Charlie Gibson Says He's Leaving Because Objectivity's Passe -- But He Loved Puffing Ted Kennedy?

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz presented quite a paradox in a Charlie Gibson profile Monday. The retiring ABC World News anchor said that "it’s time to move on" since objectivity is "less of a marketable commodity." But Kurtz also underlined how Gibson dared to keep airing live coverage of Ted Kennedy’s funeral until they were able to broadcast the reading of Ted Kennedy’s letter to Pope Benedict. These passages came late in the article:

Gibson worries whether broadcast networks will be able to support sizable editorial staffs in an era of declining audiences, when cable news channels are louder -- and more profitable. "Objectivity -- or the extent to which we strive for objectivity -- is less of a marketable commodity," he says. "People seem to want to hear news presented according to their own beliefs, and I don't understand that."

"I'm so much of a traditional, over-the-air broadcaster. I'm aware that it's changing, and I'm not adapting fast enough with it. Having hit the perfect arc of this business, I think it's time to move on."

A few paragraphs before was this Gibson tidbit of "defiance" to insure more glowing, dramatic tributes to Ted Kennedy:

As a political junkie, the highlight of his tenure was chronicling the 2008 campaign. While he also liked John McCain, Gibson says that for Barack Obama, "there was just a tide of history in the election, extraordinary to behold and to cover."

He recalls the day of Ted Kennedy's burial, when the evening procession crawled toward Arlington National Cemetery and he was left with 90 minutes to fill. It was too dark to see much when the casket reached the burial site, and his producers "were screaming, 'Get off! Get off!' Why would you get off when you've just done this hour-and-a-half preamble? So I just stayed on. They can't cut you off in mid-sentence." Gibson felt vindicated when his defiance led to the network airing the dramatic reading of the late senator's letter to the pope.

The reading was performed by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. I doubt Gibson would have balanced that liberal spectacle with the Vatican official quoted in Time magazine: "Here in Rome, Ted Kennedy is nobody."

This is hardly the way he acted when it was his turn to be a Palin-terrogator. For a review of other episodes of Gibson's liberal bias, see our Profile in Bias page.

UPDATE: MRC's Scott Whitlock reminded me of an earlier Kurtz story on Gibson, when his ardor for establishing Kennedy's faith during live coverage was quite different than his intensely negative feelings about the death of conservative TV evangelist Jerry Falwell. "Charlie Gibson was determined not to lead his newscast with the preacher's death," Kurtz wrote:

"It lends importance to a figure whose legacy contained a lot of positives and a lot of negatives," says the ABC anchor, who was once a reporter in Falwell's home base of Lynchburg, Va. "It venerates the subject to an extent that I didn't think belonged there."