalistic snake oil.

Lindsay, none of those things you describe is reporting. Reporting would be 1) finding out how much the trip actually cost and 2) trying to find out who actually said it and asking for his explanation. Then you would convey that information to the public.

The sorry state of "news" organizations is not because of bias. It's because in the race for acquiring all the money on the planet, news organizations now have to get good ratings and make money. Reporting doesn't do that. Blowhard punditry and rumor-mongering gossip does.

I think Keith probably still has a sense of humor, it's just that more people are coming around to the fact that he's never actually been, you know, funny.

"and when the true story doesn't fit the party line...eh, just make it up."
Come now, journalism isn't so inartful! They don't make it up, they just put up a chrylon and say, "Is Obama a Muslim?" I kid.

But I think even the journalists in the group will have a difficult time really describing what "Unbiased" truly means when every word is parsed to show some liberal or conservative "bias." When you're being accused of bias for calling the beating, humiliation, and general mistreatment of prisoners "torture," as opposed to the government line of "harsh interrogation techniques," how can you truly ever find an unbiased publication in today's world? You look at coverage of Watergate and can say, "There's an airing of the facts!" but you still had factions of the country saying it was a media hitjob of the Republican president.

Basically, I don't think any of this is a recent phenomenon. I don't think Edward Murrow, who Keith Olbermann unfortunately apes at the end of every broadcast, would satisfy some Pajibans view of what "unbiased reporting" should be, but again, I don't think such a thing ever existed. Papers and television stations have sensationalized news for centuries, it's just our rose-colored glasses of the present that make us think that things were all that much better back in the day. I also buck at the idea that political discourse is so much more impolite now than it has ever been. I wouldn't call the Vietnam/Civil Rights era to be a particularly polite era of civil discourse.

I basically look at the argument that "Things now are so much less civilized than they once were!" in the same way I view people who make the argument that the Founding Fathers were brilliant bastions of civic duty and responsibility, whose examples should be followed by all, and whose centuries-old beliefs must be followed to the letter to this day. Was Benjamin Franklin a great figure in our history? Sure. Did he publish that his Almanac competitor, Titan Leeds, had died, only to call the living Titan Leeds an imposter when the latter contested the publication? Yep.

Moral of the story, I think we're tricking ourselves into believing that things were actually better once.

"Newspapers ALWAYS needed to make money, and there was always sensationalism to the news in order to sell papers, but the problem with today is that it's become sensationalizing by pandering to an extremist viewpoint--and when the true story doesn't fit the party line...eh, just make it up."

Do some research on William Randolph Hearst, or really the history of any major newspaper. I think you'll find that your quote above will fit anything you turn up. My comment was made with TV news in mind.

" Which, of course, you could argue is the same with the opposition shouting that Obama is a Muslim, only the difference was Kennedy WAS a Catholic and Obama is NOT a Muslim. The only matter here that is NOT a point of fact is whether or not being Catholic means you have to do what the Pope says if he says to do something."
I think you are splitting hairs to fit into the rose colored glasses interpretation of journalism's history.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think any "respected" journalistic institution has asserted that Obama is a Muslim, but they have speculated based on opposition and people have editorialized as much. Similarly, I don't think any respected journalistic institution directly stated that Kennedy took orders from the Vatican, but did they report on speculation and did some editorialize as much?

Furthering this, during the Red Scares, are you of the opinion that no journalistic institution opined or directly accused anyone of being a Communist that wasn't?

Is it just me, or has it been that Keith's getting progressively larger and orange-r since the 2008 primaries?

At this rate, whoever the fuck is helming Florida now will have to worry about all the orange groves going out of business.

Mangrilla, to answer your last question, I think that journalism has devolved from (arguably for-profit) news reporting to a liberal vs. conservative competition where each news source identifies with a political leaning and actively tries to protect it. Sensationalism is an entirely different beast.

I think Olbermann and Maddow would identify themselves as liberals if asked and obviously we have no doubts about O'Reilly or Hannity.

And you argue that shows like Hannity's or O'Reilly's are editorial and not "news" but the problem I see is that if you subtract all the shows on the 24 NEWS channels that fall into those categories, you have maybe 2 hours of total "strictly news" content left. The line is far, far too blurred between what is an information-delivering source and what is one host's opinionated sounding board and viewers can no longer tell the difference.

Wasn't Olbermann always this arrogant and narcissistic? I don't know...I still like watching him. I also like watch the O'Reily Factor so riddle me that, Pajiba fans.

You like watching loud obnoxiousness and arrogance, Littlejon. Perhaps in your daily life you don't get to yell at as many stupid people as you feel deserve it and so you enjoy watching someone else express their rage in an overt and hyperbolic way. You find it cathartic.

Although you most likely have more nuanced views, you enjoy hearing a black and white, extreme take on the issues occasionally because it makes it sound like there may be a simple solution to the world's greater problems. If only we would do the opposite of whatever is being done right now. It's comforting to think it could be that easy.

You're argumentative and get a rush of adrenaline every time you vehemently disagree with someone on an important issue. You like getting yourself a little worked up about the things that piss you off because it makes you feel alive.

Close?

@becks,

Not gonna lie. I think you almost hit it on the head with that last part.

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