"News"

At the moment, the Keith Olbermann saga seems to have come to a happy ending. On his first show back he was anything but contrite and said the conditions to which MSNBC had been holding him were illegal and not in his contract. Please note the italics. Legal matters of this importance are often unpredictable and prolonged, requiring more than just a second opinion. On the other hand I assume his contract was properly signed on paper. I hope the story ends here. If this were to be the start of an “nuclear war” between the entire MSNBC staff and General Electric we know how it would end, with Keith Olbermann on a GE toaster.

There’s more to this matter than the specifics. Something is wrong with the way we are being informed these days and that “something” has just taken place before our very eyes. One citizen makes small legal contributions to three Congressional candidates and at least gets publicly slapped on the wrist by his bosses. A rival network has been featuring commentators taking collections for candidates on the air.

A recent exchange between Bill O’Reilly and his host, Bill Maher, says a lot.* Maher referred to wildly exaggerated stories about the expense of the presidential trip to India to which both men agreed, in O’Reilly’s words, was “bull.” The ensuing dialogue went like this.  O’Reilly: (as to how this became news on Fox) “It came from a guy in India, picked up by the Drudge Report and then disseminated by several other people. Our hard news didn’t do it. Who?... {did it}” Maher; “Sean Hannity’” O’Reilly; “Look, Seanny’s a talk radio guy he’s not…” Maher: “then he’s presenting it as a fact. It’s his opinion (emphasis mine) that it’s $200 million {a day}…” O’Reilly: “There’s a difference between opinion people and hard news people.”

OK. So “opinion guys,” as O’Reilly later referred to himself, you have license to present what you choose as news, even fiction if it sells, because you’re not doing “hard news.” Pardon my cynicism, but doesn’t that license by itself detract from the integrity of your conclusions just a little bit?

O’Reilly and Maher are not spokesmen for the Fox network and MSNBC. But if one accepts them as stand ins for these two purveyors of what passes as news, it’s easy to pick the winner.

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*This interview from Nov. 12 can be viewed on the internet for those so inclined. I see it as great comedy from two perspectives. One has O’Reilly as the straight man for Maher’s one liners. In the other Maher is the straight man to O’Reilly’s version of Stephen Colbert.