Finally calling newspinionators out

I was so heartened to see the evergreen sagacity of Ted Koppel pile on to the gathering storm over newspinion. In a column for the Washington Post, Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news he sums up the current glut of infotrash quite nicely:

...I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.

And I might add that not only is bias a regrettable selling point of the workday evening's ration of newsflap, it's most egregious feature is grandstanding.

Koppel, in his column, traces the (d)evolution of this sorry state of affairs concerning the fourth estate. It's worth a read and lots of thought.

Jon Stewart may have started the foodfight, inasmuch as it's coming to public debate, with his silly rally in Washington DC. While it was a romp, he made an reasoned speech denouncing inflammable, biased ranting on both sides of the wingnut spectrum, taking the courageous stand that leftie/progressives are also wingnuts not just the right.

Rachel Maddow is a snarky partisan on her own MSNBC show but demonstrates, when she's on Meet the Press, that she has the chops of a real (reasoned, revelatory) journalist. She had Stewart on her show to debate his point that newspinionators posing as journalists are exacerbating the political divide at this tenuous interlude in American History. He was ill. He should have stayed home. He was almost incoherent, which is too frackin' bad because his point is essential if we are to process the current infobabble into a productive narrative.