“Where Olbermann starts to get carried away in his high dudgeon is in, essentially, blaming Koppel and his conception of proper TV news for the Iraq War. Before, during and after the war, he says, the press failed to question the evidence that going to war was based on; “when truth was needed, all we got was facts—mostly lies, anyway.”
Well, not exactly. The real, valid criticism would be that, amid all the embedding of reporters and flashy video, we had an lack of incontrovertible facts—in particular about Saddam’s WMDs or the lack thereof—and that absence of facts was not treated with appropriate skepticism. Or mostly it wasn’t; in fact, the very old-school Knight-Ridder Washington bureau was almost alone in questioning the evidence for war, hard, and in turning out to have been right.
In other words, the problem was neither partisanship nor a slavish devotion to “facts”; it was the willingness and ability to assess a field of incomplete information and take the risk of making an informed judgment based on it. The answer was not reporting, “This side says X and this side says Y, who do you believe?”; but it was also not just editorializing and reflexively saying that, if the Bush administration said it was day, then it must be night. (Although, admittedly, in this particular case, that would have gotten you closer to the correct answer on WMDs.)”

Poniewozik, really smart on Olbermann v. Koppel
  • TIME

Notes

  1. jonathan-cunningham reblogged this from apoplecticskeptic and added:
    Except that Phil Donahue did this, and MSNBC fired him for it.
  2. apoplecticskeptic reblogged this from markcoatney
  3. markcoatney posted this