Sunday, August 24, 2008

K.O. -- Countdown to Setting The Record Straight

For the most part network and cable news in America is a vast wasteland of pomposity, dishonesty and shameless corporate whoring and adds no redeeming social value to most American's lives whatsoever. Not to mention the fact that the media/press in this country has pretty much abdicated it's once purposeful role of being straightforward news gathering organizations acting as a check on the abuses and corruption of the powerful in our society. On the contrary, thanks to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his revolting style of sensationalizing the news and aiming it to the lowest common-denominator readers and viewers, a presidential blow job gets more press attention than a president who lies his country into a disastrous, bloody war. Add to that the incestuous corporate/government entanglement factor and what ends up being lost is a media/press apparatus that is no longer a provider of vital information needed to keep citizens informed and supportive of productive public discourse. It's a propaganda apparatus not wholely unlike the old Soviet communist party news outlet Pravda.

Amidst this cable and network news wasteland though is at least one sliver of hope. Someone who isn't afraid to look Americans in the eye and tell it like it is. A digital-age Edward R. Murrow who stares down the wasteland establishment and their bullying on-air lackeys and pretty much tells them in his own sweet, colloquial way to GO FUCK THEMSELVES!

That person is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. And thank the gods that be that he has a nightly show on cable tv - Countdown with Keith Olbermann. With all the right wing dreck on the people's airwaves like Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, Coulter, Fox News, yadda, yadda, yadda --- Olbermann is a breath of fresh air in that dark, dank, putridly odoriferous dungeon of media whoredom commonly referred to as cable news.

Here's a sample of his splendid work:




----k

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