The guy has an hour-long television show that isn't the highest-rated program on cable television, but does fairly well considering the circumstances. Yet, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who has expressed his own "unhinged" anger about the Supreme Court ruling that corporations have a free speech right to participate in elections, says there is a deficiency of anger about the ruling.
Olbermann, on the Jan. 22 "Countdown," launched into another one of his abbreviated tirades, or what he calls is a "Quick Comment" and blasted his colleagues in the media for not being as "enlightened" as he thinks they should be.
"I worked full-time in sports for about 20 years and I've worked full- time in news for about 10 years," Olbermann said. "And after yesterday, I must finally say aloud what I have long thought but have been reluctant to voice. The average person in the American news industry appears to be about one-fifth as plugged into the world he or she covers, as does the average person in the American sports industry.
Olbermann drew a long-winded sports analogy about the ruling, showing he was less concerned about the constitutional aspects of the ruling, but instead the "fairness" of the ruling.
"If yesterday, the Supreme Court have ruled that the salary and payroll caps in football, basketball and baseball were unconstitutional and that teams could thus spend any amount of money they chose on the players they wanted, every sports outfit from ESPN to the local cable access show in Sandusky, Ohio, would have been on the air with a special report about the obvious big as Mt. Kilimanjaro consequence of this. That the big city teams would quickly corner the market in talent and a place like Green Bay, Wisconsin, would shortly lose the ability to keep its franchise, let alone win anything."
The "Countdown" host then lamented how much political reporters covered John Edwards so-called love child, which has hardly gotten a lion's share of attention, even though he droned on with ad hominem attacks against Carrie Prejean and Mark Sanford night after night.
"But when the court instead ruled that the equivalent of salary and payroll caps for corporate political advertising were unconstitutional, guaranteeing that corporate donations would soon turn every other kind of donation into a kind of bankrupt Green Bay Packers, America's crack political reporters went: Supreme Court, boring," Olbermann ranted. "Let's talk about John Edwards' love child. That will affect people's lives. Not the court and John Edwards. I can live with that. I'm in TV. I've made choices like that."
Olbermann then put his media critic hat on, and by cited the Huffington Post, which criticized the amount of coverage two ABC News programs gave to SCOTUS decision and not reflecting the same outrage he did.
"‘Nightline' and ‘Good Morning America' reports the Huffington Post - between them two minutes coverage of the Supreme Court decision, more than half an hour on Edwards. Newspapers and online sites were nearly as blinkered," Olbermann said. "Some people rightly fear right-wing media bias. Some claim there is a left-wing equivalent. The real threat to journalism and thus to democracy is its blinding lack of thought, of effort, of imagination. As I said in sports - get a roll of stamps and mail it in."
