A few random thoughts collided when I was pondering the curious case of MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, who was suspended indefinitely without pay from his primetime gig on “Countdown” after the website Politico outed him for making personal contributions to three political campaigns. Doing so was a violation of the policy of MSNBC’s parent, NBC News. That policy has actually been enforced before, when local WNBC-TV news anchor Chuck Scarborough was disciplined for making political contributions in the 1990′s.
Late Friday night, I was pondering the fallout from the story while consuming an adult beverage (in the privacy of my home mind you) and I began reading the label on the bottle of said beverage. I guess I hadn’t realized that such labels now are akin to cigarette packages, at least in terms of the number of health warnings and disclaimers that are required to be displayed. Along with the details of ingredients and other “consumer” information, all designed–one would suppose–to make me, as the late Sy Syms always like to put it, “an educated consumer.”
There have been the more-than-slightly-predictable reactions to Olbermann’s suspension. Conservative-types have expressed hyperbolic outrage or all knowing declarations that the journalism practiced by MSNBC was far less pure-reliable-fair and/or balanced than that of their beloved Fox News Channel. Liberals quickly shot back that Fox doesn’t even have such standards and pointed out that Fox actually encourages the likes of it’s staff including O’Reilly, Hannity, VanSusteren, etc., to support political campaigns.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow went so far as to say on her own show about the cable network that she and Olbermann both appear on: “We are not a political operation. Fox is. We are a news operation. And the rules around here are part of how you know that.”
With apologies to Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for “The American President”–Thank goodness she cleared that up, because that MSNBC audience was about to buy some Amway products.
Which brings us back to my point about labels. Because I’ve always found the labels on Amway products a bit odd. Amway has brushed up against government regulators on occasions in the past, regarding health claims made about its nutrition products. So like many products that may or may not have some actual health benefits to the user, these products are called “nutritional supplements”, which gets them out of the direct purview of the pesky Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which tends to take a dim view of products that claim to magically improve your life, looks and pursuit of happiness.
And so it is my humble opinion that it seems to be high time for some truth in labels for the “24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator” as Jon Stewart so eloquently described our nation’s 24-hour cable television news-opinion complex.
Because the claims on the whole “news” label are getting as questionable to a skeptical public as Geritol’s claims in the 1950′s about fixing “iron poor blood”.
The problem is that the 24-hour news business is a monster that is truly never full. (Having founded and built a few of these operations on a smaller, local scale–I know this on a first-hand basis.) Unlike journalism of past eras which first had days, and then hours to get a story reported, checked, edited and proofread–all before being released to the public–the arrival of the non-stop news machine some three decades ago in a former country club in Atlanta collapsed the all mighty deadline to a matter of minutes.
And now the internet has changed even that to a matter of seconds.
Give Ted Turner, Reese Schonfeld, and the team they assembled back then their due. The early effort of the Cable News Network was often decried as the “Chicken Noodle Network” because aside from being a struggling start-up, the realization that “the news never stops” also means there was a lot of repeating of the same news stories, over and over.
So along the way, some commentary, opinion and talking heads were added to the mix. But CNN stayed pretty true to the course of being first and foremost a news organization that plied its trade while maintaining some semblance of objectivity and impartial practice of the journalistic craft. Over time and with the arrival of the first Gulf War in 1991, CNN came of age and became a successful media giant.
Five years later, Austrialian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch would tap Roger Ailes to create another 24-hour news channel for cable television, the Fox News Channel. The genius (either true or evil, depending on your own political viewpoint) that Ailes brought to the start-up was rooted in his career that began in television (as producer of The Mike Douglas Show), moved to political media consulting (mostly for Republicans), and then transitioned back to television (bringing radio’s Rush Limbaugh before the cameras and running a 24-hour talk show cable channel called America’s Talking.)
This led Ailes to deftly mix news and opinion across a 24-hour platform to present a populist view on world and national events that would resonate with an audience willing to accept Fox’s “fair and balanced” sloganeering as a reaffirmation of their own conservative views. Fox’s undeniable success would change the 24-hour cable news landscape forever.
In the same year Fox News Channel was born, Microsoft and NBC had teamed up to create their own vision of the 24-hour news outlet with MSNBC. The idea of having two preeminent names in online and on-air media combine to create a new news organization was impressive, but it wasn’t an overnight success. Only in the past few years as MSNBC’s television efforts have taken on the role of being the political counterbalance to the left of Fox’s right-leaning point of view, has MSNBC found more relevance. And profits.
This “lean forward” (as the channel now bills it) followed the success the channel experienced when anchor Olbermann stepped out of the role of being simply a news anchorman to being a news anchor who also espoused his own opinions, most notably about the presidency of George W. Bush. Given his long career in sports journalism, where opinion and commentary are more easily accepted and indeed expected–Olbermann’s transition was not a difficult one.
Returning to the present day, where the hand-wringing and grenade throwing over L’affaire du Olbermann s now the curious political fodder to fill the previously mentioned 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator called out in Stewart’s “Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear” of just a week ago. In a curious reaction to Stewart’s own impassioned “can’t we all just get along” themed speech, Olbermann went after Stewart, first via Twitter and then on his own “Countdown” show, for creating a “false equivalency” between all cable television news channels.
Which brings us up to date and to the bigger point. Jon Stewart was right, all of the cable television news channels are more or less the same with differences only in tone and viewpoint. But their blurring of lines between what once was called “hard news” and the opinion-editorial page has become so accepted and successful that finding the news in a so-called “news” channel is roughly the same exercise as trying to find a rib in a McDonald’s McRIB sandwich.
To be clear, its my personal position that Olbermann (whom I do not know personally and have never met) deserves to be on the air as much as his long standing archenemy O’Reilly. Both are clearly thoughtful men who I’ve followed since both worked on local television stations in Boston. Both seek to inform and yes, entertain the public with their respective presentations and points of view. And both make a pretty decent living doing so.
But it’s high time to stop calling either of them–or their respective outlets–as being in the news business.
Because pretty soon, if you want to be in the news business, you’ll have to put a label on your product disclosing how much actual news is in it. And then we’ll need one of those omnipresent “Consumer Information” boxes with percentages of News, Commentary, and Vitamins against the “daily recommended amount” is actually contained within.
And nobody asked me, but it is probably time for NBC to think about giving MSNBC a new name, to separate the latter from the former’s more legitimate news division.
After all, Shakespeare had it right when he posed the question, “What’s in a name?”
But it sure would be nice if we knew that we could find some truth in one from time to time.