And there was much rejoicing:
STATEMENT REGARDING KEITH OLBERMANN – SUNDAY, NOV. 7
From Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC:
After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night’s program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy. We look forward to having him back on the air Tuesday night.
I imagine that Keith’s ratings will be through the roof for the next few days.
First, I have to put my cat to sleep, and now Keith Olbermann has been suspended by MSNBC for making campaign contributions:
Keith Olbermann, the pre-eminent liberal voice on American television, was suspended Friday after his employer, MSNBC, discovered that he made campaign contributions to three Democrats last month.
The indefinite suspension was a stark display of the clash between objective journalism and opinion journalism on television.
Many prominent liberals and conservatives immediately called on MSNBC to reinstate Mr. Olbermann, who is usually outspoken but who had no comment on his suspension Friday.
The contributions came to light in an article by Politico Friday morning. Mr. Olbermann acknowledged in a statement that last month he donated $2,400 to the campaigns of Representatives Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and Attorney General Jack Conway of Kentucky, who lost his Senate race to Rand Paul.
I think that this is a stupid standard to hold straight journalists to, much less someone who is clearly an talking-head opinion type.
In the article, there is a suggestion that this is an attempt to make brand differentiation with Fox, where, for example, Hannity gave to Michelle “I used to be the nuttiest person in Congress, but the elections moved the bar” Bachmann, but I don’t live in media executives heads, nor would I ever want to.
It does appear that Keith will be back at some point in the not to distant future, though.
H/t DC at the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS.
When one looks at the craziness out there, why is it that Christine O’Donnell appears to get the lion’s share of the attention?
Well Matthew Yglesias has a good explanation:
That’s true, but I think there’s more in play, namely logistics. The Alaska Senate race should be excellent copy. Joe Miller is nuts, Scott McAdams is fascinatingly amateurish, the Palin-Murkowski feud is interesting, everyone likes to talk about Sarah Palin, etc. But Alaska is also cold and remote. Sending a reporter there would be expensive and annoying. The time zones are inconvenient. By contrast, Wilmington is a 2 hour drive or 90 minute train ride from both Washington, DC and New York City. So if you want to get some “real reporting” done it’s convenient. And logistics count in life.
I would note that even some place less remote, like Angle in Nevada, or Paladino in New York, or McMahon in Connecticut, they were also much less willing to expose themselves to the press.
Basically, if you wanted to cover “the crazy,” it was easier, and cheaper, to cover Ms. O’Donnell.
I haven’t had time, or the inclination, though I have read excerpts.
The excerpts do not impress me, but then again, I’m not in the “Impressed by Barack Obama,” demographics, and and have not been since late 2007 (scroll down). I held my nose to vote for him in the general in 2008.
I just don’t feel any need to see it, though I probably will when the election passes.
Call it my own ‘enthusiasm gap’.
The Federal Reserve has decided not to appeal the decision of the Federal Courts to turn over information on its sh%$pile for cash loans to Bloomberg News:
The Federal Reserve won’t join a group of the largest commercial banks in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to let the government withhold details of emergency loans made to financial firms in 2008.
The central bank’s decision not to appeal makes it less likely the high court will hear the case, said Tom Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who has argued 22 cases before the high court since 1999 and whose Scotusblog website tracks the panel.
The Clearing House Association LLC, a group of the biggest commercial banks, filed the appeal today. Under federal rules for appeals, a lower court’s order requiring disclosure remains on hold until the Supreme Court acts. Kit Wheatley, an attorney for the Fed, confirmed that the central bank won’t join the appeal. David Skidmore, a spokesman for the central bank, did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment.
The bank group is appealing a federal judge’s August 2009 ruling requiring the Fed to disclose records of its emergency lending. Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, sued for the release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Obviously, the Supreme Court could still decide to hear the case, but the Fed pulling out indicates that they no longer see this sort of disclosure as a systemic threat, which in turn makes it less likely that SCOTUS will take up the case.
I think that it is now a question of “when” not “if” the data gets released, and I think that it should prove to be very interesting.
Background here.
This really does encapsulate Washington, DC, or at least the White and Federal part of the District:
When you can read an entire column by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and never once feel the urge to cut out your own heart with a dull knife, you know that you no longer have the sense of outrage that is essential to reporting from our nation’s capital.
–Now former Washington, DC editor for Harpers Ken Silverstein, explaining why, though he will still write for the publication, he can no longer be their Washington Editor.
Basically, he has realized that if you don’t go native, you will go insane, and Mr. Silverstein has chosen to get out of Dodge.
He notes how little that things have changed:
I moved to Washington in 1993, when a young, new Democratic president replaced George Bush and promised to reform politics and be a transformative leader. Backed by huge majorities in Congress and with public opinion squarely in his corner, he had the opportunity to shake things up and change American politics. Instead, he and his party squandered their chance through timidity, weak leadership, a lack of any original ideas and their refusal to confront special interest groups.
Here we are seventeen years later and there’s a young, new Democratic president who replaced George Bush and promised to reform politics and be a transformative leader. Backed by huge majorities in Congress….
Well, by now you can probably guess where this is heading.
I also appreciate his observation that, “The [Obama Health Care] bill is widely unpopular, and not only because of the hyperbolic attacks on it by Republicans and Fox News. It’s unpopular because it’s a terrible piece of legislation.”
He will be working for a foundation doing long form journalism.
Go read his swan song. It’s a great piece of work.
He was an old school journalist, though I best remember him for his curmudgeonly defense of the English language from those who would debase the tongue.
I am referring, of course to The Daily Show, who follows the advice of Fox News®, and follows the money supporting the 51 Park development in Manhattan, which leads to Alwaleed bin Talal, who is the single largest largest non Murdoch investor in Fox News.
As to the dispute, whether Fox is stupid or evil, I think that evil and stupidity is orthogonal.
Courtesy of Wikileaks, which received something on the order of 90,000 US documents about Afghanistan, pretty much the whole of military logs from January 2004 until December 2009, which it then released to the New York Times, der Speigel, and The Guardian, some weeks ago, and has now made publicly available on their site.
Much like the Pentagon Papers, the revelations this far are also generally known:
These are all well known facts, though these have not been presented in US government documents before, which is also much like the Pentagon Papers.
Needless to say, the Obama White House, notwithstanding its promises for more openness has gone full throated in its denunciation of the release of data, saying that the release of the documents could, “could endanger lives and U.S. security,” even though the facts are so well known that even I have blogged about most of them.
There is no danger to any lives or US security, but it does make it more difficult for Barack Obama to prosecute this deepening fiasco, he will see increasing push-back from his own party on this, and this likely seen as a serious political, threat: It is clear that Obama is terrified of being cast as a peacenik in the 2012 elections.
He was a hell of a reporter, and I always envied the fact that he made Nixon’s enemies list.
We have two videos here, the first is Olbermann’s special comment, which is good, but, as I said last night, not as good as he has been, and then we have Maddow’s clear and convincing demonstration about how the right wing media in general, and Fox in particular, play the game of, “find the big scary black man,” for political advantage.
I prefer Rachel’s approach and delivery.
That being said, they are both good segments, and well worth spending the 10-15 minutes each segment runs.
I’m not suggesting that he is a bad journalist, but rather that is s frequently a square peg in Fox News’s round holes, as was the case over the past few days when he pointedly did not become a part of the baying pack of Foxholes.
I imagine that he must feel some days a lot like Oskar Schindler must have felt.*
In any case, here is a video of Mr. Smith saying that, “we did not and do not trust the source,” referring to professional bigot Andrew Breitbart.
H/t TPM.
*Yes, I know, Godwin’s Law.
I think that invoking L’Affaire Dreyfus was a bit over the top.
His refrain on Obama is that his administration is ill serving him, which IMNSHO, is profoundly is wrong.
As I am wont to say, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
Still, Keith’s advice to stop making nice is the right one, and his invoking the line from The American President, you know, the one that goes, “I was so busy keeping my job I forgot to do my job,” was a good bit.
But it doesn’t get my blood pumping like the older stuff, and I’m not sure if he’s changed, or I have, or maybe the times have changed. I don’t know which.
As much as I rag on the Washington Post, there is some reporting of real value amongst the dross, including Dana Priest, who, along with William M. Arkin, have published an extensive investigative report on the burgeoning world of the American security-industrial complex:
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
Basically it points to a picture of a state security apparatus run amuck, where there are so many players, generating so much analysis, from so many sources, that it is impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, or as Glenn Greenwald notes:
So it isn’t that we keep sacrificing our privacy to an always-growing National Security State in exchange for greater security. The opposite is true: we keep sacrificing our privacy to the always-growing National Security State in exchange for less security.
(emphasis original)
More than ever, we need to ensrhine into the constitution something analogous to the the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness), because right now all that our paranoia is generating is a massive trail of profiteers/contractors without generating much in the way of security.
It should be noted that reigning in this will not be easy. You can be sure that when the budgets are in jeopardy, the various wings of the state security apparatus will come up with scary stories to subvert any effort at real reform, and the current administration is terrified of being labeled, “soft on fillintheblank,” so they do not have the inclination to even bend the curve.
I’ll be going through the story, and the supporting material, to see if I have anything to add.
My official 40 Years in the Desert list of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off, that is.
I really can’t do justice to his latest blog post, “Lara Logan, You Suck,” In response to her pandering to her sources by publicly stating that the job of a reporter is to kiss senior officer’s butts, so just go and read it.
This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.
For those of you whodon’t know, the preceedings was written by Dave Weigel on the private (and now shuttered) JournOlist listserv, and was subsequently leaked to right wing bloggers, leading to his resignation from his position at the Washington Post as their blogger covering the right wing movement.
It should be noted that a number of prominent conservatives have come to his defense.
I cannot speak to the ethics of leaking information from a private listserv, after all we see a lot of leaked private emails when the media covers other industries, but I think that whoever did this was a dick, though they might be an ethical dick.*
Needless to say, it all that the Washington, DC professional blogosphere is talking about right now, to which my response is to go back to covering the damn news.
BTW, if you read the Washington Post Ombudsman’s article on this, which is basically a plea to conservatives to like them, you will understand why you should not subscribe to the paper.
*Come to think of it, “Ethical Dick” is a should be a synonym for “good reporter.”
This time, he’s angry at the press, Fox, or rather the idiotic Gretchen Carlson, in particular, but the press as a whole, over their coverage of the McChrystal affair.
He notices that everyone in the MSM is stunned and amazed that Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings was willing to piss off someone by doing his job, and thus not have him as a source again.
You see, a lot of bad reporting is driven by the fact that reporters have their tongues so far up well connected sources asses that they can taste tonsil, and it makes the mainstream media resemble a protection racket.
H/t the inner walls, aka my hairy barbarian elder brother, who dryly observes, “What a concept, doing the job comes first, careerism later.”
When U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, a Reagan appointee, struck down the Obama administration 6-month moratorium on deep water drilling, I kind of figured that I would hear stories about appeals.
It turns out that the story about his decision is all about the judges investments in a number of energy companies, including Transocean, operator of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig:
U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, a 1983 appointee of President Ronald Reagan, reported owning less than $15,000 in stock in 2008 in Transocean, the company that owned the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
………
Feldman’s 2008 financial disclosure report — the most recent available — also showed investments in Ocean Energy, a Houston-based company, as well as Quicksilver Resources, Prospect Energy, Peabody Energy, Halliburton, Pengrowth Energy Trust, Atlas Energy Resources, Parker Drilling and others. Halliburton was also involved in the doomed Deepwater Horizon project.
I am stunned.
Not by a judge ruling in a case where the appearance of a conflict of interest is clear, after all, the moratorium might expose both Halliburton and Transocean but rather that someone in the mainstream media actually checked out his disclosure forms, and that it actually is now all over the place.
Props to the MSM.
Helen Thomas has resigned as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.
In an interview, she said:
Thomas remarked in video posted to RabbiLive.com that Jews in Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else.”
Thomas has never made a secret of her Lebanese-American background, and I think that anyone with a bit of skin in this game, myself included, can be a bit nuts, but the statement here is wrong on a number of levels:
Needless to say, while I respect Thomas’ contributions to journalism, I do not appreciate when anyone sounds like Meir Kahane.†
I’ll miss her at press conferences
The tragedy is that Pat Buchanan still has a job.
(on edit)
I think that a refreshing bit of perspective comes from [url=http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/helen-thomas-affair]Kevin Drum[/url]:
Helen Thomas is retiring. Thank God. On a substantive level, this is a good thing. Her remarks about Israel were obviously odious and she’s doing everyone a favor by stepping down. Equally important, though, maybe this means we don’t have to spend the next week listening to every windbag in the country rant on about Thomas’s remarks, using them as an excuse to grind every axe ever invented and suck media attention away from actually important stories. Of which, you might have noticed, we have quite a few these days.
Say what you will about Thomas, she really was never a part of the pundit class.
* They are generally referred to as Sephardic, but this is a misnomer, as Sephardic Jews trace their origins back to the Iberian peninsula. Jews from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, India, etc. are more accurately referred to as “oriental” Jews.
†Let me google that for you.
I think Woodward’s capitulation to interviewing people in limousines, as opposed to people on the subway, is something I feel is partly responsible for the fact that we ended up in Iraq. Because so many reporters, Judith Miller is the most egregious of them, spoke to Scooter Libby and some other higher officials, and never spoke to intelligence people on the ground. They swallowed wholesale Colin Powell at the U.N., and [ultimately] their limousine reporting meant that 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives. I don’t think anything can be so neatly drawn, but I think in this case it can be neatly drawn.
—Novelist, and former Washington Post reporter Lorraine Adams on her former colleague Bob Woodward
(emphasis mine)
A very succinct indictment of what is wrong with the Washington DC press corps.