A Shoutout to Keith Olberman
As my somewhat infrequent posting to this blog would seem to demonstrate, I would never want the responsibility of having to write on a daily basis. Nonetheless, a part of me is envious of the platform that journalists have to speak the truth to power. It's one of the primary bullet points in their job descriptions, after all, isn't it?
Alas as we all know, the 4th estate has largely shirked its duty to speak the truth in the years since the Bush administration has been prosecuting its ill-advised "War on Terror." More frequently now, there are some exceptions to the rule of silence, compliance, and complicity that envelops those whose job it is to monitor the Beltway. Two of my favorites are Garrison Keillor and Keith Olberman.
This is Olberman's principled and well-crafted response to the abomination that is Donald Rumsfeld's (or is it Ronald Dumbsfeld's?) most recent thought piece, the one that he uttered most ingloriously this week in front of "his" troops in Salt Lake City. The excerpt is longish (almost 7 minutes) but well worth the time it takes to watch. Olberman finishes with an understated, yet appropriate, use of an obvious influence, Edward R. Murrow. It's appropriate because it's clear that Olberman is attempting to pick up the torch that Murrow carried two generations ago when he nearly singlehandedly ended the McCarthy era by repeatedly exposing the vain senator's fear mongering and trampling of the truth in front of a national audience. Although today's media are much more fragmented in terms of sources (and therefore audiences) than during Murrow's era (as this blog is an apt example), let's hope that those few like Olberman and Keillor can do the same to those who, today, dare to usurp democracy while claiming to support it.
Despite the fact that both Keillor and Olberman are utterly mainstream (which means that I'll end up disagreeing with them once the political tide in this country returns ever so slightly to the left), it behooves progressives to voice support for them precisely because they're part of "the broad political middle," and they dare to contradict the doublespeak that passes for news and political discourse in some circles.