Keith Olbermann Suspended Indefinitely After Political Contributions

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by LipstickLola

I believe that delivery is everything. If news organizations are going to denigrate the facts, in order to "appeal" to a wider, non-thinking audience, then I will simply choose another source for information. The snarky, belittling comments are not necessary, IMO, to deliver the news for an audience of people who want facts and unbiased information. MSNBC seems to be wanting a piece of the Fox pie of late, it is not working, they know it, they've set out to change it!

What do you do when the people you are interviewing have no concern for the facts? How do you deal with that? If someone says "if we cut taxes, we'll reduce the deficit" and you know that this statement cannot be true because it defies any mathematical or economic logic, what do you do? Is that not a denigration of facts--to present as true something that not only is not true but cannot, by definition, *be* true? What if, when you ask a follow-up question, the person just goes back to saying "tax cuts will reduce the deficit"? So you press on and ask, again, how precisely will tax cuts reduce the deficit. The person again insists that math does not work the way that people believe that it does or that economic theory somehow has it that the fewer tax revenues you take in, the more money the government will have?

I understand what you are saying but that doesn't change the fact that we have one political party that has become completely unmoored from reality. Climate change IS happening. Evolution DID happen. Minority home buyers did NOT bring down the financial system. Barack Obama WAS born in Hawaii and Hawaii WAS at the time of his birth, part of the United States. If you are currently $10 trillion in the hole, reducing tax revenues by $750 billion does not mean that you are suddenly only $9.25 trillion in the hole. Yet one party espouses ALL of those things. They pay no penalty for espousing things that are demonstrably untrue. There are no negative consequences--at least not for them and not immediately--for espousing things that are untrue. Yet these very untruths have *real* policy consequences and thus have an actual impact on our society.

How do you do what you are saying should be done in order to keep your viewing loyalty while ALSO recognizing that one's job as a journalistic outfit is to get actual information out there?