Obermann Suspension: TV Journalism Test

07 November 2010 |permalink | email article

The backlash against NBC’s decision Friday to indefinitely suspend Keith Olbermann without pay because his employer, MSNBC, discovered he made contributions to three Democrats last month has created a justifiable firestorm not only among media personalities, reporters but even conservative pundits.

Bill Kristol, the longtime respected conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, penned a blog post under the title “Keep Keith!” extolling MSNBC for muzzling someone whose ideological leanings are fairly self-evident.

At the other extreme left-leaning Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent, called the suspension “outrageous,” adding, “This is a real threat to political discourse in America and will have a chilling impact on every commentator for MSNBC.”

That, of course, is not a problem at Fox News where host Sean Hannity gave $5,000 to the political action committee of conservative hero Rep. Michele Bachmann, R. Minn., in August and his wife, Jill, gave another $5,000. Interviewing Bachmann this summer, he called her the second most loved Republican woman (after Sarah Palin). Nobody at FoX was disturbed when Hannity was the keynote speaker earlier this year at the annual fund raising dinner of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

As Huffington Post pointed out, Olbermann may have violated NBC News “policy and standards.” But NBC doesn’t have real news standards for MSNBC – otherwise the channel wouldn’t exist. “But now there’s a Republican House, and perhaps GE may be trying to curry favor by dumping Olbermann?”

This past September the Center for Responsible Politics produced a study showing that “235 people who identified themselves on government documents as journalists, or as working for news organizations, who together have donated more than $469,900 to federal political candidates.”     

I’m no fan of Howard Kurtz, the controversial Washington Post media writer and host of CNN’s Reliable Sources who recently jumped to The Daily Beast. He thinks Olbermann is a hypocrite and ought to apologize because he has used the issue of political donations to flay Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s donation of a million dollars each to the Republican Governors Association and the GOP-backed U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Olbermann committed an ethical lapse, a pardonable venial sin. What’s that compared to the overt bias of Fox News and its loopy contributors?

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