So Keith Olbermann will return to his MSNBC show Tuesday after serving a two-day suspension for making campaign contributions to three Democratic candidates, including one donation made the same day the candidate in question appeared on Olbermann's show.
Olbermann's suspension last Friday sparked outrage among his loyalists, 275,000 of whom signed a petition demanding his return to the airwaves. In response, Olbermann tweeted: "Greetings From Exile! A quick, overwhelmed, stunned THANK YOU for support that feels like a global hug & obviously left me tweetless XO"
The suspension also prompted plenty of questions, among them:
Question: Why does Olbermann, who is clearly a partisan and not an objective journalist, have to obey the rules that bar employees at many news organizations from contributing to political campaigns?
Answer: Because MSNBC is tied to its parent network, NBC, whose execs reportedly don't want MSNBC's overt partisanship to tarnish NBC's image as an objective news operation. To let Olbermann off scot-free would, the execs feared, have damaged the NBC News brand.
Question: Given that Olbermann is so outspoken about his liberal views, why did he anchor MSNBC's election night coverage?
Answer: I suspect it was because Olbermann is MSNBC's biggest ratings draw, and the network simply wanted to grab the biggest audience it could on election night. Not that it helped; Fox News clobbered both MSNBC and CNN.
Question: Why doesn't Fox News follow the same rules against campaign donations? Several of its hosts (and owner Rupert Murdoch) have made donations to conservative pols and causes, and GOP presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin are paid commentators for the network.
Answer: Because Fox News (and most importantly its owner Murdoch) choose not to play by the rules everyone else does. Fox built its phenomenal success on delivering both news and heavy doses of far-right opinion, and by blurring the lines between the two. It may claim to be fair and balanced, but what Fox News really serves up is an echo chamber for right-wingers who want their own views reinforced, and dissenting views squashed.
In a segment on her show Friday, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said Olbermann's suspension highlighted the differences between her network and Fox News.
"Let this incident lay to rest forever the facile, never-true-anyway, bull-pucky, lazy conflation of Fox News and what the rest of us do for a living," Maddow said. "Hosts on Fox News raise money for Republican candidates. They endorse them explicitly, they use their Fox News profile to headline fundraisers. . . . We are a news operation, and the rules around here are part of how you know that."
Maddow's half right. Years ago, MSNBC pretty much was a straight-news operation. But as MSNBC execs witnessed the ascent of Fox News and the corresponding decline of CNN, they figured that if they didn't want to end up in the ratings dumpster, they'd better take a page from the Fox News playbook.
In other words, MSNBC didn't hire partisans like Olbermann and Maddow in order to be a better news operation; it hired them to pump up the ratings. And in the end, ratings matter more than politics in the overheated world of cable news.
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Comments
Tony,
I watched Fox on election night and they did not have Beck on at all and the rolls of O’Reilly and Hannity were kept to a minimum, as they should have been.
Most of the newscast were Bret Beir and Megyn Kelly, no more conservative than I was at AP, and you may recall my best buddies were Dems such as Bill Bulger.
Tony
As Fox is the most trusted TV news source in the country, it is hardly surprising that the right did so well in the past election. Part of Fox’s conservative agenda is to keep the country ignorant about global warming and climate change (both terms are rarely heard).
I think that it is fine to have partisan commentators, but when they pose as reporters, they do a disservice to democracy.
Johnny Mac