When the Occupy Wall Street movement first emerged, I opined in this blog that it is the most important story of this year and next. I noted that Keith Olbermann, now a truly independent source of news at CURRENT, jumped right in with COUNTDOWN to provide the best, and most extensive coverage of the incipient movement. It has continued as the best — not to say that Big Eddie, Rachel and Lawrence haven't provided good coverage — most comprehensive TV coverage of OWS. And this is where a truly independent network/program, CURRENT and COUNTDOWN, become so important to the public dissemination of unfiltered news and information.
The internet is the interactive alternative to bad TV news. Depending on the user's choices, it can provide very good, or very bad, information. But it's no match for the visual impact and immediacy of television, from which most Americans still get their news. Hence the inordinate influence of Fox disinformation compared with its total numbers. What goes out at Fox is quickly disseminated to its online and radio web of right wing propaganda to blanket American news consumers with lies.
Similarly, there is no match for the Fox disinformation blitz in the mainstream media. In fact, given their for-profit corporate model, they are being dragged down the Fox black hole of disinformation — see MSNBC (more on this in upcoming posts) — rather than providing an effective countervailing source of correct(ed) truthful information. The MSM's compulsive pressure to provide both sides of the story, 50-50, even though the other side is a pack of lies, compels MSNBC's Chris Jansing — whose apologia for being among liberals and progressives is "to keep my head down and work hard"— to run the FULL video of Michele Bachmann's ignorant comment re: the storming of the British Embassy in Teheran that "we (the U.S.) wouldn’t have an embassy in Iran. I wouldn’t allow that to be there" ... (stupid wingnut ... we haven't had one since 1979!), and then report the Bachmann campaign's ABSURD response that she had been "quoted out of context." MSNBC is no longer a credible source of news and progressive commentary; it has become a political theater of the absurd.
Which is why Keith's work at CURRENT and his incredible coverage of OWS is so noteworthy. Again, not to take anything away from Rachel and Big Eddie — they're islands of progressive sanity, but they work for a network that is lurching by leaps and bounds, to quote John McCain ironically, over to "the dark side." Now that his daughter Meghan is an MSNBC employee, her dad is freer than ever to become the partisan right wing hypocrite of his latest incarnation. I wonder if he'll land on PSYCHO TALK for insulting Long Island, NY, then doubling down on NY Senator Chuck Schumer with a faux apology, which was even more despicable. Not with his ditzy daughter hanging around with her valley girl "New Hamp-SHAR" diction, I'll bet.
It's been refreshing to watch COUNTDOWN with Keith hosting a plethora of OWS guests — activists, academics, artists, teachers, REAL alternative media journalists — who are effectively outside the MSM grid but very much connected in every way, speaking with such true insight, idealism, intelligence, and passion. It's a perspective that exists nowhere else in our corporate-dominated media. We have Keith — and Al Gore — to thank for it. Can't wait for the debut of the Young Turks.
Keep up the GREAT work, Keith.
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