[NYTr] Media: Olbermann Rules!

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Nation - Oct 8, 2007 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071008&s=kitman


Olbermann Rules!

by MARVIN KITMAN

The launch of Katie Couric a year ago as the anchor of the CBS Evening
News was hailed by CBS as the biggest thing in news since, well, the
invention of denture fixative commercials. It was also the biggest
flop. The CBS Evening News Without Dan Rather or Bob Schieffer had its
lowest ratings since Nielsen began tracking evening news shows in 1987.
This turn of events stunned CBS executives--who had given her the
famous "Kiss Me Kate" contract, which paid Couric $15 million a
year--and the news consultants who thought she was the answer to CBS
being mired in third place in the network news race for the past ten
years. The news doctors who have been paid millions trying to fix the
show for the past year have only made it worse. It didn't matter how
many times the consultants got it wrong. Remember what they did to poor
Dan Rather? Smile, don't smile. Wear a sweater, don't wear a sweater.
Stand up to deliver the news, sit down. It is a law of the news
consultancy/network relationship: If we are paying so much money, it
must be right. Otherwise, why are we paying so much money?

So, as a TV critic who has logged millions of hours of viewing to help
save one of my three favorite commercial networks, I decided to
volunteer my services to the Save CBS Campaign. Here's what I would do:
First, I would dump the Walter Cronkite school of reporting, of which
Katie Couric is the latest practitioner. The objective
that's-the-way-it-is style they use at all the network evening news
shows is so old, so over. No wonder all the network news programs are
falling in the ratings. Katie Couric is just the hardest hit.

What the evening news shows need is less "objectivity" and more
analysis. The problem with objective journalism is that it doesn't
exist and never did. Molly Ivins disposed of the objectivity question
for all time when she observed in 1993, "The fact is that I am a
49-year-old white female, a college-educated Texan. All of that affects
the way I see the world. There's no way in hell that I'm going to see
anything the same way that a 15-year-old black high school dropout
does. We all see the world from where we stand. Anybody who's ever
interviewed five eyewitnesses to an automobile accident knows there's
no such thing as objectivity."

What I'm proposing is nothing new. Before Walter Cronkite became the
model "objective" newsman, there was Edward R. Murrow. In the late
1930s Murrow started the tradition of reporting the news and analyzing
it, giving his opinion of what it all meant. The Murrow legend was
built on his opinionated analyses on the CBS Evening News.

For those who never saw Murrow's news show, here's how it would go:
After running through the headlines, he would call on reporters at home
and abroad to give reports on the scene. These so-called Murrow's Boys
were real TV journalists, not actors who played them on TV. CBS News in
the Murrow years had people we respected because of their expertise,
not because they were famous TV names. The foreign correspondents
weren't empty trench coats but real experts like William Shirer, who
reported from Berlin on the menace of Hitler in the 1930s. It didn't
matter that Murrow's Boys were bald like David Schoenbrun, who reported
from Paris in the glory days, or older than the 18-49 demographic like
Dan Schorr. They were specialists in specific areas.

Then Murrow would do his closing essay, in which he would comment on
some hot issue, continually treading dangerous waters: McCarthyism at
home, apartheid abroad, J. Edgar Hoover, the atomic bomb, stockpiling
of weapons of mass destruction--all of which he opposed. He was
pro-union and anti-business. He was a dissident on US foreign policy
post-World War II. He spoke out against the Truman Doctrine, which had
America supporting fascist dictatorships in Greece and elsewhere
because they were anti-Communist. He was against funding Chiang
Kai-shek and his Nationalist army, which John Foster Dulles told us
would retake the mainland someday, if they didn't die of old age first.
He was hard on Douglas MacArthur when he took his troops across the
38th Parallel in the Korean War. He criticized the Pentagon snafus that
were getting our troops killed. He was critical of US support for the
French in Indochina (pre-Vietnam) and of the Eisenhower
Administration's embrace of the French puppet government in Saigon led
by a Riviera playboy, Bao Dai. He was against Red Channels and
blacklisting and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which
identified a Communist under every bed. He even attacked television
itself, warning that it had the capacity to "distract, delude, amuse
and insulate us."

"No one can eliminate prejudices--just recognize them," Murrow said.
His approach was so successful that all the other network news hours
copied him.

Finally, CBS president William Paley made Ed Murrow shut up--by
canceling his shows. In the dark ages after Murrow, the most powerful
commentary on network news was the raised eyebrow of David Brinkley
after reading a piece of news on NBC. A generation of telegenic and
totally uninvolved journalists followed.

In short, what CBS (and all the others) need is a new Ed Murrow. Good
news! There's already one out there on the launchpad who has
demonstrated his qualifications. I'm talking about Keith Olbermann of
MSNBC. He has the journalistic chops and the mind, heart, instincts and
courage.

Olbermann, who anchors a one-hour nightly news show on MSNBC called
Countdown With Keith Olbermann, closes his show every night by saying
"1,547th [for instance] day since Mission Accomplished in Iraq," an
hommage to Ted Koppel's "Iran Hostage" coverage, which evolved into
Koppel's late-night ABC news show Nightline (the MSNBC show was
originally Countdown: Iraq). Then Olbermann throws his crumpled script
at the camera, which shatters, a simulated digital effect (something
Koppel never did).

"Our charge for the immediate future is to stay out of the way of the
news," he explained when the show debuted on March 31, 2003. "News is
news. We will not be screwing around with it," a reference to Bill
O'Reilly, his rival over at Fox News in the 8 pm time slot. "It will
not be a show in which opinion and facts are juxtaposed so as to appear
to be the same."

Olbermann, who looks more like a high school teacher than a glitzy TV
anchor, is the one who cuts and dices the news of the day into five
segments, what he and his staff consider the day's top stories,
illustrated with news reports from NBC News correspondents, interviews
with newsmakers, whom he treats courteously, interspersed with
signature witty interjections (calling 9/11 Rudolph "Giuliani's red
badge of courage"), further interrupted by new ways to look at the news.

Olbermann does news quizzes and a puppet theater. Beginning with the
Michael Jackson trial, he created comedic puppet "re-enactments" of
news stories, using printed photographs glued to popsicle sticks,
hand-held in front of a blue screen. Olbermann did the voiceovers
himself. My favorites were the "Karl Rove Puppet Theatre" and the "Anna
Nicole Smith Supreme Court Puppet Theatre," although the Mel Gibson and
Paris Hilton puppets were not too shabby.

A segment called "Oddball" regularly assays the day's collection of
weird videos, goofy stories with goofy clips of people behaving like
idiots, announced with the clarion "Let's play Oddball!"

Each night he picks the Worst Person in the World, awarding a bronze
medal (worse), a silver (worser) and a gold (worst). Bill O'Reilly has
the distinction of winning all three top spots on a single broadcast
(the night of November 30, 2005); as of June he had gone gold
fifty-seven times.

What I like about Olbermann as a newscaster is that he makes the
evening news look like life itself, very absurd but serious, very
angry, very stupid, very silly, very snarky, very much about pop
culture. He gives the news in a language that can be understood by news
audiences today. It is refreshing to hear a straight newsman making
cultural references. If the voting goes heavily Democratic, he told the
co-anchor of MSNBC's election night 2006 coverage, Chris Matthews, "you
might see some sort of shift toward getting out of that war faster than
Britney Spears just got out of her marriage." His was the only show
where I could stand to hear about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes,
Brangelina, Britney and estranged husband Kevin Federline, American
Idol results or other stories he always told us his producers were
forcing him to cover.

This is Olbermann's second stint at MSNBC. In 1997-98 he hosted a talk
show called The Big Show, but he left the network after clashes with
management over an edict from the suits to focus on the unfolding
Monica Lewinsky scandal, which especially sickened him.

This time around, MSNBC execs gave him the freedom to do the news his
way, since they had nothing to lose. Nineteen other shows had already
failed opposite The O'Reilly Factor since 1996. Countdown is now the
highest-rated show on MSNBC, which doesn't say much, as MSNBC is
ratings-challenged. Still, his ratings in July were up 88 percent over
last year.

What I like most about K.O., as he is called offscreen, is his passion.
He goes after the dragon--which, as Murrow's producer, Fred Friendly,
used to say, is the real function of news.

Olbermann's Special Comments, as they are labeled, make up the core of
my pitch as his volunteer advocate. They were off the radar scopes
until September 2006, when Rumsfeld said anyone who was critical of the
"war on terror" or the war in Iraq or of Administration policies was
the equivalent of the people who appeased Hitler in the 1930s. "I'm not
a big fan of being called a Nazi appeaser or even a parallel Nazi,"
K.O. said. "I took that personally." And he began eviscerating Rumsfeld.

He has done twenty-two of the "specials" (as of July 19), all of which
earn a place for him on the Mount Olympus of commercial TV anchors. The
July 4 special on his reaction to Scooter Libby's pardon, explaining
the historical imperatives for Bush and Cheney to resign, was the
Gettysburg Address of K.O.'s commentaries:

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of
fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link
between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals
who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient....
I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but
sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle
dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of
creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of
exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people
who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to
slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing
part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without
conscience and letting him run roughshod over it....

For ten minutes, Olbermann spoke with fierce clarity and surgical
precision, drawing a comparison to President Nixon's resignation. He
had obviously done his homework. His recitation of Bush's crimes
concluded with his observation that the President had been "an
accessory to the obstruction of justice" in the Libby case. "From Iraq
to Scooter Libby," Olbermann said at the time, "Bush and Cheney have
lost Americans' trust and stabbed this nation in the back. It's time
for them to go." The highest praise I can give is to say I can imagine
Ed Murrow speaking those words.

I'm not saying Olbermann is Ed Murrow. He is, however, what Ed Murrow
might sound like today, changing with the times as a good newsman
should.

I also realize the format of Countdown, with its mix of serious and
lite news, might seem a little schizophrenic to older folks who haven't
kept up with the crazy way the culture is evolving. But it's what has
to be done to get the literally tens of people who watch MSNBC to pay
attention.

My final recommendation is that what would make The O Factor--or
whatever they would call the Olbermann-anchored evening news--work is
for CBS News to bite the bullet and be the first to go to an hourlong
format, something the network began debating in Walter Cronkite's day.
The network under Bill Paley wrestled with its conscience and always
lost, preferring a half-hour of lucrative syndicated trash following
the news.

Would it work? There would be gnashing of teeth, rending of garments at
Black Rock. There would be outrage from the on-the-air zombies now
doing the news from the Land of the Living Dead. If the new concept
caught on, they too would need to find something to say about the news
they are mindlessly reporting. It would change the face of network TV
news.

TV is an art form that suffers from kleptomania. They would rather
steal something that works than try anything original. So much
attention will be paid to The O Factor that the other networks will be
looking for their own Olbermanns, newsmen with differing values and
opinions. After all, in Ed Murrow's day, right-wingers Fulton Lewis Jr.
and Walter Winchell were also on the air.

A whole new audience will emerge for the network evening news when it
stops being, as Arianna Huffington put it, "the referee, pretending
there are two sides to every issue." As Murrow suggested, there
actually could be three, or even one.

Naturally, CBS won't buy the Kitman Plan, because I'm giving it to them
free of charge. In TV news, they don't believe anything is good unless
they spend millions to ruin the likes of Couric and Rather. And that's
the way it is.