It's been revealed that MSNBC anchor and neo-Murrowite Keith Olbermann was suspended indefinitely without pay after contributing to three separate Democratic candidate's campaigns this week. But why? What for? FOX News has several Republican candidates on the payroll as contributors; so why is MSNBC struggling to appear "objective?"
If you have ever watched MSNBC side by side with FOX News Channel, it's blatant left-liberal bias is as insidious as FOX' own brand of right-wing conservatism. FOX raison d'etre is to provide "fair and balanced" coverage as an isle of conservative right-wing truth in an ocean of Hollywood dominated liberalism. Like any good right-winger, it appears perpetually assailed from the left like the underdogs of journalism despite being part of the largest media conglomerate that world has ever known.
By exposing Olbermann as a Democratic party supporter, it gives FOX news the upper hand and a free shot at MSNBC. Like O'Reilly's McCarthy to Olbermann's Murrow, O'Reilly can proclaim MSNBC as a "bed of leftists" and continue to rail against their leftist bias. By allowing FOX journalists to contribute to the campaigns of the Republican of their choice, they can not be accused of being anything but journalists doing their job under the strictures of their company's internal policy.
But where was the ethical pressure of MSNBC management for Olbermann to tell the objective, verifiable truth anyway? Where is the funding for real investigative journalism and voices to debunk, with empirical and reasonable evidence, the dubious claims of those they seek to denigrate? I still feel that these two stations degrade and almost mock public discourse in the US, reducing public debate to a nightly slanging match that provides little substance in the way of public policy scrutiny.
FOX news insists that their map is the territory and all other maps by their mere articulation by those who are not part of FOX are false. Their "truth" is validated by the fact it is being reported by them. MSNBC have made it their mission to break free from FOX' sinister Aristotelian nightmare but have only served to ruin their credibility further by doing so.
MSNBC makes its money through being as biased as FOX albeit in the other direction. FOX, like professional wrestlers, don't break kayfabe as readily as their MSNBC counterparts. Paradoxically, people feel more deceived now by MSNBC when they told the truth that their anchor may have been lying.
By keeping up the facade, MSNBC's credibility would have stayed intact as "objective" if they believed Olbermann was (by their own standards) acting ethically.
If MSNBC now strives for journalistic objectivity and integrity, they are going against their best interests. It may just happen that they will report the truth one day and live to regret it.