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Rachel Maddow & Jon Stewart. Ted Koppel & Keith Olbermann. Major names grapple with weighty topics. What is the distinction between opinionated journalism and political satire? Are FOX News Channel and MSNBC symmetrical or is that a false equivalence? What should the balance be on cable TV news between journalistic commentary and objective journalism? And is there such a thing as objective journalism in the first place?

Big thoughts. Thoughts that make one's brain hurt.

Here are the original texts:

MSNBC's Maddow invited The Daily Show's Stewart for a 50-minute one-on-one interview about his Rally to Restore Sanity on the DC Mall and the critique of cable TV news for its political polarization that he made there.

Koppel wrote an op-ed for Washington Post in which he singled out the opinionated journalism of MSNBC's Olbermann and FNC's Bill O'Reilly as egregious examples of what ails contemporary TV news, with its drive for profits and its neglect for fact-gathering. He dismissed Olbermann as "avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan."

Olbermann responded in a Special Comment on MSNBC's Countdown criticizing Koppel's so-called objective style of journalism for what he saw as TV news' most catastrophic recent failure, its credulous coverage of the case for the invasion of Iraq and the conduct of its occupation between 2002 and 2005.

Here is a trio of aftermatter:

BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis appears on npr's Talk of the Nation to argue with Koppel. Jarvis rejects Koppel's either/or argument that opinionated commentary supplants objective fact-gathering. Jarvis asserts that as the Internet supersedes television (both broadcast and cable), viewers have access to both more opinions and more reporting from the field than they ever had during Koppel's heyday.

Media Decoder offers a discussion between The New York Times' media columnist David Carr and its media reporter Brian Stelter on Olbermann's observation that Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow, the icons of broadcast TV news' so-called objective era, achieved most impact as journalists when they became commentators. Carr pointed out that the power of their commentary derived from the fact that it was occasional; Olbermann's is continual.

Jay Rosen at PressThink ruminates about Maddow and Stewart over a glass of Johnnie Walker Black. He picks up on Stewart's suggestion that cable TV news should stop filtering its political coverage through a partisan prism--left-vs-right, blue-vs-red, liberal-vs-conservative—and should adopt a new template, virtue-vs-corruption: what is salubrious for the body politic and what causes it harm?

Let me make five points to try to cut through the clutter:

Andrew Tyndall 11/19/10 7:32:39 pm

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