This is Countdown

This is Countdown

This is Countdown; the third day since Keith Olbermann has been suspended indefinitely by MSNBC.
Olbermann got caught by Politico, in a story published late last week, donating the maximum amount of 2,400 dollars to three different Democratic candidates. Shortly thereafter, by midday on Friday, it was announced that Olbermann had been indefinitely suspended without pay from MSNBC. The resulting internet uproar was deafening. Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an irate entry for The Huffington Post, demanding MSNBC return Olbermann; his sentiments were echoed by journalists and talking heads, liberals and conservatives alike.

NBC news policy prohibits journalists from donating to political campaigns. The policy- at least insofar as the public knows- was never officially extended to the whole of MSNBC, though insiders claim that the policy was understood to apply to the network.
This sort of policy is put in place to ensure the public non-opinion, transparency, and lack of conflicts of interest of journalists. It is arguable that straight-news reporters ought not to donate to political campaigns (though they should not be either explicitly or implicitly banned from doing so), but one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes Olbermann is a straight-news reporter. Olbermann's biases are clear, well-publicized, and completely disclosed. Is anyone surprised that Olbermann donated to Democratic candidates? Not really.
Perhaps Rachel Maddow put it best on her Friday, November 5 show:

I understand the rule. I understand what it means to break it. I believe everyone should face the same treatment under that rule. I also personally believe that the point has been made and we should have Keith back hosting Countdown.
Here's the larger point, though, that's going mysteriously missing from the right-wing cackling and old media cluck-cluck-clucking: I know everyone likes to say, "Oh, cable news, it's all the same. Fox and MSNBC -- mirror images of each other. But if you look at the long history of Fox hosts not just giving money to candidates, but actively endorsing campaigns and raising millions of dollars for politicians and political parties... They can do that because there's no rule against that at Fox. Their network is run as a political operation. Ours isn't. Yeah, Keith's a liberal, and so am I. But we're not a political operation -- Fox is. We're a news operation. The rules around here are part of how you know that.
Back before it was politically safe to do it, Keith Olbermann attracted the ire of the right-wing and a lot of others besides when he brought to light and raged against what he saw as the errors and sins of the previous presidential administration. Keith was also the one who brought to light Fox News's water-carrying for the Bush Administration; he was the one whose point-of-view journalism exposed and put exclamation points on the problems of disguising a political operation as a news one, the model embraced by the guys across Sixth Avenue, at Fox.
Now, weirdly, it is Keith who is once again illustrating the difference between what he does at MSNBC -- what we do here -- and what goes on across the street.

Over the weekend, over 250000 people signed a major online petition for Olbermann to return. Well, the petition worked. Olbermann's suspension has been lifted, starting with tonight's show. It's a little incongruous for the network executives at MSNBC to suspend Olbermann on principle of the rule and to return him this quickly, but his ratings power makes it unsurprising.
Here's the other piece of Olbermann's suspension: he's not the only one who donated. Joe Scarborough, host of 'Morning Joe', donated at least 9,000 dollars to Republican candidates in recent elections. Apparently, though, Scarborough asked the network for permission first. And as you may note, Scarborough is still on the air.

[Photo credit: The Huffington Post]

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What Happened to Muckraking?

What Happened to Muckraking?

At the turn of the twentieth century, journalists in America began to reassess their role as a check on the federal and state government. Reporters who once wrote straight news were rapidly evolving into investigative journalists, and corruption in American governments was starved of power by this new, nosier version of journalism. Starting in the early 1920s, the work of these investigative journalists began to have a measurable impact on Americans, if not the impact they assumed their work would have.
Upton Sinclair, who was privy to the disgusting standards of living of immigrants in the early 1900s, wrote The Jungle in effort to raise the overall humanity of these worker's lives and to minimize the impact political corruption had on their voting. However, the horrifying conditions in meat packing factories detailed in Sinclair's story disgusted Americans. Resultantly, the Food and Drug Administration was created (FDA), and the struggling immigrants were left behind for years later. Sinclair's work was the symbol of early twentieth century 'muckraking'- a term used for those who were willing to sift through America's dirt to expose social or political injustice.
Later in the century, The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were assigned to what originally seemed a simple break-in story at the Watergate Hotel. Quickly after the arrest of the men involved, the mundane crime mutated into a series of investigative pieces that led to the indictment and resignation of former President Richard Nixon, changing the way Americans look at the role of reporters and the purpose of transparency in political affairs forever.
These men were the American media at its best. The true purpose of the press- beyond simply providing information for all Americans- is to act as the people's check on the government. The media is average Americans' eyes and ears; the reporters go the places the constituants cannot.
So where are the muckrakers today? In 2010, there are plenty of reporters and political commentators trying to stir up dirt (because, after all, dirt is what sells papers), but how many of them are actually muckraking, actually exposing social injustice?
Very few reporters truly expose injustices today, mostly due to the extremely small range of topics that are featured on mainstream news shows and in popular papers. The Rachel Maddow Show, however, often produces stories that are under-reported on and presents them in a muckraking-like way that focuses on the injustices being occurred. Still, even such an investigative program is unable to go all the way for these human-rights pieces, which are often reduced to short features directly before or after a commercial break. Other programs that attempt to muckrake almost always fall into a yellow-journalism trap, sensationalizing any bit of kicked up dirt in the name of scandal.
Muckrakers are rare, but the practice must be preserved if the press is to continue to carry out its most important role: that of a check on power, a noose for corruption.

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Quote 3/10/10

Quote 3/10/10

Christopher Hayes 

"[S]anity has, tentatively, provisionally prevailed."

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Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

It is so basically against the American political ideals of honesty and transparency to ask someone who devotes their life to serving our country to lie about who they are from the day they begin to serve. Not only is it morally wrong to force a soldier to lie, even as they take on an oath swearing honesty, but it is detrimental to the armed forces to limit who can serve to people who fit the extraordinarily limited ‘traditional’ definition of who should serve be allowed in the military.

Lt. Dan Choi, who is fluent in Arabic, was discharged from the military for being gay after an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show where he came out. The skills and experience Choi brought to the armed forces were vital, and without loyal, patriotic, and talented people like Choi, our military will crumble.

The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy made some sense in the early nineties, when the social climate in America was decisively anti-homosexual, and the military is, in general, more conservative in its policies than mainstream America. However, although it may not be true for everyone, America is becoming more tolerant and accepting. It is time to change an old policy that weakens our military, divides our troops, and causes our soldiers to lie.

Regardless of how you feel about gay rights, it is not good for the military to lose qualified service members because of social differences. 

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What's Wrong With Congress Today: Part One: Lack of Voting/Action Consistency

What's Wrong With Congress Today: Part One: Lack of Voting/Action Consistency

Sunday on Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Representative Aaron Schock (R-Il) confronted over comments made by Maddow saying Schock had voted against the Obama stimulus bill and yet had shown up for an event in his district for a stimulus-funded project, and had, quite literally, held up the giant stimulus check. Similarly, many moderate Democratic and Republican congressmen have been vocally supportive of health care reform and positive about its implications while talking to constituants but did not provide the votes to back up their sentiments.

You see this sort of voting hypocrisy rampantly in Washington- no one wants to take the risk of voting for a politically charged bill, especially when the bill is against their party norm, but everyone wants to reap the benefits for constituants. It is the responsibility of elected officials to stand by their votes, decisions, and opinions. If a congressman in against the bill while the vote is taken, he or she should not be able to be applauded by voters for its benefits. By acting as though he or she is in favor of the bill, their constituency is being misled.


Without support for beneficial but contentious bills that may be against the ideals of one of the parties, and with the current Senate filibuster rules, no politically risky legislation will be able to be passed by Congress. Congressmen who wish to benefit politically from bills have to vote for them.

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Quote 2/15/10

Quote 2/15/10

Rachel Maddow 

"We don't really treat gay issues differently than other issues ... I can't do the show as a non-gay person. I don't have that option."

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Quote 1/13/10

Quote 1/13/10

Rachel Maddow

“Sometimes we choose to serve our country in uniform, in war.  Sometimes in elected office. And those are the ways of serving our country that I think we are trained to easily call heroic. It’s also a service to your country, I think, to teach poetry in the prisons, to be an incredibly dedicated student of dance, to fight for funding music and arts education in the schools.  A country without an expectation of minimal artistic literacy, without a basic structure by which the artists among us can be awakened and given the choice of following their talents and a way to get to be great at what they do, is a country that is not actually as great as it could be.  And a country without the capacity to nurture artistic greatness is not being a great country.   It is a service to our country, and sometimes it is heroic service to our country, to fight for the United States of America to have the capacity to nurture artistic greatness.”

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Quote 12/28/09

Quote 12/28/09

Anna Marie Cox 

"[Sarah Palin is] interested in being as big a celebrity as she can."

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Quote 11/30/09

Quote 11/30/09

Rachel Maddow

"Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we believe don't have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent we believe they call on our best, not our worst."

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