Great Murrow's Ghost!

Keith Olbermann's special comment in response to Ted Koppel is actually one of his better rants.

And therein lies the final irony to what Mr. Koppel wrote yesterday. We got here organically in large part because of Mr. Koppel. His prominence, you will recall, came when ABC News and Sports president Roone Arledge who never permitted business or show-business to interfere in his judgments and journalistic pledge of allegiance - when Arledge made the subjective, and eminently correct, decision that the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran merited half an hour or more each night of the network's time in 1979.

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This was not the no-brainer retrospect may suggest. CBS and NBC and PBS certainly did not do it. Even when CNN signed-on in the middle of the next year, it did not do it. Arledge made his decision just four days after the hostages were seized, and stuck with the story until it ended, defying the conventional television wisdom and constantly pressing the government and questioning the official line.

And even after those hostages were freed more than a year later, the half an hour of news, now called "Nightline," continued. And each night, for 26 years, Mr. Koppel and his producers and his employers subjectively selected which, out of a million stories, would get the attention of his slice of American television for as much as half an hour at a time. Which story would be elevated and amplified, and which piles upon piles of stories would be postponed, or tabled, or discarded, or ignored.

Just as the story of Mr. Murrow's career emphasizes McCarthy but not the fact that the aftermath of McCarthy buried Murrow's career, the stories of Mr. Koppel's career will emphasize the light he so admirably shone on the Irahn hostages. Those stories will probably not emphasize that in 2002 and 2003 and 2004 and 2005 Mr. Koppel did not shine that same light on the decreasingly coherent excuses presented by the government of this nation for the war in Iraq.

Fourteen consecutive months of nightly half-hours on the travesty and tragedy of 52 hostages in Iran, but the utter falsehood and dishonesty of the process by which this country was committed to the wrong war, by which this country was committed to dishonesty, by which this country was committed to torture — about that Mr. Koppel, and everybody else in the dead "objective" television news business he so laments, about that Mr. Koppel could not be bothered to speak out. Where were they?

Worshiping before the false god of utter objectivity. The bitter irony that must some day occur to Mr. Koppel and the others of his time was that their choice to not look too deeply into Iraq, before or after it began, was itself just as evaluative, just as analytically-based, just as subjective as anything I say or do here each night.

I may ultimately be judged to have been wrong in what I am doing. Mr. Koppel does not have to wait. The kind of television journalism he eulogizes, failed this country because when truth was needed, all we got were facts most of which were lies anyway. The journalism failed, and those who practiced it failed, and Mr. Koppel failed.

I don't know that I'm doing it exactly right here. I'm trying. I have to. Because whatever that television news was before we now have to fix it.

Not too many journalists would have called Koppel out like this, and Olbermann is right about it being self-serving.  But Olbermann is certainly one who qualifies as being able to do so, especially on Iraq.  Using "We were just reporting the facts" as cover for Iraq is not anything that can be allowed to be repeated.

Just a little reminder about the Village.