Very simpleIt's time for a little tough love. MSNBC must be made to understand who the customers are and to remember that the customer is always right.
1. Stop watching MSNBC until he's reinstated.
2. Find the pro KO petitions and sign them
3. Find every venue to badmouth MSNBC management.
4. Remember this is not about KO, it is about whether or not the left will have a media outlet that is honest or just another elitist propaganda machine that wants our support but stabs us in the back.(That sound like some other liberal organization we frequently write about?)
5. There is nothing in their employee rules that called for the nuclear option, so Phuque them!
Shortly after which, I posted this email action alert from BoldProgressives.org:
BREAKING:?MSNBC has suspended star anchor Keith Olbermann following the news that he donated to three Democratic candidates this election cycle.Sign our emergency petition to MSNBC. Tell them to put Olbermann back on the air NOW!
Then, pass this to your progressive friends.
Media are writing about this breaking story right now, and our growing petition will display the public outrage. Sign here.
NBC policy does not prohibit employees from donating to political candidates. But?MSNBC president Phil Griffin is miffed that Keith didn't get "prior approval" first. Seriously. His feelings are hurt.
Meanwhile, Republicans Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan also gave political contributions -- but are not suspended. It must only be ok for MSNBC employees to give to Republicans, not Democrats.
The Democratic Party sadly saw this week what happens when you alienate your base.?Tell MSNBC that if they want to keep their viewers, they must put Keith back on the air NOW!?
Then tell your friends.?Thanks for being a bold progressive.
I urge you to take that action, but I'd also suggest you read what I have to say on the flip. And if you haven't seen what Rachel Maddow had to say on her show last night, then check out the clip:
First off, as Jed Lewison explained at DKos, Olbermann, as an MSNBC employee, isn't covered by NBC News standards, quoting John Cook on Gawker as his strongest support:
MSNBC's increasingly left-wing programming and personalities aren't required to abide by NBC News' exacting rules-if they were, it would be a much less bombastic and politically charged network. So while Olbermann's donations may have run counter to the NBC News brand and Griffin's wishes, there doesn't appear to be a chapter-and-verse policy applying to MSNBC employees barring them."The standards department has told us that MSNBC doesn't answer to NBC News standards," the insider said. "They don't have coverage over MSNBC. They used to, back before MSNBC went political, but at some point it became too hard and MSNBC was taken out of their portfolio. As far as I know, there are no ethical standards at MSNBC. And if NBC says MSNBC is supposed to be living up to the NBC News standards, that's a preposterous lie."
So, the outrage is fully justified, and you should definitely take action. This is about political suppression, pure and simple (although there's obviously other factors involved, such as personality, they may be psychologically or dramatically interesting, but they're politically irrelevant). Remember, Markos has been banned from NBC because Joe Scarboro threw a hissy fit. This is part of pattern. And, of course, there was the firing of Phil Donahue prior Olbermann's tenure.
Second, Rachel's taken her usual diplomatic, big-picture approach & turned lemons into lemonade. Makes no diffrence to my first point above. Or my next one.
Third, there's no actual moral reason behind NBC's standards. Back in the 19th Century, virtually all media was partisan. What changed that was the growth of advertising. As it came to surpass subscriptions as a revenue source, the business model changed. Newspapers (primarily) and magazines wanted to appeal to the widest possible audience to please their advertisers, and also deliver that audience in a sales-friendly mood. Hence they adopted an "objective" stance and tone that cooled political passions, and delivered a more consumer-minded audience rather than a citizen/activist-minded audience.
In short--this is about business models, not morality or ethics. Indeed, I work for 19th-Century-style advocacy newspaper. And because advocacy is so central to our mission, we are even more concerned to get our facts right. After all, we've got a lot more to lose if we screw up. We damage our credibility in the eyes of all fair-minded people.
As a matter of fact, however, media no longer even aspire to objectivity, having come to realize that it's an unobtainable standard. (Merely choosing to cover one story or issue rather than another is virtually impossible to justify objectively in the vast majority of cases, just to underscore one major problem involved.) Instead, they supposedly strive for "fairness", often identified with providing "both sides", as it every question always has two sides, and they are more or less evenly matched. The media's too dumb to have realized yet that this is just as flawed a model as "objectivity" was. But it allows them to strike a morally superior stance, and that's really all that matters.
By far, the best book on media ethics, with a good deal of historical information in a very slim volume, is Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest by Jeremy Iggers.
Make something good come out of this episode. Read Iggers' book.
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