I've said this before and I'll say it again: if you watch cable news actually expecting learn anything, you're even dumber than I otherwise would have given you credit for. That's not to say that there's no reason to watch it, because there is. It's essentially become professional wrestling without the homoerotic undertones and the appearance of reason. And it's awfully entertaining if you're smart enough to know that it isn't real.If you catch a wrestler on an especially honest day, he'll tell you right up front that he knows that he's rapidly destroying his own body for a fast buck. It's all in the name of giving the people what they want. The wrestler's going to die young and live in miserable pain, but he's got bills to pay and a crowd to please. Who else is going to do that? You?
Cable news operates on pretty much the same premise. Everybody in that industry knows that they're crushing their own credibility as professional journalists and rational people, but that's what the people want, and there's gold in them thar hills! In that, there's very little in Ted Koppel's Washington Post editorial from yesterday that can be credibly argued with.
Besides, very few of these people were ever journalists in the first place. The more seasoned of them were opinion columnists, but the really big stars - your Keith Olbermanns, Bill O'Reillys, Glenn Becks and Ed Shultzs - weren't even that. Olbermann covered sports and O'Reilly was Inside Edition's resident starfucker. Hannity, Beck and Shultz are all talk radio vermin, risen from the primordial media where stupidity feeds off of and reinforces itself.
I'm willing to give a little leeway (very little) to people like MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Lawrence O'Donnell, who as retired Capitol Hill and White House staffers, at least have some background in what they're talking about and aren't furthering their own political careers anymore. That can't be said of the half dozen presidential candidates that Fox News currently employs, who are there to get a paycheck, maintain their visibility and further their chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination. Even Karl Rove is running a 527 and advising campaigns on the side. So is Dick Morris.
The only difference between MSNBC and Fox News - and it's a slight difference - is that MSNBC is part of NBC News, which has a history to honor and least some standards to uphold. Fox, on the other hand, has never pretended to be anything other than Wrestlemania.
In the last couple of weeks, Keith Olbermann has managed to erase even that distinction. Even before his political contribution fiasco, he tutt-tutted Jon Stewart for using "false equivalence" in comparing him to Fox and word is that he'll do the same with Ted Koppel tonight. In doing so, and addressing his critics head-on, he's doing little more than lifting a page from the Fox playbook and adopting their persecution complex as his own. If there actually was anyone who thought there was still a difference, they can cut it out now.
Olbermann also has a storied history of committing career suicide that Howard Kurtz reports that he's looking to resume. If the Kurtz piece is even halfway right (and I suspect that it's correct to the last comma), Keith is just proving that he's mentally ill and stupid. Who does he think is going to hire him at this point? CNN certainly isn't going to self-immolate what's left of their reputation and I don't see Mother Jones throwing around $30 million contracts in the near future.
However, Olbermann's done quite well for himself and when he finally gets himself fired, he'll be financially secure as he devotes his golden years to barking at cars. MSNBC will be fine, too. Having built a profitable enterprise around Olbermannism, Phil Griffin is secure in the knowledge that there are at least five younger, dumber and crankier versions of Keith out there waiting for their hero's fall. And they'll work cheap. The original model is nice to keep around as a conversation piece, but hardly essential to the continuing operation of the channel. Besides, Olbermann is thought to spook NBC's new corporate masters at Comcast.
The same is true over at Fox, where they've devoted the last three years making O'Reilly look like the sensible and reasonable one. But if Ol' Bill gets to be too big a pain in the ass, they can dump him, move Beck to eight o'clock and hire someone even crazier, like Mark Levin, for Beck's time slot.
If I were to quibble with anything in Mr. Koppel's editorial, it's that he makes it too much about Olbermann and O'Reilly and takes entirely too long to get to his main point: that this is about money. The dirty little secret about cable news is that pretty much anyone can do it. I'm not sure that Sean Hannity can even read his RNC talking points on his own, but his show has been going strong for nearly a decade now.
No matter what Olbermann or O'Reilly get paid, it's cheap compared what to properly collecting and presenting news costs. And news has become a bottom line business. That's why you're seeing CNN being slowly sucked into the vortex that Fox and MSNBC created fifteen years ago. CNN only resisted this long because of their vast international audience. In the very near future, the broadcast networks will get drawn in, too.
What the current slate of talking heads don't get is that they're going to price themselves out of the market soon. Most of these people come from talk radio, which is really just glorified blogging. And bloggers will work for nothing. Christ, they already do. When the talk radio guys, perennial presidential candidates and consultants get too demanding - and they will - I guarantee you that we'll start seeing bloggers hosting cable news shows. It's just a matter of time. Ever wonder what a flame war would look like on TV? You won't for long.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, I used to hear Republicans endlessly squeal about how biased the news networks were, which was an invention of Spiro Agnew, who practically invented running against the media. That wasn't true then, at least not as much as it is today. It's the basic fact of life now. Everyone has their own niche of news. But there really isn't a news media anymore. The one that exists is being starved to death and no one has really cared enough to notice.
Here's an example of just how much modern cable news has dumbed down everybody that takes it seriously. Sarah Palin has spent the last two years channelling the ghost of Spiro Agnew and running against the "biased lamestream media." And one day last year, for no apparent reason, she resigned as governor and signed a contract with Fox News. But she's still making the same argument. In fact, she makes it even more frequently and more stridently than she did while in office.
There was a time when someone would have noticed that. My younger readers might not remember it, but there was. Seriously, there was a time when movies like Network, Broadcast News and even Anchorman were considered comedies. Today all three are basically documentaries with exceptional production values.
h/t to Far East Cynic
Update: And here's Olbermann, completely missing the point. Also, engaging in 12 minutes of self-reverence and implicitly comparing himself to Cronkite and Murrow, which is laughable at best and a desecration of their memories at worst.
But it's still funny.
Upperdate:I wasn't sure that it was even possible to miss the point more widely than Olbermann did, but Bill O'Reilly never seems to disappoint me. In true O'Reilly fashion, he makes it all about himself and the awesome goodness of Fox News. Bill then reverts to the tried and true standby of challenging Koppel to go on his dopey show. When Ted rightly refuses, O'Reilly declares victory.
Of course, the reactions of both Olbermann and O'Reilly tend to reinforce Koppel's point rather than refute it, but both are just to dumb to see that. Each of them devoted about 15 minutes of their precious airtime preening instead of presenting actual news.
Case closed.
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