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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Why I'll Miss Keith Olbermann |
| 2011-01-25 |
| Bret Stephens, WSJ ...In 1950, the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote that "Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." Conservatives, by contrast, didn't have ideas, only "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." But then came William F. Buckley and the National Review, and then Irving Kristol and the Public Interest, and then Robert Bartley of this editorial page. And then came Fox News, and Fox Sports, and Fox Business, and Fox Everything. With each new iteration of conservative thought, every new conservative encroachment on a previously placid domain, the liberal reaction began to evolve, from indifference to condescension to irritation to tantrum. By the time Mr. Olbermann got into the business, the tantrum had given way to something stronger. Intellectual eclampsia. His genius was to embody it. That's something conservatives can applaud, even if they aren't exactly grateful for it. At least until the last couple of years, when President Bush's retirement deprived Mr. Olbermann of his premier foil, "Countdown" consistently passed the market test. He served his audience. He put MSNBC on the map. He pushed CNN into third place. He earned his $30 million contract. Nor was Mr. Olbermann only good for capitalism. For a long time, the dominant mode of liberal argument was to ironize, or tut-tut, or dissemble, or manipulate the terms of discourse, or stack the deck in debates that are supposed to be balanced. The "Countdown" host did away with the old-fashioned liberal snigger and replaced it with a full-frontal snarl. Put simply, Mr. Olbermann had a genuine faith in populism, something liberals more often preach than practice. Say what you will about his on-air rants, I'll take them any day over the subterfuges used by NPR to fire Juan Williams. All this matters in an era in which the greatest threat to public discourse isn't "incivility," as was so preposterously claimed after Tucson....Rather, the real threat is Good Morning America-style niceness, USA Today-style consensus-seeking, all-round squeamishness when it comes to words like "Islam," the political masquerade of "news analysis" from papers like the New York Times, and so on. In today's media landscape, audiences are being presented with a choice between voices who are honest (at least about their biases) but not objective, and those who claim to be objective but are rarely honest. Not surprisingly, Americans increasingly prefer the former.... For much the same reason, I kind of prefer the likes of Alan Grayson to the likes of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Grayson said out loud in public what people like Reid and Pelosi truly believe, but which they only say behind closed doors, and only when they think the rest of us aren't paying attention. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 ever have an annoying and semi-painful canker sore just..one day...go away? Yeah. It's like that |
| Posted by: Frank G 2011-01-25 20:08 |
| #2 Kind of like missing athletes foot ... |
| Posted by: CincinnatusChili 2011-01-25 18:25 |
| #1 Why I'll Miss Keith Olbermann. That's one. I'm not surprised at the underwhelming numbers. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2011-01-25 13:20 |