You can Depend on Howie Kurtz — to always promote the backbiting and back stabbing of anonymous sources to attack liberals, as this article about Keith Olbermann suggests:
Michael Price stepped out of the Atlantic Grill to talk to MSNBC’s president, leaving his client with a platter of 18 oysters. It was Sunday, Nov. 7, and Price informed Griffin that if they couldn’t resolve their differences quickly, Olbermann would take his complaints public by accepting invitations from Good Morning America, David Letterman, and Larry King.
“If you go on GMA, I will fire Keith,” Griffin shot back. Such a move was clearly grounds for dismissal. […]
We are at war,” Griffin responded. […]
If so, it was a war that had spread beyond the principal combatants to many of the journalists who work at NBC and MSNBC. From the moment Olbermann was found to have donated money to three Democratic candidates, there has been a deepening sense of anger and frustration among his colleagues, according to interviews with eight knowledgeable sources. These sources, who declined to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the situation, say that several of NBC’s front-line stars, including Tom Brokaw, have expressed concern to management that Olbermann has badly damaged MSNBC’s reputation for independence.
Read the whole thing. It’s slimy dirty rumor-mongering but a necessary exercise in the way the “liberal media” like MsNBC isn’t liberal at all. It’s corporate media, and once Comcast assumes control all bets are off as to Olbermann’s show.
Personally I could give a rat’s ass what Tom Brokaw, Mr. “I supported My President, George W. Bush, and his Iraq War until I didn’t” thinks about NBC’s reputation for journalistic integrity.
NBC anchor Brian Williams interview[ed] former anchor Tom Brokaw (he was still in that seat when we went to war) [in late May, 2008]. Brokaw’s bankrupt arguments could stand as Exhibit A in the media’s continuing failure to admit complicity in the human, financial, and moral disaster that is the Iraq war.
Consider just a few elements. Brokaw says, “But this president was determined to go to war. It was more theology than it was anything else. It was pretty hard to deal with.” So “hard” that the media didn’t even try hard to “deal” with the ‘theology.” NBC and others chose to focus on the “evidence” of WMD rather than the evidence that the administration was simply bent on going to war, WMD or not.
Brokaw, to make light of McClellan’s charges, also declares that “all wars are based on propaganda.” He even mentions World War II.
As for the gutless executive cowards “who declined to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the situation” about Olbermann’s relationship with NBC, they knew exactly who to go to to spin the story to make Keith look bad: “Liberal” Howie Kurtz. Kurtz the media critic who is enamored with the “false equivalence” talking point that what Fox News does is the same as what Olbermann did (and never once mentions the political activities of Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan, MsNBC host and contributor, respectively).
Guess what I predict happens when the Comcast merger goes through. Keith will get fired or backed into another “confrontation” with “management” in which he will be sorely tempted to resign rather than change his show. They’ll find some excuse, any excuse. Lawyer up now Keith. When network executives start leaking this crap to Kurtz it means the fix is in.
