Keith Olbermann Suspended Indefinitely After Political Contributions

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Corkey

I miss Cronkite. Keith isn't even trying to hide his bias, neither is Maddow for that matter, not a one of them are unbiased. The days of the pure news for the sake of information based on facts and not obedient to any party are long gone.
That said, I can figure out Maddow, and her humor is quite contagious, I don't get my news strictly from MSNBC.
The point of MSNBC as I've seen it, is as a news magazine, not unbiased not always exactly truthful. More than faux news but less than BBC or NPR.
So is he a private citizen contributing to a party and specific candidates on his dime, or do we hold him above the rest of the "journalists" who get to give and still pontificate?
MSNBC has a policy in place, he violated that policy, he is suspended for that violation. Should he loose his job? Not if he learned he is to follow policy his employers set out. Or he can go to talk radio and have his say and paycheck too.

It was interesting. A couple of years ago, when BBC America started doing a nightly, hour-long newscast (which is now, sadly, down to half an hour) I was watching with my wife and she made a comment about how *different* it was. She's a decade my junior and so doesn't *remember* what TV journalism used to be--a sober, fact-driven affair. To her, it has *always* been CNN and FOX. The sight of an anchor soberly sitting at his desk and stories that lasted 5 - 10 minutes was completely and utterly foreign to her.

I remember the very end of Cronkite's tenure with CBS. I still remember Frank Reynolds at ABC, when Max Robinson looked like he was going to be the first black anchor of a major American nightly news broadcast and when missing 60 Minutes meant you missed the most important hour of news for the week. I miss that media environment. It wasn't perfect. It did manage to be informative and it seemed to delight in NOT toadying up to power overly much.

Cheers
Aj

Cheers
Aj