Keith Olbermann’s Demise And The Myth Of The ‘Liberal Media’

A Commentary by Doug Draper

‘The problem is the liberal media.”

Keith Olbermann doing his thing for one of the last times.

I’ve heard that comment and others like it for all of the 32 years I’ve been a professional journalist and going back well before then – during the times of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War, the enactment of the War Measures Act in Canada and the civil rights movement in the United States.

Typically, these comments come from people on the conservative end of the spectrum who can’t seem to tolerate any media scrutiny of politicians on the conservative end of the spectrum, yet never seem to mind same media taking a run at politicians or citizen groups on the liberal side.

Every time I’ve heard this bilge about the ‘big, bad liberal media’, I’m always left wondering where this “liberal media” is and how I can find it, other than a couple of magazines and newspapers like Mother Jones, Harper’s or The Nation, or sometimes the New York Times and Toronto Star. Aside from that, most of the media in Canada and the United States (owned by corporations like Quebecor, Thomson Corp, Disney and General Electric) is pretty mainstream, if not pretty conservative, to put it lightly.

The impression I’ve received over and over again, and going back to the beginning of my journalism career, is that there is a critical mass of partisan conservatives and special interests out there who simply don’t want the media asking critical questions around such matters as our ongoing military involvement in Afghanistan, the untendered  purchase of billions of dollars worth of new fighter jets by the Canadian government, plans to build more prisons in Canada at a time when crime rates are dropping, calls for more gun control in Canada and the United States, and more health care for the mentally ill and action on climate change.

How dare questions be asked on such issues! Only a ‘liberal media’ would be so subversive as to ask questions about matters such as that. Yet why do these conservatives worry? They can lay their heads on their pillows at night knowing that the chances of someone like Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Ralph Nader or Michael Moore getting mainstream media time are far less likely than Don Cherry, Lady Gaga or Dr. Phil.

And now even Keith Olbermann, arguably one of the last progressive liberal voices on cable television on this continent, is now gone. Olbermann signed off his MSNBC show ‘Countdown’ this past Friday, January 21, just as a new, reportedly more conservative corporate entity is about to take over MSNBS that might be more interested in having Dr. Phil and Oprah and Kelly Ripper doing commentary than a Keith Olbermann who was in the habit of concluding rants by Sarah Palin with the words; “God, that woman is stupid.”

It may not have been the best move in the world to use his NBC pulpit to call Palin stupid, but was it any worse than so much of the hateful crap that spews from the mouths of Glen Beck, Palin and Rush Limbaugh, a popular radio voice for the extreme conservative wing, floating a billboard in Tuscan, Arizona, in the days leading up to the attempted assassination of a congresswoman there, promoting himself as a ‘straight shooter’ with depictions of bullet holes through the billboard?

That offensive billboard was quickly taken down, but so what. Why is an ultra right-wing idiot like this still on the air while Olbermann is now off.

At a smaller level, as a reporter for the late and great independent St Catharines Standard starting in 1979, to watch my beat as an environment reporter disappear under the new management of Conrad Black/Hollinger (when environment beats, labour and other health and social justice beats disappeared at newspapers) just about said it all. Those of us who were left – who still wanted to be left – could move to “general assignment,” which mainly meant covering courts, crime and any other stories that did not offend the advertisers or the powers-that-be.

So I am here now, trying to do this Niagara At Large thing. Are you interested and do you care? Is there anyone out there who might want to back this site up with some dollars to really make it fly, by the way?

I feel confident to say  this. If Niagara At Large was a conservative site, dedicated to getting the Harper government re-elected and dedicated to bringing back a Conservative government in Ontario, I would have well-healed people writing me cheques to sustain this site. Practically no one on the left would do the same for a news site like this, so what is all of the crap I keep hearing about the ‘liberal media’.

There is hardly any liberal media to chomp on and, besides, you conservatives can now party around the departure of Keith Olbermann, a television journalist inspired by the late, great Edward R. Murrow and one of the last progressive voices on cable news. He’s gone, and so too many be us little ones trying to keep alive a torch for tough, questioning media. So what do you want?

(Visit Niagara At Large at http://www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to residents in our greater binational Niagara region.)