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Showing posts from November, 2010

What News 'Should' Be

Ted Koppel, a living paragon of news reporting in the last thirty years, wrote a recent op-ed piece lamenting the death of objective journalism in today's media while taking direct stabs at Fox News's Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. His claim was that such modern commentators were purely political partisans designed to feed a profit machine by preaching vehemently to the choir and, for the most part, devoid of actual objective fact and analytical journalism. I have linked the article as well as Keith Olbermann's response on his show to the piece, but I believe this deserves some additional commentary I haven't seen offered yet. Ted Koppel is wrong. But first, a point about the responses by both Olbermann and O'Reilly. Both men responded defensively. They challenged the objectivity of Koppel's work and time, Olbermann pointing out the idealization of objective news simply ignored the reality of the subjective commentary provided during Koppel&