First Jon Stewart, now Ted Koppel

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111202857.html">Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news

By Ted Koppel

To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.

Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

The commercial success of both MSNBC and Fox News is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.

Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for "BBC World News America."

I'd like to call attention to two episodes in particular, both of which I consider effectively media psyops and transformative moments in US society and culture enacted through the broadcast media, though we can argue about the extent to which the origins of either involved planning as opposed to elements coming together organically; and also debate, once each got started, the degree of central orchestration involved in either as propaganda events. These two milestone TV productions were "America Held Hostage" and the O.J. Simpson case. Though the intensity of both faded long ago without much echo remaining today, both were gargantuan media frenzies and public moral panics in their time, and our aliens might find them important out of proportion to other events, based on the sheer TV time devoted to each over extended periods.

"America Held Hostage" ran as the primary US daily news coverage in both TV and print for almost all of the 444 days from the taking of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 until the release from Iran of the last 52 American hostages on January 20, 1981, in the hour after Ronald Reagan's inauguration.

Those of you who were watching at the time should recall that the US network nightly news programs during this period actually opened with the title, "America Held Hostage: Day XXX" (on ABC) or some variant of the same on the other networks. So the name is not something I'm attaching to the event myself, but the universal referent for it at the time.

I don't think the original storming of the embassy was the result of a prior covert operations plan (though it was predicted as a consequence of Carter's allowing the Shah into the United States for medical treatment), but the media production in the aftermath provided the moral banner for rallying that year's "Reagan Revolution" in the manner of a more traditional top-down propaganda campaign, and the affair's denouement was scripted in the "October Surprise" deal Casey and Bush cut with the Iranian government. At any rate, the sheer duration and prominence of the event and the primary staging as a TV-generated emergency were unprecedented, at least in degree and also in quality.