I don’t get to watch Andrea or Morning Joe but now I feel I have. Spot on Lib.
A co-worker of mine loves Olbermann and always teases me about my girl-crush on Rachel. I told him Rachel is a wonk and Keith is a muckracker. Both have their attractions but I like the cute wonk better.
Lib, I’m worried about you. Isn’t watching that much bloviation, enough to be so spot on,* bad for your health?
Great job, Lib! I almost never laugh out loud at something I read on the computer, but I did this time. Twice!
It’s so nice to see some well deserved criticism of this hack. He’s not funny, even though he believes the funniest and smartest guy in the room.
His obsession with Fox is what has really undermined him. If you remember, he was an ESPN anchor, and he jumped ship to head up Fox Sports when they started their network. Well, ole’ Keith wasn’t as good as he thought he was, and he was fired. Because he SUCKED. Like many people on ESPN do. But because ESPN is so big, they make some people think they are better than they are. Olbermann fell into this category, and he digs at Fox on a daily basis. It’s pathetic and petty. And it’s ruined his show.
He’s as biased as anyone he accuses on Fox. How anyone who has half a brain doesn’t see that is deluded. Based on this thread, it seems many people do see it and have grown tired of his act. We can only hope he gets fired firm MSNBC and disappears into his well-deserved oblivion. I think it would be hilarious if Bill O’Reilly survived Olbermann. That would be the ultimate ego slap for the legend in his own mind.
“Conspiracy”? Hmm. See, here’s an interesting thing. The pharmaceutical lobby has done a lot in the past when things like national healthcare, and the importation of drugs into the US from Canada have come up. At one point they apparently hired novelists to write a romance novel involving terrorists funding their operations via prescription drugs imported from Canada.
Now, I realize that this is probably going to sound crazy to some folks, but maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to know that certain groups are lining up now to oppose any medical related issues. ISTR that during the campaign, Obama talked about expanding healthcare coverage for Americans in some manner or the other. I think also, that the concept of the US joining the rest of the developed world in adopting socialized medicine, is somewhat controversial. Which seems strange, since they’d go along nicely with our socialized roads and schools and military.
So, could someone explain to me in small words what I missing here? I mean, you know, it seems to me that if Olbermann is right in his comments (and I don’t know that he is) about someone misrepresenting what’s in the stimulus package as it relates to how doctors get certain information and that the person wrote a letter to an organization funded by the pharmacutical industry asking for money to help support them, this should be news. You know, in the same way that someone who got money from a company like Blackwater or Haliburton and suddenly announced that a country like Iraq had WMDs would be news. (I’m assuming such a thing would be news, but maybe I’m wrong.)
I guess I’m just foolish in thinking that because someone is being paid by people with a particular mindset, that this might just color what they have to say. And I suppose that thinking they might object to anything which would force them to change their business model (even slightly), would be enough to get them to start sending out lackeys is totally misguided on my part, even though corporations in other industries have done the same thing. Serves me right, I suppose, for believing that old saying which goes “Forewarned is forearmed.”
I’ll have to confess that I was not paying close attention to Olbermann when he mentioned Deer (I put Olbermann as “entertainment” and not “news,” like I do with The Daily Show) and I thought that he was saying that Wakefield’s theories were first reported by Deer and that if Deer had done his research then, Wakefield might never have gotten any kind of cred. As I said, however, I was not paying attention to Olbermann when the subject came up, so I have only the barest of ideas as to what he said about it.
Keith Olbermann Traces "Anatomy Of A Smear" -- Bizarre Stimulus Attack (VIDEO) | HuffPost Latest News She is a spokesman for big Pharma and works with them. She is merely lying to start the fight against a change in our medical system.
The point of my OP – and this is coming from a general Olbermann fan – is that on those two occasions at least, Olbermann spent little or no time on accurately reporting the facts and instead focused far more on trying to debunk the claims by proxy or some magical transitive property by linking the authors to what he saw as financial conflict of interests.
My point is that a falsehood is a falsehood and a truth is a truth no matter who funds the person making the claim. I am not claiming that following the money and reporting on funding sources is not relevant or should not be reported at all; only that facts and truth must prevail, no matter their source or the source of their funding.
But as a result of his stupidly misplaced over-emphasis on funding sources over facts, Olbermann:
(1) Fucked over Brian Deer and everyone else sane enough to know that vaccines don’t cause autism after credulously believing the almost infinitely despicable liar David Kirby, who convinced Olbermann that Deer’s earth-shaking exposure of the latest scandal involving the ever-more blood-soaked Andrew Wakefield was bogus because (he apparently told Olbermann), Deer had a financial and other conflicts of interest. It was all a contemptible lie and it wouldn’t alter the facts if it *were *true, but Olbermann clearly sided with the liar Kirby and his “follow the money” bullshit to the detriment of children and parents everywhere.
(2) Spent ***far ***more time trying to debunk Betsy McCaughey’s absurd “secret provision” claims based almost entirely on her links to pharmaceutical companies rather than on the far more effective and devastating tactic of simply showing the bill’s actual language in context and explaining what it really meant.
Why am I so angry with Keith’s seemingly new-found obsession with financial conflict of interests rather than facts and reality? Because that’s the most common “argument” used throughout crankland to discredit scientific facts and findings of all sorts!
Some examples just off the top of my head…
“Joseph Newman *did *create a free-energy machine, but NIST and the government are being paid off by the oil companies to keep the truth from coming out!”
“Homeopathic medicine has a cure for every known disease, but the AMA and “Big Pharma” don’t want you to believe it because they’d lose too much money!”
“Power lines do cause cancer clusters, but the electric companies deny it because it would cost them too much money to fix!”
And, of course, the child-killing bullshit du jour:
“Vaccines do cause autism, but “Big Pharma” and the government continues to deny it because they’d lose too much money in lawsuits!”
I’m sure we can all think of many other examples. Sure, financial conflicts of interest are very real and do result at times in very real harm. But you cannot debunk a claim merely by emphasizing a financial conflict of interest and leave it pretty much at that.
So, let me see if I’ve got this straight:
1.) Olbermann is to blame for parents being too stupid to listen to their doctor about vaccinations.
2.) Decided to focus on an aspect of the story which you feel was unimportant when it came to Betsy McCaughey’s comments about the bill.
Am I wrong here? Because first of all, I gotta say that anyone who considers a show hosted by a man who spent a good portion of his career as a sportscaster, and routinely has segments entitled “Worst Person in the World” where he mocks, and deliberately does bad impressions of noted figures given that award, to be “hard news,” is not realizing that the show is best viewed as entertainment, much the same way that The Daily Show should be. Yes, there is some accuracy to elements of the program, but I think that even Keith would admit that the entertainment aspects of the program are the main emphasis. (After all, he’s done entire episodes dedicated to nothing but recapping the bizarre news stories of the year. Can you imagine The New York Times doing something like that?)
Next, how much coverage in all media did Betsy McCaughey’s comments get? My primary news sources are NPR and the BBC, with the occassional AP/Reuters/USA Today story thrown in. My entertainment based “news” sources are Olbermann, TDS, the SDMB, and a few other message boards I frequent. To date, the only mention of Betsy McCaughey I’ve heard has been here, and the episode of Countdown which inspired this thread. IIRC, Betsy McCaughey’s were made on Fox News, I seriously doubt that a significant portion of Fox News viewers ever see more than a few seconds of Olbermann, so it is highly unlikely than any of them see any of Keith’s comments about whatever it is that they’re misinformed about. If you’re going to be Pitting anyone it should be people who labor under the impression that Countdown is hard news. It clearly isn’t, and one should treat anything Keith says as potentially suspect.
Nope. Not at all. Not even close. In fact, it would take an **extreme **effort to get it any less straight.
I write:
Then – Bob help us all! – you offer a “rebuttal” that argues in the final analysis that the truth or falsehood of these claims are unimportant or even irrelevant because the claims came from the mouth of someone you *personally *don’t respect (based on the oh-so-compelling reason that he also announces some sporting events) on a show that you personally contend contains no hard news whatsoever (apparently because the show contains a segment or two of light diversion).
The rational mind boggles!
You know, I’d accept that your comments may have some validity and consider them worthy of serious debate, but since you’re obviously in bed with the pharmaceutical industry (no one could write something so vapid and wildly off-point if they were not one of “Big Pharma’s” paid guinea pigs), your obvious financial conflict of interests completely invalidate everything you wrote.
I won’t be bothering to reply to you any further in this thread, but don’t stop blathering on my account…
I’d demand a cite proving that you have “rational mind,” but you’ve already stated you’re done with me. I will note, however, that Olbermann spends a great deal of time making self-depreciating comments, and even ran the SNL clip of Affleck mocking him. Anyone thinking that Olbermann is “hard news” is misguided, as even Olbermann points out! And knowing that someone, who is quite clearly a crank, is being funded by the pharmacuetical industry isn’t an “insignificant detail.” Because it means that no matter how many times its pointed out that this person has their facts wrong, they’re still going to be rearing their ugly head, because they’ve got someone out there funding them. And when that “someone” has a lot of money, it means there’s a good chance, we’ll be seeing a lot of that particular idiot.
How droll. Just because I won’t join your little hissy fit about someone whom you think should be a perfect purveyor of truth, you throw out some hysterical insults. I gotta a question for you (not that you’ll bother to answer me): If you’re so pissed about this, why haven’t you fired off a letter to Olbermann? Its not likely that he or anyone connected with his show will read this thread, so why waste your time ranting here? You might be able to have some impact if you wrote him. You certainly stand a better chance of making a change, than doing it here.
Lib, that was priceless! I’m a big MSNBC fan, and I thought it was hilarious! I look forward to seeing you on “Worst Persons” since, by now, I’m sure someone has probably e-mailed your post to MSNBC. 
I’m of two minds. Yes, Olbermann is a spittle-flecked maniac. Yes, he manages to comfortably miss the point a lot of the time.
But I despair that merely presenting the merits and facts about something that most of the populace won’t understand anyway is insufficient. I think there’s real value in revealing where the money is coming from. Chris Mooney, in The Republican War On Science, does a good job of covering this, with lots and lots of cites. The misuse of science as funded through corporate “watchdog groups” and back-door conservative flim-flammery (Data Quality Act, anyone?) has gotten so bad that sometimes following the money leads to very revealing realizations about the bias of what you are looking at.
You mean like discovering that many of the groups denying global warming “just happen” to get a significant portion of their funding from certain energy companies. . .
Most definitely. Makes me ill.