Olbermann Watch keeps getting better and better. It's always been an amusing and provocative website, but now it has become supremely important in the present and future struggle to bring fairness and justice to the media.
Why? Because OW is one of the few sites that keeps track of maybe the most dangerous man in The Cable Game, Keith Olbermann. OK, Olbermann has just a #2-rated TV show in his cable-news slot, but because of all his screaming and defaming has become a hero to the nasty left.
Indeed, TCG thinks that one secret of KO's success is that he says what a lot of MSM reporters wish they could say. But those reporters can't, in their regular day jobs, because their bosses insist on some modicum of fairness and professionalism. But Olbermann has been given a long leash by Dan Abrams and MSNBC, and so is free to be a rabid attack dog against anything in the middle, and everything on the right. That's why so many in the MSM cheer for him--because he speaks for them.
And that's why Olbermann is dangerous, because he is injecting a new degree of irresponsibility ito the media. That's not only on his own show, but across the media: by being so nasty to non-lefties, he is creating more psychic space for others to ape Olbermannite leftism. Isn't that correct, Joe Scarborough? Isn't that correct, Christiane Amanpour?
Olbermann Watch's video compilation reminds a seemingly uninterested America that Olbermann said recently--in the October issue of Playboy, in fact--that Fox News is worse than the Ku Klux Klan, and worse than Al Qaeda. Not everyone has to like FNC, of course, but isn't there some limit to the unfairness of an attack?
Remember the days when liberals used to complain about the "coarsening of the discourse"? Well, maybe, say right-winger G. Gordon Liddy went over the line sometimes, but Liddy never had anywhere near the audience of Olbermann. And Liddy never had such corporate parents as MSNBC/NBCU/GE. Which is to say, Olbermann should be getting some corporate supervision.
But instead, Olbermann is a hero to liberals (even if, as noted, it's not helping his ratings much).
Meanwhile, as a thought experiment, ask yourself this: What if, say, Bill O'Reilly had said that someone he didn't like was worse than the KKK, or worse than Al Qaeda. Can you imagine the outrage? The talk of boycotts? The pressure on advertisers?
If O'Reilly had said those things--but he didn't, of course. Olbermann did. So the media watchdogs and high-minded cultural critics are benignly silent. After all, Olbermann is trashing someone one Fox. And that's not only not to be criticized, it's to be admired.
Eventually, Olbermann will get his comeuppance. Drunk with his own indiscipline, and in love with his own egomaniacal vocabulary, Olbermann will eventually go too far, because it's obvious that KO isn't really a true liberal. Instead, he is a true hater--a truly angry man.
And so when Olbermann blows too hard, there'll be a crisis for MSNBC, and NBC, and GE. And that's when Jeff Zucker and Jeff Immelt will have to get involved--and probably get rid of Olbermann--to cut off additional embarassment.
At which point, Olbermann Watch will be remembered and honored for its painstaking accounting of all of Olbermann's excesses.
