Legal Commentary

NBC Kow Tows To Journalistic Standards

By Big Tent Democrat

Contra to Jeralyn's excellent take, over at Daily Kos, BarbinMD is upset that NBC dumped Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as news anchors for MSNBC's political coverage (Olbermann of course will continue his opinion show Countdown, going head to head against his right wing counterpart, Fox's Bill O'Reilly, and will be correctly labelled as a pundit in MSNBC's political coverage.)

This goes to an ongoing tension I see in the so-called Media criticism in the Left blogs, or rather lack thereof. We ALL know Keith Olbermann is a partisan hack. No one in their right mind would deny it. Which is fine as far as it goes. But let's not pretend he is a journalist. He NEVER should have been anchoring MSNBC's political coverage. He should have been in the pundits' slots. As should Chris Matthews (and Matthews was terrible LONG BEFORE this election. He was terrible in the 2000 and 2004 elections as well, but against Democrats then.) These two men are not journalists. It is that simple.

More . . .

Fox News is not a journalistic enterprise and we all know this. No one in their right mind would deny it. But NBC News decided that its MSNBC NEWS operation would not become a Left wing Fox News. I applaud them for that. Clearly it will continue to be a Democratic leaning organization in this election - with a nightly lineup of Tweety, Olbermann and, starting tonight, Rachel Maddow.

But it has done the right thing regarding its news coverage. It will not become Fox News Left. This is a good thing. We need journalists, more and better ones, to coin a phrase. Not more hackery masquerading as journalism. Now David Gregory is no one's idea of a great journalist and calling him out for buying right wing nonsense is an important task but he is certainly more of a journalist than Olbermann and Matthews.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 08, 2008 (boomark / email).