While I would expect no less passion and prose from a wordsmith such as yourself, I am unfortunately not buying your position that some form of objective journalism cannot exist in our republic. The mere fact this is the angle you have taken shows just how much corporations and the shareholders' bottom-line dominates the public sphere of information.
This has been a long fight, the battle against whether corporate-style news or objective facts are presented to the public as the truth inherent. If you will allow me, I will show you what Edward Murrow himself said at an address to the RTNDA Convention in 1958 concerning this very subject:
This was Murrow's quest, to get straight facts to the American public without any filter of ideology. Are you really willing to stand before the titans of journalism and declare Edward Murrow was a heretic praying before the false god of utter objectivity?
You are fulfilling the very prophecy he spoke of here, but instead of giving you a polite golf clap, I care to reference a shared passion of ours, baseball.
The bitter irony, a taste you seem to summon at will, is that your original claim to fame is one of the last bastions of true objective reporting, sports journalism.
I need not go over the details with you of all people, except to say that play-by-play announcers are the nearest journalists to the holy grail of objective fact in our media today. Some with argue that even the color commentary is objective, but the mere act of selectively recalling information into the commentary allows for a slant of the reality of the sporting event in progress.
One could remember how many strike outs a reliever has garnished in the situation on the field, or one might remember how many home runs said reliever has given up in the exact same scenario. Depending on the fact presented, a slant is given to the audience and might quite possibly enact the phenomenon known as the "Commentator's Curse."
The play-by-play commentator would never venture such a gambit, for it is not their place. They are only there to call the objectively game for the benefit of those not there to see it first hand.
Pundits themselves are regulated to pre-game, half-time and post-game spots, and are usually gloried hype color commentators. I remember you doing this quite well many years ago at ESPN.
It is still what you do today, quite well again.
But you are no play-by-play commentator or analyst covering the political sport they play in government. You are constantly wearing your jersey, marked l for liberal, and you are wearing it in the booth while calling the game.
The same uproar you hear now is tame compared to the outrage a play-by-play commentator would feel showing up to call a Yankee's game decked out in a Red Sox's jersey in the Bronx.
That is the transparency I want from you and all pundits and color commentators who cover the sport of politics. You are not doing play-by-play based on empirical fact and the presentation of truth is slanted by your ideological beliefs and your passion for what you consider your home team.
I agree true objective journalism is impossible, and to quote one of the best color commentators of the last century on both sports and politics, Hunter S. Thompson:
"The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado."
You may promote the truth as you see it, but always remember that you are in the sports booth calling the latest clash in the eternal game between Democrats and Republicans, as a pundit and not as play by play based on objectivity.
To do otherwise would be to throw the career of Murrow's back in his face, to discount his plead for sanity in the communication of truth to the American public, one that was made by Jon Stewart ever so recently and is directly related to the dust up at hand.
It must be bitter irony, since you do love this phrase, that it is actually Stewart, a man who once followed a show about muppets making prank calls, who is more fit to carry on Murrow's legacy than you are yourself. I also taste that bitter irony when I see you editorializing Murrow's catch phrase at the end of each and everyone of your pundit-laden shows.
Just admit you have your home team's jersey on in the booth and we can all move on, or admit you have surrendered the public sphere of knowledge to corporate-styled news where pundicy is consider unbiased data, as Murrow warned us would happen in 1958.
To end this critique, I call out your applause line from your Special Comment posted today:
Where were they?
Worshiping before the false god of utter objectivity.
Besides using the trigger word of 'utter' to make this a black/white issue, with no grey area allowed for objectivity, I would like to point out men such as Mr. Koppel were not operating on facts, but drinking directly from the fount of state-sponsored propaganda.
But that is a discussion for another day. I hope this finds you well and possibly enlightened.
Have Patience for idiots like me in the peanut gallery,
John