The Truth is Out There, Part Two

There is news. There is IMPORTANT news. Breaking news. News critical to the future of democracy. And the best news is that it's all being covered, at times brilliantly!  It's just being covered by the newer media leaders.

John Nolte, one of the best and brightest writers I read regularly, has written a scathing article over on Breitbart.com, attacking and condemning the traditional media giants for their failure to investigate, research and often to even report on major news stories.  

John is 100% correct!  The old media, the folks we often call the "mainstream media," is a pathetic joke right now.  Read John's article here: MAINSTREAM MEDIA FAIL TO BREAK EVEN ONE OF FOUR OBAMA SCANDALS  The article is brilliant.  And Breitbart.com is one of the real leaders in investigative news reporting today.

Yes, as a real Liberal (with a capital "L"), I'm praising Breitbart because they are doing the job that used to be done by the New York Times or The Washington Post.  There are still Woodward's and Bernstein's working today, they just work for FOX NEWS, or one of the newspapers in the United Kingdom.  If any work for The Washington Post, they are blinded by the light, frozen like a deer caught in the glare of the Obama Presidency.

Every real Liberal should be ashamed of the embarrassment that is NBC News.  They should be appalled of the cowardice of The New York Times and saddened by the impotence of The Washington Post.  I know I am.

I'd like to believe somewhere out there is a real editor who is just damned tired of being scooped by The Guardian all the way across the pond.  I'd like to believe there is an editor giving his (or her) reporters absolute HELL over their failure to discover the IRS story, the Benghazi story, the AP story or the Verizon/NSA story.  I'd like to believe that.

However, the truth is exactly as John Nolte states it in Breitbart:

During the Bush years, it was the New York Times, Washington Post and Sy Hersh breaking story after story after story about the White House. And yes, some of that reporting was--ahem --overreach, but at least Power knew it was being watched; our democracy was safe because an overzealous media is what you call a luxury problem.

Today, it is the complete opposite and the result is an administration run amok.

Get down on your knees and thank your Maker for conservative New Media, Roger Ailes, and for the few true liberals left in the media, like Glenn Greenwald--who works for the Brits.

If a Republican is elected in 2016, the old mainstream media will come back to life.  After all the New York Times sent 16 reporters to Alaska to "investigate" Sarah Palin.  I'll welcome the re-awakening.  It just shouldn't be that way.  Political Parties shouldn't make one damned bit of difference.   

But until we get a Republican President, I'll give a big "Thank You" to the late Andrew Breitbart.  His legacy is saving our Democracy.

MSNBC Suspends Keith Olbermann Indefinitely

In what has to be the most stunning move in recent media history, MSNBC has suddenly suspended its only major star, Keith Olbermann for making financial contributions to three Democratic Party campaigns.

Phil Griffin, president of the MSNBC, said he “became aware of Keith’s political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay.”

Whoa!!!

What is ironic is that Olbermann isn't financially capable of making a monetary contribution even remotely worth the value of his on-air shilling every night for progressive candidates. An endorsement from Keith was worth a fortune in motivating the Democratic base.

What's even more ironic is that MSNBC had no problem allowing the completely biased, partisan and fact-challenged Olbermann anchor their election night coverage. Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell and Ed Schultz turned the election night coverage into a joke, a pathetic frat boy party of snickering, mockery and revelry. There was literally not 30 seconds of journalism all Tuesday night from the crew who ran the coverage like it was an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 rather than a news event of historic proportions.

Phil Griffin himself should have been suspended without pay for allowing the once proud Peacock Network to fall to these lows.

It really makes me wonder why they would even bother to have a no financial political contribution policy.

The Delaware Witch Trials

I must tell you I have really come to detest politics. Our "Party Trumps Principles" method of campaigning and promoting candidates is disheartening and distasteful. And now that the main stream media has abandoned even the appearance of objectivity, elections simply make me sad.

Therefore, even though I was simultaneously amused and outraged by the Delaware Debate between Democrat Chris Coons and the Wiccan, errr... i mean Republican Christine O'Donnell, I wasn't going to waste my time writing a blog post expressing my disappointment in the debate.

As I watched the debate (available below), I was following the comments by fellow observers on Twitter. The always brilliant Hunter Campbell captured the essence of the debate in well under the 140 character limit with this synopsis of the calibre of the questioning:

Wolf Blitzer: Ms. O'Donnell. Name all the elements
of the periodic table in reverse atomic number order.
Mr. Coons. Spell "cat".

Jim Geraghty, writing over at The National Review Online also captured the essence of the debate succinctly:

"The moderators were pretty awful. Both Blitzer and the local reporter seemed hell bent on… well, the metaphor burning a witch comes to mind."

Geraghty elaborated and, I think, understood the reality of the debate:

"Yes, Christine O’Donnell has a lot of quirks, a lot of questionable decisions in her past and a lot of evasive answers about those bad decisions. But it was pretty clear that neither moderator was all that interested in holding Coons’ feet to the fire or interested in what he had to say at all. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the better of the two, was hell-bent on pinning down O’Donnell’s view on evolution. And he was the better of the two."

"This was the moderators’ chance to play hardball with their designated Villain Du Jour, and the fact that CNN aired much of this debate live illustrates that the MSM doesn’t just want to see O’Donnell beaten; they want to see her… well, metaphorically burned at the stake in the town square for her audacity."

My opinion of the debate was that O'Donnell is not well prepared for the rigors of the Senate, but that Coons is a weak, too far left leaning candidate that couldn't possibly win a contest against a better qualified opponent. But the looser? The looser was Wolf Blitzer who surrendered has journalist credentials and dispensed with even a modicum of impartiality.

The ultimate tragedy of Blitzer's journalistic betrayal is that if he had played it straight, O'Donnell would have clearly lost the debate, the goal Blitzer obviously wanted to achieve.

Instead, O'Donnell is surging in the polls. She's picked up ten full points since the debate. Blitzer muddied the water. Americans (and Delawareans it seems) don't like an unfair fight with dirty refs. The ganging up on O'Donnell has gone way, way too far. The crowd is now clearly on her side. That made this a blog point worth making!

The JournoList Assault on Journalism... in Perspective

Roger Simon, writing today for POLITICO has the best short and readable synopsis of the JournoList scandal. In part he writes in Journalism Veers Out of Bounds:

"This may be the most embarrassing thing I have ever written — and looking back on my writing, there is a lot of competition for that dubious distinction — but when I became a reporter, it was almost a holy calling."

"We really believed we were doing good. We informed the public and helped make democracy work. We exposed wrongdoing wherever we found it. We reported without fear or favor. As a columnist, I tried to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

"Somewhere along the way, things have gone terribly wrong."

Read the complete article at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40308.html#ixzz0v0GvBRQh

The Death of Journalism

Being a journalist was once a proud and noble profession, filled with high ideals and strong ethics. In several great movies of the early to mid 20th Century reporter were real heroes battling against corrupt government and powerful corporations.

We were inspired, even in awe as we watched Orsen Welles' Citizen Kane, spellbound by Humphrey Bogart in Deadline, USA, and mesmerized by Cary Grant and Rosiland Russell in His Girl Friday.

Get the story and get it right!

Those days are now very officially dead.

We were genuinely betrayed by FOX's gross negligence in handling the explosive Shirley Sherrod video. There are many, especially in the left who proclaim we "should have known" FOX would repeat such gross falsehoods without so much as asking for a simple verification of the tape. Regardless, FOX failed to follow the most basic of journalistic standards.

But what is much, much worse in the now revealed cabal of liberal reporters who conspired, successfully, to throw an election. Barack Obama might just have won fair and square, but now we'll never know.

In an EDITORIAL today Investors Business Daily assesses the terrible damage the JournoList cabal did to America. They are dead on-correct in virtually every word they print:

There are so many things wrong with this, we hardly know where to start. Nominally competitors, these supposedly impartial media mavens colluded in a way that would put airline or insurance officials in the dock for anti-competitive practices. They engaged in activism instead of fact-finding and mixed incestuously with activists whom they also should have been covering impartially.

Worst of all, they deprived millions of Americans of the information they needed to size up this new face on the political scene and determine if she really was a candidate who represented their interests.

That still remains to be done — and the country is poorer for it.

I'll leave you with Anderson Cooper's on air discussion of Journalism. While he himself has often failed to live up to the standards, it's till good to hear him recite then to remind us of what we've lost.

John McCain: You Can Win! Here's How....

I don't think John McCain is reading my blog. And I rather suspect his advisers are too busy, too. But, if you are out there John, you can still win (easily).

How? Simply return to the full and open press availability that was the hallmark of your earlier campaigns. Your advisers (or should we call them "handlers") are giving you really bad, bad advice. Sarah Palin knows it. And, in your heart, you know it too.

You'll never close the 3% to 4% gap in the polls following your current plan. It's not possible. Barack Obama is out spending you in paid advertising 20 to 1. His 603 million dollars dwarfs your 87 million dollars.

O.K., accepting public financing was a huge mistake. But you can't fix that one now.

Barack Obama is completely hiding from the press. He hasn't had a press conference in ages and refuses more than two to three (carefully controlled) questions, and only on some days. And Obama has a lot of reasons to hide. More importantly, the press is finally starting to return to real journalism. They've been shamed into it.

And Joe Biden.... well, Biden is a disaster.

Sarah Palin is now the only available candidate and it's working. But you are the pro! You cannot match Obama's spending. But you can absolutely dominate every news cycle. Trust your instincts and return to the open, honest, available, candid, funny, controversial, folksy, trustworthy candidate that got you here in the first place.

John McCain, you can win. Talk to the press every hour of every day. And encourage Sarah Palin to continue to do the same thing.

The Manchurian Candidate

Is Barack Obama The Manchurian Candidate?

If somehow you are not familiar with Richard Condon's best selling 1959 novel or the 1962 blockbuster movie of the same name starring Frank Sinatra or even the rather sluggish and strange 2004 remake starring Denzel Washington, the "Manchurian Candidate" is a charismatic candidate who runs for President only to be the puppet of another, much more sinister, power. In the novel and 1962 movie that unseen power was the communist Chinese (hence the name). In the 2004 version the hidden villain was updated to be a domestic corporation, replacing our cold war fear of communism with the more politically correct (and rather prophetic) fear of Wall Street greed.

So is Barack Obama the real Manchurian Candidate? Do we have a man who has one very charismatic public persona, but a radically different personal and political agenda for the country once he takes office? We really don't know.

And this is EXACTLY what happens when the bulk of the Main Stream Media decides, in mass, to simply stop doing their jobs. When the main stream media (most importantly the print media) decides to elect one candidate instead of reporting the news and investigating the facts, the real electorate is left with a lot of questions and a whole lot of fear. That is where we are today.

The right wing blogosphere is erupting with the story of a video tape they claim is so explosive it could and would, by itself, cost Barack Obama the election. The LA Times has admitted it has the tape and has had it for months. They claim it's nothing, certainly not news. But, so far, they refuse to release it. Now that does strike me as odd. And it's the stuff conspiracies are made of.

All agree the tape in question does show Barack Obama at a party for radical Islamist Rashid Khalidi along with the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Supposedly Obama gave a speech heaping high praise upon Khalidi and, according to others, spoke harshly of Israel and the jews.

Except we don't really know, because absolutely no one in the media has bothered to lift a pencil in reporting this relationship, or the event in question.

Much worse malfeasance on the part of the MIA MSM is their failure to look into the money flow (called money laundering by many on the right) into Obama's campaign. It has been proven that Obama's campaign has turned a blind eye toward the source of the massive cash inflow, reportedly 150 million dollars last month. It is entirely possible that the hundreds of millions of dollars Obama has used to swamp McCain came from one single individual or a small group of individuals or even a foreign country or terrorist group.

All this happened (whatever may have happened) with the willful cooperation of the Obama campaign which disabled the normal name and address verification procedures for credit card donations. These are the facts we do know.

What is stunning is that the Main Stream Media has completely ignored what might be the biggest story of any election in history.

While the media was completely enraptured with front page story after front page story about Sarah Palin's wardrobe, not one single reporter was looking into this gross and now proven (thanks to the bloggers who investigated themselves) violation of campaign fund raising procedures. The MSM is still trying hard to ignore the story.

I don't think for a minute that Barack Obama is the pawn of either Islamic militants bent of the destruction of Israel or he is the pawn of George Soros or a small cabal of liberal kingmakers. Although I am certain his campaign is grossly violating campaign fund raising laws.

But we don't know. We just don't know. Because the adoring press won't or can't ask any tough questions. Not of Obama or anyone on his team.

The Sinking of the MSM Titanic

There are a few others, mostly conservatives, in both the traditional media and the blogosphere who clearly see the complete unraveling of the Main Stream Media. Chris Muir, cartoonist writing the Day by Day strip certainly gets it. If you have any trouble reading the above cartoon, please link over to the Day by Day Website for a full sized version.

Faced with the dilemma of choosing between the ethics of journalism and their dedication to the man they genuinely believe must become President of the United States, these pseudo journalists are consistently choosing politics over professionalism.

Make no mistake about it, these people genuinely believe that Barack Obama must become President. This isn't some vast left wing conspiracy to deprive the world of real news.

Instead these are zealots who have convinced themselves they are doing the right thing. A kind of "group think" mentality sets in that allows people who were at one time idealistic journalists to begin to overlook their ethics and their responsibilities. Stories get buried. Reporters are never assigned to certain stories. Key questions simply are never asked. Words and phrases are changed.

But the results are extremely serious. I have another entry coming up on this later today or tomorrow.......

The Death of Journalism, 2008

UPDATE; October 28, 2008 8:00 am: ABC News columnist Michael Malone has updated, edited and expanded the essay discussed below and ABC NEWS has published it on the flagship ABC NEWS Website. This searing indictment of the election coverage of 2008 is a must read essay. Link over to ABC NEWS and read the entire essay now: Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

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ABC News columnist Michael Malone, curiously writing in Pajamas Media, has a must read essay that documents the death of journalism in the United States during the 2008 election. Please link over and read the entire essay, even though it is rather long. Here are just a few of his key points:

The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game. With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate. The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer. But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist...... .....what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography. That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: his job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so...... .....The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber. Middle America, even when they didn’t agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a Presidential candidate. So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

What frightens me the most, Mr. Malone, is that my fellow liberals cannot see or simply refuse to see what is happening right before our eyes. Believe me, this will come back to haunt us all.

Why the Media's Mistreatment of Sarah Palin is So Important

The mainstream media and liberal/progressive blogosphere's grossly unfair treatment of Sarah Palin is not really an issue in this years campaign, at least as far as I'm concerned. Governor Palin herself has rarely complained and it does go with the territory. When you are plucked out of nowhere and placed in center stage the media is going to investigate, research and then test the new star.

And frankly, she did scare the heck out of the Democrats and Obama supporters with good cause. Barack Obama's egotistical elimination of Hillary Clinton as Vice President rubbed millions of Americans the wrong way. The left believed that McCain's Vice Presidential pick had to be destroyed in order to keep the Democrat faithful in the fold.

I do not fault any Democrat or liberal/progressive pundit or blogger for their full throated objection to everything Sarah Palin represents. Hell, it's just good politics.

What is really important is what many are calling the "death of modern journalism." When our journalists consciously make a decision to throw the election to one candidate over another, we are genuinely lost as a society.

But make no mistake, journalism is dead. Deader than a doornail. And Sarah Palin is the poster child. It all happened when the mainstream media decided to become the tabloid media. Not one reporter ever made even a pretend passing effort to actually investigate Palin, instead 100% of the effort was to dig up dirt, find embarrassing skeletons in the closet or outright fabricate totally false stories that make the Brothers Grimm look like non-fiction writers.

This all finally got to be too much for Newt Gingrich last night and he literally exploded in one of the most brilliant rants I've even been privileged to hear. Both the video and the copy follow. And Gingrich is 100% correct in every word he utters.

The elite media's attack on Governor Palin again and again has been factually wrong, intellectually dishonest, totally biased, worthy of the Polish State news media attacking Lech Walesa back in the 1980's. I mean this is the type of deliberate, vicious, dishonest, total distortion of who Governor Palin is including by the way, the Saturday Night Live Skit some of which by the way, I think were slander and were worthy of a lawsuit. And, I think the American people should realize that the elite media on the Left is so desperate to elect Barack Obama that the view they are giving you of Governor Palin is fundamentally a falsehood. And, the one you saw from CNN is so outrageous that they owe her an absolute apology. But frankly, Katie Couric misquoted Henry Kissinger, earlier than that, ABC News misquoted the Bush Doctrine. Again and again you've seen elite reporters do things that were false in order to try to make Governor Palin look bad... If you would look at the coverage Michelle Obama has gotten and the coverage that Cindy McCain has gotten you have to believe that the fix is in. When you look at the magazine covers, the pictures that were taken, again and again, over and over for the last year we have been brainwashed, propagandized, insultingly lectured by the news media. If you look what happened to Joe the Plumber... Now, I haven't seen anyone from the elite media do a live broadcast from the non-existent Katie's Restaurant to point out that Joe Biden is just out of touch with reality. He's either dishonest or has a total memory lapse about his hometown. Yet, nobody notices it. Again and again there were 14 factual mistakes by Biden in the vice-presidential debate. Nobody said that disqualified him. This has been a totally one-sided campaign where the news media has been the best ally that Barack Obama has gotten. And we ought to be honest about it. There's no pretense, not a shred of neutrality on the part of the major networks or The New York Times... I've been thinking about having one of my researchers look at every single elite media interview of Governor Palin to see if any of them asked her how she gave $1300 a person back to Alaskans as a tax break, how she negotiated and got so much money out of Big Oil, how she worked out the deal for the natural gas pipeline, or anything of substance about how she shaped an $11 billion budget involving 29,000 employees of the state government. I don't believe by the best of my knowledge that there has been a single question by an elite television journalist about her actual career in Alaska. And, I think it is the most insulting. I can't say this too strongly. This is like watching Pravda. This is a one-sided vicious unending dishonest campaign.

GayPatriotWest (B. Daniel Blatt) also has an excellent article on the same issues. Be sure to link on over and read MSM More Interested in Palin Gossip than her Record

As the Economy Melts, Do One Reporter's Minor Observations Matter?

I certainly intended to ignore this simple little non-story, a minor blog entry by CBS News Reporter Dean Reynolds. Oh, I read it with amused interest, one of a dozen or more blog entries I digested this afternoon.

What caught my eye was the horrific and deranged hate replies Reynold's essay inspired.

Here's a link to the original Reynold's essay: Reporter's Notebook: Seeing How The Other Half Lives

In what seemed to me to be a harmless interest story, Reynolds compared the relaxed atmosphere, the slow pace and the meticulous organization of the McCain campaign versus the frantic, high powered and terribly disorganized management of the Obama campaign. While Reynold's was complimented the McCain campaign for helping reporters, he clearly noted that McCain, with only a single appearance most days, was not putting forth the effort one might expect from someone being clobbered in the polls.

But read what poster gizmogainous wrote in reply to the Reynold's essay. He was so enraged he (or she) posted similar entries multiple times:

Awww-poor little crybaby-no one was nice to him....... Also, if you think anyone would listen to a guy who is clearly a racist hack--did you really write that he had a stinky plane?!? What, because he is a black guy??? I guess you must be Sarah's new lover since she had to get rid of the last one. I have never been this mad about an article--you really should be fired. I would be very interested to know more about your background so maybe I could understand this ignorant excuse for journalism. You are a lowlife punk.

There are dozens more that attack the reporter over a seemingly minor story. Why? And, as an aside, aren't we tired of constant cries of racism dripping from the lips of every Obama supporter? But I digress.

Do Obama supporters fear this little blog entry might reflect a larger issue in the Obama campaign" You know the logic = If Barack Obama can't run a campaign, can he possibly run a country?

I wouldn't put too much stock in that logic. President Clinton's campaign was often similarly disorganized. It's a campaign.

More likely, Obama supporters fear this entire article reflects a change in the relationship between Obama and the press.

Dean Reynolds does complain about access to Obama: "The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who've been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure."

Is the press corp beginning to behave like a scorned lover? They have given Obama way more love than Obama ever deserved.

Reynold's does finish his essay with: "Maybe none of this means much. Maybe a front-running campaign like Obama's that is focused solely on victory doesn't have the time to do the mundane things like print up schedules or attend to the needs of reporters.

But in politics, everything that goes around comes around."

Indeed.

A Tale of Two Conventions

>>>>>>8/31/2008 10 am: THE UPDATES JUST KEEP ON COMING. MARY OVER A FREEDOM EDEN HAS NEW INFORMATION AND A PATENTED MARY RANT ABOUT THE COMPLETE DISASTER THAT MSNBC HAS BECOME: MSNBC - NOT FAIR AND BALANCED

>>>>>>8/27/2008 10 pm: THE DISASTER AT MSNBC HAS EXPLODED. READ THE STORY ON POLITICO TONIGHT: MSNBC prez defends convention team

>>>>>>8/27/2008 10 am: SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR AN UPDATE ON THIS ESSAY.

ORIGINAL POST 8/26/2008 10:53 pm:

Hillary Clinton gave a great speech tonight. She brought down the house. She was brilliant. No matter which network you watched, Clinton was a master at the top of her game. All three cable news networks carried her speech uninterrupted and in full.

But before and after the speech you could watch two entirely different conventions. Your could watch the real convention as it was unfolding on CNN or you could watch a fairy tale make-believe convention on MSNBC.

To summarize, Keith Olbermann is a complete blithering idiot and he is singlehandedly destroying the once great NBC News organization. O.K., not singlehandedly. He has help from the nearly helpless and totally bewildered Chris Matthews and the completely biased and totally unqualified David Gregory. Their combined performance can only be described as pathetic.

When you are so totally biased in favor of one candidate, you continuously seek to bolster your biased opinion. This became David Gregory's sole mission on the floor of the convention. So Gregory pigeonholed Governor Bill Richardson, who dutifully recited the Obama mantra and avoided all controversy.

But Gregory didn't need any help, Olbermann will not brook any naysayers. Disagree with Obama's perfection and face the wrath of Olbermann.

As result we had Keith Olbermann pontificating about the total unity of the Democrat Party at the exact moment CNN was interviewing a tearful black woman delegate who said she might not be able to vote for Obama this November.

Olbermann's unity was a myth, a figment of Olbermann's mind. When you already know all the answers, you no longer look for or even tolerate any facts that might point in a new or unexpected direction. A person as completely blind as Olbermann cannot be allowed to anchor a news program.

As a result, tempers are boiling over at MSNBC with near open warfare between Olbermann and Gregory versus an incredulous Joe Scarborough. Insiders advise that Scarborough is close to being fired for daring to challenge the all powerful Olbermann. Yet most outside analysts agree that Scarborough is right and MSNBC is a network careening out of control toward the abyss.

Part of the question is how long can Tom Brokaw and Brian Wilson and the rank and file journalists tolerate the complete destruction of the once great NBC News Organization. And do they have the power today to challenge Olbermann.

But, mark my words Olbermann's days are numbered. Part of the handwriting is in the overnight ratings. CNN's audience was 50% greater than FOX and nearly double the ratings of MSNBC. People want fairness and objectivity from their news sources.

FOX and MSNBC both fail because they are not fair or balanced. CNN has power because Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer and Campbell Brown (she escaped from MSNBC just in time) worked hard to be fair and report the news instead of papering the walls with rosy Obama colored wallpaper.

UPDATE 8/27/2008: Maureen Dowd tells the story of the Denver convention that Keith Olbermann and the MSNBC cheer leading squad tries to avoid. Read her column in today's New York Times: High Anxiety in the Mile High City

On a separate note I watched what seemed to me to be an entirely different David Gregory this morning on Morning Joe. I like the detached and analytical Gregory on display this morning much better than the cheerleader we were treated to last night.

Tim Russert

I join virtually the entire nation and perhaps much of the world in mourning the tragic and premature death of Tim Russert. We have suffered a great loss, the magnitude of which we will feel for years to come.

Curiously, I was working on an essay about the very sad state of news journalism today. The laughable excesses and hyperbole of FOX News and the tragic fall into a cesspool of tainted journalism by MSNBC have simply destroyed the great legacy of Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite.

With Tim Russert's passing we are left with the mere shell of old fashioned journalism. Today we are force fed clowns who substitute ambush interviews, bombastic rants and one-sided political commercials for any real reporting.

Russert was great. His trademark of hard hitting and probing questions were always delivered with civility, manners and grace. But he got the answers. In the process he made Meet The Press the most important forum for any politician or government official.

While NBC will no doubt audition dozens of potential substitutes, Tim Russert cannot be replaced. That is the magnitude of our loss.

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The best reporting and consolidation of stories I have found this afternoon is found on The New York Times at this link: NBC’s Tim Russert Dies

The photograph above was provided by NBC News and was taken by Virginia Sherwood.