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As Assange’s defenders multiply, Keith Olbermann finds his truest voice to date

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PATRICE GREANVILLE Dateline December 11, 2010 [print_link]

KEITH OLBERMANN seems to have finally hit his stride. After filing a strong denunciation of Obama in a Special Comment aired Dec. 7, he has now apparently also broken ranks with the rest of the MSNBC hosts in the manner he’s covering the Obama-GOP tax deal (good), and the Julian Assange case clash with the “Masters of the Universe.”  

     It’s worth noting that for far too long Olbermann, along with his colleagues at MSNBC, notably Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, and Rachel Maddow, and more recently Lawrence O’Donnell, confined their scant criticism of Democrats to the party leadership in Congress but did veritable contortions to avoid indicting Obama, the Pink Elephant in the room.  Now, patience exhausted with the nonstop series of betrayals and pathetically inept maneuvers issuing from the White House (or lack thereof, as Obama’s style of governance is definitely pseudo-leadership) this week’s special comment lambasting Obama on the tax deal with the GOP signals that Olbermann has apparently decided to take his chances with the unvarnished truth. No more passes or softballs for Barack Obama. 

     The switch became even clearer on Dec. 10, when Keith dropped the other shoe by coming out straightforwardly on Assange’s side, featuring two supporters of WikiLeaks, Daniel Ellsberg (left), of Pentagon Papers fame, and —of all people—Ron Paul (below), who was shown giving an impassioned and eloquent speech in defense of Assange and the value to the nation and the world of transparency in government, especially when issues of war and peace are on the balance. (See clip above) Like many Libertarians, Paul is firmly against wars and foreign adventures, judging them erroneously (in our view) as products of “corporatism” and not “real capitalism”—whatever that may be. (This is a false distinction common among libertarians, a notion probably stemming from their stubborn ahistoricism—they fail to accept the fact that in time, when left to its own devices, the logic and dynamic of market competition spawns firms that are both oligopolistic in size and multinational in scope of operations, a fact that inevitably ends up involving the capitalist-controlled state to do their bidding. If it sounds familiar it’s because that’s precisely the history of all capitalist evolutions, including our own.)

     True to his stated contempt for “objectivity” (see below) and artificial “balance” when there’s none, Olbermann apparently refused to load the panel of the program’s witnesses and experts with two hacks attacking Assange. The result was not only much better journalism, but a re-energizing event for progressives who have long been ignored, derided, and frequently attacked by mainstream media figures. This was political television at its best. 

Take your objectivity and shove it

The Olbermann assault on American journalistic “objectivity” is amply well taken but unlikely to be imitated any time soon. Careerism makes most media figures toe the line, and “objectivity” remains perhaps one of the most sacred and insidious of cows in the American pantheon of false gods. The ostensible and largely unexamined veneration of “objectivity” among professional journalists, especially the American tribe—a putative ideal that has degenerated into a meaningless mechanical exercise of matching two sets of people with opposing opinions (neither of which may be right)—is as misguided as it is harmful to the interests of democracy, not to mention that it represents under the guise of respectability and “impartiality” a complete abdication of a journalist’s raison d’etre, which is to seek and understand the truth about the world, especially power, and then present it to the public. (See

Olbermann: Stop worshipping false objectivity Gods) . From that perspective alone, Olbermann is on firm ground. 

(Alex Cockburn’s satire of this obtuse and hypocritical ritual—

The Political Function of PBS remains one of the funniest and most devastating examinations of the practice. Click here to read it. )

     If the winds of change continue to blow auspiciously around the Olbermann tent, it’s possible that he may even do a Special Comment on WikiLeaks in the near future.  That would be valuable. Meanwhile, we only wish the rest of the crowd at MSNBC would follow Keith’s example, and stop boostering for Obama, the Democrats, and the status quo, whose moral gangrene, permeating every nook and cranny of this society,  is becoming more evident by the minute .

     Habits and comforts, however, are not thrown out overnight.  On the same day that Olbermann was featuring Bernie Sanders and other Democratic party insurgents explaining to the public why the Obama-GOP tax deal stank, Obama was trotting out a pathetic Bill Clinton—the old Triangulation King—for a last-minute vote of confidence and soft “jawboning” of the Democratic hoi polloi, while Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, Ed Schultz, Cenk Uygur, and Rachel Maddow were busy burnishing their creds as loyalists with pundits counseling “maturity” and “statesmanship”, and the necessity “to stick to the deal”, as it was likely to be “the best we could get now, and certainly a lot better than we’ll be getting after January, when the Republicans gain the ascendancy.”   Needless to say, mention of WikiLeaks among this lot was minimal or nonexistent, and the tone exhibited impeccably distant or glacial, when not subtly hostile. That’s beyond bad, its inexcusable for people who claim to be progressives.

SUMMATION

     While Olbermann, very much a work in progress, certainly has a way to go before he breaks out of the toxic left-liberal corral, at least he’s moving in the right (I mean true left) direction.  The rest of the players—for all their bluster and occasional didacticism (Rachel, when she wants, can be very effective in that department, which is why it is something of a shame she has chosen to stay aloof from the WikiLeaks controversy, focusing almost obsessively on the DADT story) remain hopelessly mired in the squalid conventions of mainstream journalism along with their shameful allegiance to the propaganda needs of the American empire.—P.G.

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Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post’s Editor in Chief.