Time Blogger Thinks Keith Olbermann is Approaching Self-Parody

Only "edging ever-closer" to self-parody, though. Not there yet.

File this in the no duh category.

lbermann is edging ever-closer to self-parody, or, worse, predictability. (As soon as the Clinton gaffe broke, blog commenters were wondering how ballistic he would go, and he obliged, and how.) Even if we concede his argument—that Clinton was at best callously and at worst intentionally suggesting she should stay in the race because Obama might be killed—every time he turns up the volume to 11 like this lately, he sounds like just another of the cable gasbags he used to be a corrective to.

But mostly his outburst reminds me of how the long Democratic primary has divided the left-of-center media (or at least, the media outlets with a left-of-center audience) into camps, like a bad divorce. Personalities and institutions that were once universally beloved by people who were sick of the Bush administration have either taken sides, or have been perceived to, splintering what used to be a unified and largely uncritical amen chorus.

A curious admission. He goes on to name comedy (ahem) shows like Stewart's and Cobert's, and liberal columnists, as those formerly part of this "unified and largely uncritical amen chorus." I wonder if he secretly acknowledges Time magazine as part of this chorus.

Next comes one of the most obvious, oblivious statements I've read in recent years:

...

It's probably asking too much, but maybe the experience of being annoyed by someone you used to constantly agree with could teach political audiences something about how they have appeared all along to their adversaries. Think about it: if you've found yourself suddenly irritated by any of the people or outlets I mentioned above this election, is it really they who've changed? Or are they simply less charming when they're not confirming your comfortable beliefs?

Sometimes, maybe, the only way to really understand how your idols sound from the other side is to actually find yourself on the other side of them.

Shut up, really?

He also muses that if there were more anti-Obama partisans in the media, the other half of the Democratic Party could suddenly appreciate what it's like to be on the wrong side of the media's collective partisan -- and then suggests that Republicans, too, could benefit from such an object lesson.

Republicans, too? Really? We need to see what it's like to be grotesquely insulted and dismissed by the media? We're really in need of that schooling, huh?

It's so amusing that after 50 years some liberals finally seem to have woken up to liberal media bias. Only because they were on the bad end of it, of course. Previously these free-minded, endlessly thoughtful, self-critiquing True Believers in Fairness had just plum never noticed that the media seems to give a free ride to liberals while viciously attacking non-liberals.

Of course, this blogger, having finally gotten media bias, will quickly forget all about it once the Democratic Party and its parent company the Media Party unites around Barack Obama. No longer will he find Keith Olbermann to be bordering on self-parody, nor will he find anything objectionable in how the monolithically liberal media reports the news.

posted by Ace at 01:58 PM

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