Greg Mitchell, of Editor and Publisher mag, looks askance at Keith Olbermann's open advocacy of Obama, which has now reached the point where Olbermann has taken to flyspecking reporters' copy and hectoring them about it on national TV. As Mitchell puts it in his lede:
In an unusually heated attack on a veteran political reporter by a cable news host, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann laced into the Associated Press's Charles Babington an hour after Barack Obama had concluded his speech in Denver on Thursday night.
There's nothing wrong with press criticism, of course--The Cable Gamer has been known to indulge in such--but there is something wrong with open advocacy for one candidate on a "news" network.
And there is REALLY something wrong with being a bully. Here's how Olbermann closed his tirade:
"Charles Babington, find a new line of work."
If I were Babington, I would be more than a little afraid that the lefty netroots would come after me somehow. (And the great Cable Gamer Johnny Dollar, over at Olbermann Watch, demonstrates that Olbermann got his script from none other than Daily Kos.)
In other words, the Olbermann-Kos Komplex is working hand-in-glove to intimidate ordinary reporters.
This is not good.
And so one has to ask: Is this good for Olbermann's employers? Do they really want a Kos-sack on their payroll.
Forget MSNBC, we know about them. But what about parent-company NBC, and grandparent GE? Is this the sort of atmosphere of intimidation that they wish to pay for?
Maybe what Olbermann is doing is protected by free speech--although bullyboy tactics are not so protected--but there is still the potential Federal Election Commission issue of what are, in effect, in-kind contributions from MSNBC to the Obama campaign. (Where are the smart conservative lawyers?)
And also, more broadly, do the GE shareholders really want to subsidize these nasty tactics with their money?
And what about advertisers? There might be eyeballs to be found in the Olbermann-Kos strategy, but do big companies really want their products to be associated with the raw partisanship of the O-K Kombine?
As discussed here at TCG in the past, the current course is not sustainable for MSNBC. Olbermann is getting buzz, but he is making too many enemies, and he is too visibly losing his cool for the cool medium of TV.
So if Obama wins, expect Olbermann to be doing something different, something more Washington-oriented, if you get my drift.
