Huffington Post Makes Fun Of Olbermann--You Read That Right. Even a Lefty Website Thinks Olbermann Is A Figure of Fun.

You would think that The Huffington Post would be reliably in Keith Olbermann's corner. After all, Arianna's blog and Keith's ego both sit well to the left, politically.

And yet for four days now, the HuffPost has prominently displayed James Poniewozik's mocking takedown of KO, using the headline, "Time Critic: Olbermann's Special Comment Shows He's 'Just Another Of The Cable Gasbags He Used To Be A Corrective To'" (see screen grab above, just to immortalize the moment)

So what gives? Why would the Huffpost take after Olbermann like that? Perhaps AH and HP are determined to go mainstream. Or perhaps the Huffpo hipsters simply have an eye for the ridiculous. Which is to say, they are looking out and seeing the increasingly Howard Beale-like spectacle of Olbermann's nightly rants and they want to keep their distance.

But what's also interesting are the comments, posted by Huffposters. As of Saturday night, there were 2932 comments, which is quite a few. And a lot of them are funny, from the one that reads, "Olberman jumped the shark with this 'special comment'" to those that are sympathetic, but still critical: "Huge KO fan here, but he went a bridge too far here."

You're losing it, Keith, and even your friends are noticing it, and they are backing away from you. And so when you finally blow your stack on TV, you will blow it alone.

David Gregory vs. MSNBC?--The Plot Thickens!

OK, Cable Gamers, here's where things get interesting. Yesterday Howard Kurtz published a piece in The Washington Post, "MSNBC, Leaning Left And Getting Flak From Both Sides," which painted a picture of the cable newser as being so pro-Barack Obama that both conservatives, on one side, and liberal supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton, on the other side, are angry.

Kurtz quoted John McCain adviser Steve Schmidt said of MSNBC, "It's an organ of the Democratic National Committee. It's a partisan advocacy organization that exists for the purpose of attacking John McCain."

And then Kurtz quoted Terry McAuliffe, chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign, as saying that MSNBC star Chris Matthews (who appears ever more frequently on NBC) has been "in the tank" for Obama "from Day One" and is practically "the Obama campaign chair."

One observation, of course, is that you have to be pretty over to the left to be seen as both anti-Republican and anti-Clinton. As an aside, it's a myth, of course, that Hillary is some sort of moderate; her lifetime vote-score from the American Conservative Union is 9, reckoned on a 1 to 100 scale; McCain's rating, for purposes of comparison, is 83. And oh by the way, Obama's ACU rating is 8. In other words, Hillary and Obama have virtually identical voting records, and yet MSNBC still chose to favor Obama.

And not just Matthews. Keith Olbermann, as we all know, has been devoted the full hour of his show to Obama-olatry for months now--except, of course, when he is defaming George W. Bush. And Dan Abrams and all the rest seem to be happy joining on on the O-Train. How come? Maybe because MSNBC knows that Obama is much further to the left than his ACU rating would indicate.

But there was one little line in the Kurtz piece that caught people's eye: referring to the spillover from MSNBC onto NBC, Kurtz observed, "Some top NBC journalists say privately they are troubled by the overlapping identities." Kurtz is a pretty good reporter--he wouldn't have printed that if he hadn't heard it, more than once, while reporting this story.

So now the plot thickens: Yesterday, Jossip.com, a well-plugged in NYC site, Is David Gregory Orchestrating Hit Jobs on Other MSNBC Talent? Well that's kind of an interesting question, wouldn't you say?

Here's the case from Jossip:

There’s a rumor going around MSNBC that Howard Kurtz’s unfriendly article about the network, “MSNBC, Leaning Left And Getting Flak From Both Sides,” was a David Gregory-orchestrated hit job against his colleagues.

Kurtz’s piece, which followed up earlier items about the (invisible?) controversy brewing now that NBC News and MSNBC are both housed at 30 Rock and sharing resources, slammed the network for the convergence of hard news reporting and opinion.

We’re hearing that when the article hit yesterday, Keith Olbermann and his camp began raging over Kurtz’s printed criticism about Olbermann manning the anchor chair during primary coverage, a time when, one might suggest, a newsman without obvious bias should be running the show.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Olbermann has directed his anger Gregory’s way.

But what really sent Olbermann over the edge was this line: “Some top NBC journalists say privately they are troubled by the overlapping identities.”

All eyes have been on Gregory as one of those “top NBC journalists” who spoke with Kurtz. And to those who think so, one of the next lines, a pro-Gregory plug, wasn’t a surprise: “Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory, both well-regarded NBC correspondents, now anchor hour-long programs on the cable outlet. Gregory replaced Tucker Carlson, leaving former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough as the channel’s only conservative host.”

And if Olbermann needed more evidence that Gregory helped steer Kurtz’s item, it came here:

“But news and opinion often seem to merge on primary nights. MSNBC’s coverage is anchored by Matthews, a onetime Democratic operative, and Olbermann, the Countdown host who recently finished one anti-Bush commentary by instructing the president to ’shut the hell up.’”

One source tells us that top MSNBC management is convinced Gregory “must have been involved” with Kurtz’s reporting.

Are all those plot-turns thick enough for you? And the fun of it is, it's all playing out in real time, right before our eyes!

I love this Game. I will doing my own digging to see if I can figure out what's really going on at MSNBC/NBC. But of course, as faithful TCG readers know, my own angle, for a long time, has been that Wall Street pressure is going to force parent company General Electric, mis-led by incompetent CEO Jeff Immelt for seven years now--is going to spin NBC off after the 2008 election. Which of course, would leave top talent free to join the Obama Administration and leave the remainder at MSNBC free to merge with Air America or Mother Jones.

But in the meantime, I was amused to see some of the comments on the Jossip site, including this one:

I’d take Gregory over Olbermann any day. Just be patient David: Keith will have his well-deserved nervous breakdown any day now and who knows-you might get a primetime show out of it.

That was from someone named "Bmused." A great e-handle, for life, and for Cable Gaming!

I Wonder if Scott McClellan Knows That Keith Olbermann Said This About Him--Just Three Years Ago!

Scott McClellan, of course, is a new hero in new places. The Huffington Post, Buzzflash, and NBC/MSNBC--they can't get enough of Scott now that he has gone from George W. Bush-defending to Bush-bashing. But The Cable Gamer wonders if McClellan will ever go on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown."

If I could find this blistering attack by Olbermann, then McClellan can, too. Here's KO referring to SM as a "blank-eyed bully-collaborator," in the wake of the faulty Koran-flushing story that ran in Newsweek three years ago:

And larger still, in terms of politics, this isn't well-defined, is it? I mean Conservatives might parrot McClellan and say ‘Newsweek put this country in a bad light.’ But they could just as easily thump their chests and say ‘See, this is what we do to those prisoners at Gitmo! You guys better watch your asses!’

Ultimately, though, the administration may have effected its biggest mistake over this saga, in making the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs look like a liar or naïf, just to draw a little blood out of Newsweek’s hide. Either way — and also for that tasteless, soul-less conclusion that deaths in Afghanistan should be lain at the magazine’s doorstep — Scott McClellan should resign. The expiration on his carton full of blank-eyed bully-collaborator act passed this afternoon as he sat reeling off those holier-than-thou remarks. Ah, that’s what I smelled.

It'll be interesting to see if McClellan is so eager to sell books that he will even go on "Countdown."

"Keith Olbermann Blows Last Remaining Gasket"

Time magazine media writer James Poniewozik is one of those critics that The Cable Game has never been able to peg.

I mean, one sort of assumes that he's a liberal, because he formerly worked at the hard-lefty Salon.com before joining the soft-lefty Time. But pieces such as this, headlined, "Keith Olbermann Blows Last Remaining Gasket," make me admire him for his independence, at minimum. (Maybe Poniewozik fooled his bosses as he worked his way up, and now they're stuck with him! Or maybe Poniewozik is a sincere liberal who is simply embarrassed that Keith Olbermann has come to represent left-liberalism in its war against not only the Republican Party, but also against moderate Democrats.)

But hey, I only speculate, you decide. Here's Poniewozik reacting to Olbermann's bullying, bloviating, blow-up at Hillary Clinton the other night on his MSNBC show: "Olbermann is edging ever-closer to self-parody, or, worse, predictability."

Indeed.

Marisa Guthrie Does a Little Reality Checking

The spin doctors at "AC 360" are famous--OK, perhaps "famous" is not quite the right word, "notorious in certain circles" is more apt--for playing the program name-game on primary nights to take personal credit, for Anderson Cooper, for ratings bumps due to coverage of major primaries (when the rest of the networks call it "special election coverage").

Happily, Marisa Guthrie of Broadcasting & Cable cuts through the flackery in this well-reasoned article headlined, "Ratings Good News for Fox News, NBC/Fox News Channel Wins Cable-News May Battle; NBC Takes Broadcast." Note the distinct absence of any good news about La Anderson or CNN in that header. As Guthrie explains:

CNN was touting a win in for the 10 p.m. hour of Anderson Cooper 360. AC360, which was buoyed by three primaries in May, averaged 339,000 viewers in the demo, a 51% jump compared with May 2007. Fox News’ On the Record with Greta van Susteren averaged 317,000 in the demo. But unlike AC360, On the Record is pre-empted during primary coverage. On the Record prevailed over AC360 in total viewers with 1.31 million compared with 1.05 million. Subtracting the West Virginia primary May 13 and the Kentucky and Oregon primaries May 20, Van Susteren edged out AC360 by 13,000 viewers.

And then the B&C ace sums up the state of May ratings play in The Cable Game:

For the month, Fox News was ranked sixth among basic-cable networks, while CNN came in at No. 19 and MSNBC ranked 26th.

Hey Liberal Media Busybodies--Lighten Up on Howard Kurtz!

The New York Times is at it again. The Cable Gamer woke up this morning to see that Jacques Steinberg had found
new way to attack media-beat rival Howard Kurtz. The accusation from the Times is that there's an "ethical question" concerning Kurtz. Here's Steinberg's lede:

When Howard Kurtz invited Kimberly Dozier, the CBS journalist wounded in Iraq, onto his program, “Reliable Sources,” on CNN on Sunday, he was not a disinterested interviewer. Mr. Kurtz’s wife, Sheri Annis, had been paid to serve as a publicist for Ms. Dozier’s memoir, “Breathing the Fire,” which Ms. Dozier had come on the program to discuss.

Let's get a grip here, folks. Dozier, a nationally prominent journalist, gets blown up in Iraq, with cameras rolling. She is severely wounded in that attack, and two of her CBS colleagues killed. Then she writes a book about her ordeal. How could that not be news? And why shouldn't Kurtz cover it on his CNN media program, "Reliable Sources"?

And it's all the more benign, since, as the Times concedes, Kurtz disclosed his wife's role as a publicist for the book on the air. But the critics still aren't satisfied. And so Steinberg hunts down the usual collection of nitpickers, including an "ethics and diversity fellow" at the Poynter Institute, to weigh ponderously on this matter.

At a time when the media are under siege for relentless liberal bias--see any edition of Newsbusters for a dozen examples every day, including CNN's John Roberts just last night--one has to wonder why the media get hung up on such topics as an "ethical question" that is a) fully answered, and b) not a question.

Maybe Steinberg and all his little liberal henchpersons--his story got a big boost from the Slate.com "Today's Papers" column this morning--are just stupid,in their robot-repetitive whining about the same old tired topics. Or maybe they're smart, but mean--because maybe they are just jealous of Kurtz, who is still a working journo, long after so many other reporters have been reduced to the status of "ethics and diversity fellows" at dopey media think tanks.

John Roberts and The Royal "We" In The Media. And Let's Not Forget the Royal "All"!

The Cable Gamer thinks that Scott McClellan has a perfect right to publish his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, in which he tells his side of the story as he saw it--or as he imagines it, since it's pretty clear that he wasn't in most of the big meetings.

But at the same time, it's naive to not point out two things to fellow Cable Gamers:

First, McClellan will sell a lot more books this way. As Newsbusters' Rich Noyes astutely pointed out, the MSM mostly ignored Ari Fleischer's pro-Bush book three years ago.

Second, as Newsmax's Ron Kessler observed, McClellan's book reads like it could have been copied from the editorial page of any liberal newspaper, since What Happened is full of accusations that President George W. Bush led a "political propaganda campaign" aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion."

With those two points out of the way, The Cable Gamer herself will stick to commenting on the cable coverage. Newsbusters' Matthew Balan caught this item, for example, in which CNN's John Roberts told The Politico's Mike Allen that McClellan "articulates what we all came to believe." Now who is this "we"? And isn't "all" a pretty strong statement! Are the media really that unanimous?

Here's Roberts this morning:

He claims that President Bush used 'propaganda to sell the war.' Let's look at what he says in the book. 'And his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.' He finally articulates what we all came to believe, Mike, and further goes on to say that this war was unnecessary.

Now in truth, surely not "all" reporters came to believe that Bush is the Deceiver -in-Chief. But surely most do.

And yet at the same time, aren't reporters supposed to be, you know, fair and balanced? Or at least keep their opinions to themselves?

But The Cable Gamer figures that Roberts is taking no risk in saying what he said. The liberal culture of CNN isn't going to criticize Roberts--they will praise him.

As for viewers, well, they're a different story. Who knows how they'll react. But the first priority of any MSM reporter is to keep up appearances in the newsroom. And that means throwing around the "royal we," and its companion, the "royal all."

And throwing them around liberally.

Rum, Romanism, and John F. Harris--A Little Perspective, Please!

The Politico's John F. Harris posted an interesting, but ultimately wrong-headed, piece yesterday. Entitled "Media hype: How small stories become big news," Harris decried a "news culture in which... everything is exaggerated." His prime example was the flap over Hillary Rodham Clinton's "assassination" gaffe.

Harris uses the coverage of that incident to criticize the contemporary media, souped up, as it is, by the fastest cyber-speeds. Indeed, Harris is even willing, as is the fashion of such criticism, to pile some blame upon himself, and his publication. Such blame-taking, of course, in the view of a cynic, is a clever way to attract still more attention to oneself. Here's Harris:

The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.

Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.

Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days.

Who can guess what stories will cause the media machine to rev up its hype jets?

Well, that's all true, of course. But it's always been true. Why? Because human nature has always been thus. And Harris has been around for a while. As such, he should be more aware of political history--and of human nature.

It's fine to decry exaggeration, but there's nothing new about exaggeration. And there's also nothing new about a small thing speaking for a big thing; in fact, the ancient Greeks had a word for it: synecdoche.

You want to see proportionality shredded in a presidential election? How 'bout 1884? Not much modern media back then, but even so, the notorious comment by a Republican leader, the Rev. Samuel D. Burchard, (pictured above) rocketed--more accurately, I suppose, telegraphed-- around the country, is widely thought to have cost James G. Blaine and GOP the presidency. It's worth bearing in mind that Blaine didn't even utter that offending alliterative sentence--but nonetheless, he got the blame. And all without a single cable station or website to do the exaggerating.

Or, more recently, for more proportionality-shredding, let's recall the fate of George Romney, hounded out of the 1968 presidential race over a single remark. Admittedly, it wasn't smart for Romney to say that he had once been "brainwashed" about Vietnam by the Johnson Administration, but that single word, endlessly repeated in the 60s "old" media, finished off Romney's presidential prospects. Which was a shame, many might say, because Romney was one of the most respected men in American life back then--completely self-made, he was a successful business executive, and then the three-term governor of Michigan. But none of that mattered once the "brainwashing" meme infected the body politic.

To quote Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. If human nature is involved, there will be disproportionality, unfairness, randomness, and so on. And while cable and the net have obviously accelerated things, the basics of human nature were set eons ago, and haven't much changed.

So, John Harris, no excessive hair-shirting, please.

Finally, another comment on the offending Hillary quote. In Harris' opinion, it's not that bad; here's the why he describes the tape:

Clinton does indeed mention the Kennedy assassination, speaking in a calm and analytical tone: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

[Jonathan] Martin and I both thought we saw a slight twinge in Clinton’s facial expression, as though she recognized she had just said something dumb.

In other words, Harris minimizes what Hillary said. But so far as The Cable Gamer is concerned, the quote from Clinton is deeply revealing. It really was a window into her soul--of course she wants to see Barack Obama out of her way, by any means necessary.

Which is to say, the quote from Hillary in South Dakota, combined with other times when she has said the same thing, combined with her well-known ruthlessness, was enough to convince many in the political community--but not Harris--that it was time for her to go.

And that's the story behind a lot of these "exaggerated" stories across presidential history. In 1884, for example, the Republican Party had controlled the White House for 24 straight years, and it was simply the turn of the Democrats to win. The Burchard quote was a match, but the fuse was already smoldering, because it already been lit by a quarter-century's worth of Democratic grievance at being "out."

As for Romney, it's a little harder to see the logic of his political demise--which is why one can never exclude such factors as plain bad luck. Still, venturing for some sort of explanation, one might conclude that his waking up from "brainwashing"over the merits of the Vietnam War was simply a synecdoche for America's waking up from brainwashing from that quagmire. But of course, nobody likes to be reminded of his or her shortcomings, so Romney was the scapegoat for the rest of us.

And if "fuses" and "scapegoat" are old, even ancient, metaphors, well, that's the point: there's nothing new about any of this.

Sorry John! The Politico is a must-read and no doubt, it will soon go totally video, and thus join The Cable Game in a big way.

But in the meantime, the phenomenon that you espy and decry is nothing new.

Intimate Strangers--Gawking, Snarking, and Gould-ing

Cable Gamers might not know the name Richard Schickel, but they ought to, because more than two decades ago, Schickel wrote the most profound meditation on the way that the media, goosed along by cable, was altering our collective relationship with stars, starlets, and wannabes.

Schickel's 1986 book, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, was a profound media-meditation with an instantly communicative title, which endures easily into the Internet era.

Schickel's point was that TV, so constant and ubiquitous, has encouraged us to think of celebrities as our friends, that we shared our lives with them, and that they shared theirs with us. And in a way, of course, they do--we can watch them on TV, read about them in the tabs, and, now, keep up with them on the Net. So yes, celebrities are rich, but at the same time, through the power of our Nielsen ratings, our pocketbooks, and our Doubleclicks, we can make them bow down to us.

And so celebs who want to stay in our collective good graces have to live the life we want them to live. For example, they have to stay glamorous, and that means, most relentlessly, they have to stay in shape. Not just stay thin, but stay in shape. As any dieter knows, there's nothing that drives one to a cigarette--or an eating-binge--faster than hunger. And so many celebs crack up.

Of course, such a public crack-up is part of the celeb-narrative. Stars can go crazy on camera, which is, to say, the world stage, a la Britney Spears, and that has some audience value--and the late Anna Nicole Smith, had even more such ratings-value.

But woe betide the ordinary celebrity that gets fat, or even flabby, or even a little dimply.

If he or she--especially she--falls off the tightrope of taut and toned, then that star will be mocked unmercifully. Actually, the popular verb for such mocking these days is "snarked." And so as Hannah Seligson,writing this month in the The Wall Street Journal, observed, "bodysnarking" has become a recognized web-industry, on innumerable blogs, on legit social-networking websites such as Facebook, and on cruel(albeit voluntary) sites such as Hotornot. Here's Seligson:

Fifteen years ago, when Facebook was still two separate words, that too-tight dress you wore out on Saturday night might have been a topic of conversation for a few days among the handful of people who were on the scene. In 2008, your button-popping image can instantly be sent to everyone in a cellphone's address book, so that even before you've made it home from the party the picture has been blasted to MySpace, posted on Flickr, kibitzed about on Twitter and shared with the world on Tumblr for random, anonymous comment.

And so Schickel's vision of everybody being false-friendly with celebrities must be updated: Today, everybody is false-friendly with everybody.

So now we come to Emily Gould, the former editor of Gawker.com, who gained her first 15 minutes of fame in April 2007 when Jimmy Kimmel verbally decked her on CNN, filling in for Larry King. In particular, Kimmel hit Gould over the "Gawker Stalker" feature, which obviously, from the name alone, encourages stalking.

I don't think of Kimmel as particular funny, but he seems intelligent and incisive. He might thus make a pretty good Cable Gamer.

(beat)

Too bad he's chubby.

I am kidding, of course--The Cable Gamer is in no position to criticize others for excess pounds--but the dominant media culture is not kidding. You can't be too thin, and if you are, well, good. You might get rich.

Like 'em or not, Gawker and Gould are part of the phenomenon of "intimate strangers," and that's a permanent part of our techno-culture. And for her part, Gould is articulate cog in that phenomenon. As she told Kimmel, Gawker offers "unfiltered immediacy," which is exactly what people want. And they can get what they want, because technology is "shifting the definition of what is public and what is private for everyone."

But of course, there's another dimension to this strange kind of intimacy, and that's jealousy, even hostility. Last year Vanessa Grigoriadis, one of The Cable Gamer's all-time favorite brunettes, wrote a a seismic piece entitled, "Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass." That title sums it up--the feeling, among uninsured and underpaid twentysomethings, that they have a right to punish those who are older and better off. And of course, because of technology, they can. Except for Nick Denton, they probably won't get rich, but they will have their say. There will be blood, to coin a phrase.

So yes, there's a little bit of non-economic class warfare going on here, but there's an even deeper phenomenon: plain old narcissism.

Gould is an articulate writer, but her subject material could use some elevation--elevation out of her own navel. She
published a piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine in which she happily described her literary output:

Almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about. Some of my blog’s readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren’t acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.

Nothing wrong with writing about yourself, but surely that's not an end in itself: Except that in her case, it is. Here's some more of what she put in her various blogs:

I described the symptoms and probable causes of a urinary tract infection. And I wrote about how painful it was to pack up my things in my old apartment as Henry — whom I referred to as “William” — stood over me watching. I puzzled over “how comfortable I feel around him, in spite of the fact that at this point I basically feel that he’s a crazy person who I sort of hate.”

Maybe you heard the letters, "TMI," as in, "too much information"?

Gould is a smart cookie, and she gets credit for staying as a brunette, but when I see all those tatoos on her pretty young body, I think to myself, "No, girl!"

The Cable Gamer has also seen a connection between tatooing and other forms of self-laceration. And as for laceration, well, sometimes it hurts to watch, or to read, as when Gould writes, "A few weeks later, I arrived home in the early morning hours after abruptly extricating myself from Josh’s bed — he had suddenly revealed plans for a European vacation with another girl."

OK, but now here's the techno-twist, as the Internet supercharges the ability of the neurotic to broadcast--OK, narrowcast, but it is, after all, the world wide web-- themselves to the world. In the next breath, Gould continues her narrative: "And immediately sat down at my computer to write a post about what had happened."

Take that, Josh! But actually, take that, Emily. Because you are cutting into yourself. Into your soul. Yes, you are famous, after a fashion, and yes, you might even make some money, but from those pix of you, I think more and more of Amy Winehouse. And Emily, you don't want that. At the rate Winehouse is going, she's not even going to leave behind a good-looking corpse.

And yet this is an issue for today's media, too, in all its many forms--mass, major, mainstream, pajamas, micro. Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be done. And doesn't mean that it's a good idea.

Keep some things private, Emily. Resist the trend to get intimate with all of us.

Of course, others have a responsibility,too. Cable Gamers might be mindful of the general weirdness of some of what they produce and some what they watch. If it works, OK.

But as Schickel would say, there's something strange indeed about a culture that has all of us thinking that we know Britney, and Anna Nicole, and JonBenet.

We don't know them. Never did, and never will. They are little girls lost, gone to a place where today's media can't find them.

See It Now: Hillary Clinton Gets a Lesson in the Power of the Moving--and Talking--Image

Hillary Rodham Clinton may well have blown up what remained of her dwindling presidential--and even vice presidential--prospects with her off-the-wall expression of concern (or is it hope?) that Barack Obama might be assassinated.

Hillary has been pilloried from pillar to Post for these comments, which, of course, only help to remind us what so many politicians are really like--that is, in their hunger to win, of course they want their opponent dead.

But from a Cable Game point of view, it's interesting to observe that Hillary actually expressed the same horrible sentiment on March 6, to Time magazine's Richard Stengel. Time printed it, but nothing came of it. One assumes that Stengel taped the convo, but only on audio tape.

Now fast-forward two-and-a-half months. When Hillary said the same thing on May 23, this time to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, the camera was rolling. (Good heads up ball, Argus Leader, you all proved that you can be Convergence Cable Gamers; get a techno-clue, Time!) And so Hillary rocketed to permanent YouTube infamy.

And that's the lesson: With apologies to Boss Tweed, people don't read much, but they do watch TV.*

BTW, this is one time that The Cable Gamer actually agrees with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who blasted Hillary for "invoking the nightmare." Yes, Olbermann is kind of a blowhard, but some people, such as Hillary, deserve to be blown away.

* Here's Tweed, the legendarily corrupt New York City mayor, complaining about political cartoons--the hot popular medium in the mid-19th century--that attacked him: "Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!"

Which Do You Like Better: MSCNN? Or CNNBC?

When CNBC starts reporting on rumors about parent-company GE spinning off/merging units, then it's time to really pay attention, because big change in The Cable Game is imminent.

Here's the good stuff from CNBC-er Julia Boorstin; note, in the passage below, that she just assumes that GE execs--her bosses--are lying when they deny the reports:

And despite denials, rumors are still swirling that GE General Electric Co. would consider spinning off its entertainment properties--NBC Universal, CNBC's parent. And I'm hearing that Time Warner is considered the front runner to merge with NBC Universal, since other than their movie studios and their cable news channels (CNN and MSNBC) their content properties are almost entirely complimentary.

NBC Universal doesn't have a publishing division. Time Warner doesn't have a broadcast TV network. It's still a ways off, but mark my words, execs at both companies are thinking about it.

In other words, CNBC Boorstin is blithely presuming that her bosses, including NBC chief Jeff Zucker, and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, are either a) liars, or b) profoundly ignorant about their own companies. And b) of course, while possible, is highly unlikely.

In fact, talk of a GE spinoff to/merger with Time-Warner is now all over the place.

GE/NBC and Time-Warner/CNN are free, of course, to issue cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die denials, but they aren't doing so. (And of course, nobody would believe them if they did--but they aren't, which tells us plenty.)

The Cable Gamer wants credit! I have been saying that such a breakup is inevitable for a year now. It feels good to see a little woman's intuition being confirmed.

In the meantime, one must wonder: What are the folks who anchor shows on CNN and MSNBC thinking right now? For example, John Roberts and Kiran Chetry co-host CNN's "American Morning. And yet over at MSNBC, there's Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski. And what of such rival bigfeet as Chris Matthews, Larry King, and Anderson Cooper? And let's not forget the biggest you-know-what of them all, Keith Olbermann. How they are all those egos going to squeeze onto one channel?

PS: Note to Julia: Brunette is best!

UPDATE: Fortune's Richard Siklos dishes still more on the looming deal.

Chris Wallace #2 and Trying Harder?

TV Newser notes that Fox News' Chris Wallace now has the #2 ranked Sunday news-talk show in DC, behind NBC's "Meet the Press."

But Wallace is setting his sights higher, as he tells US News' Paul Bedard.

Tim Russert is still on top of the heap, of course, but The Cable Gamer suspects that his show is going to be hurt by the worsening kneejerk leftism that increasingly afflicts MSNBC and all the NBC newsers.

The two "gets"--good guests and big audiences--both like to think that they are being treated fairly, and not called names, which is increasingly the stock and trade of such MSNBC bullyboys as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Dan Abrams, and now, maybe, David Shuster.

Who knows? Maybe even left-wing Obama lovers would like to hear that there are two sides to a story.

You'd Almost Think That CNN Looks Down on Ordinary Americans--Except, of Course When CNN Is Condescending to Them!

Clay County is a perfectly nice little place in eastern Kentucky--and it's kinda pretty, actually; The Cable Gamer has been there, and recalls that it is within the Daniel Boone National Forest.

So why did CNN's Gary Tuchman dump all over Clay County? Because it's Hillary Clinton territory? Or because everyone knows that rural Kentucky is for dullards? (And, of course, rural America in general--except for Vermont.)

But don't take my word for it: Take the word of Kentuckians themselves. Indeed, it's fair to say that they are mad. (Maybe Barack Obama can explain their "bitter" pathological predilection for guns, God--and who knows, maybe they even are proud of their country.)

But in the meantime, the folks of Clay County shouldn't be surprised at the way that CNN has treated them.

The only surprise will be if Tuchman or CNN offer a sincere apology.

MSNBC Moves Further Left -- Tells Hillary Clinton Democrats to Buzz Off

"David Shuster Getting 4pm Hour?"--That's the headline atop TV Newser just now.

David Shuster? The MSNBC correspondent whose most memorable quote--as TVN recalls--"Doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"

That Shuster would say that about Chelsea Clinton, on February 7, and now be possibly in line for an anchor job on MSNBC is testimony to how wacked out to the left MSNBC has become.

Does it ever occur to anyone at MSNBC to ask: How will this look the rest of the world, outside of the little left-wing Obamabubble? It's one thing to trash Republicans and conservatives--that's par for the MSM course--but quite another to rip into Democratic moderates.

Sure Shuster apologized, and was suspended for two weeks? But if this Newser report proves true, then Shuster's suspension will be remembered as more of a vacation.

Cable Game Exclusive! Ed Gillespie Blasts NBC News!! Live From Washington DC!!!

Ed Gillespie, a Republican big shot now serving as Counselor to President Bush in the White House, just blasted NBC News at Grover Norquist's legendary "Wednesday Meeting," the weekly conclave of leading conservative activists in Washington DC.

As Cable Gamers know, the White House has been at war with NBC News since May 18, when reporter Richard Engel mugged President George W. Bush, using sneaky editing.

NBC is sticking to its unfair and unbalanced position, as Brian Williams made clear on "Nightly News" on Monday. Meanwhile, of course, such not-ready-for-broadcast TV hit men as Keith Olbermann are actively dumping on the Bush White House.

But now Gillespie is fighting back. At the Grover meeting--150 or so folks, representing the top grassroots leaders and representatives of groups around the country--Gillespie joked that MSM reporters, siding, of course, with NBC, are sucking up. MSMers are "talking to Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews like they’re Edward R. Murrow," Gillespie quipped.

And then Ron Kessler, the always-interesting reporter for Newsmax.com, asked Gillespie, "Will the White House cut off NBC?" To which the White House man answered drily, "John Yang is a decent reporter." In so doing, of course, Gillespie deftly left out any mention of the rest of NBC News. Then he added, thinking aloud, "Maybe [NBC] can have an interview, but only on the condition that [NBC] air it in its entirety."

In fairness--OK, more like pseudo-fairness-- NBC has posted the entire Bush interview on its website. But as Gillespie noted, a web-posting is not the same as running the edited version twice on national TV. Meanwhile, those who wish to see the White House position in detail can click here to see the full text of Gillespie's angry May 19 letter to NBC News president Steve Capus, as well as supporting materials.

But then Gillespie this morning continued, "If you look at the editing [of the Bush interview]... if a presidential campaign ran such a snippet...NBC would run a fact checker thing, and hammer [the presidential campaign], for deceptive advertising." Pow!

This White House vs. NBC controversy isn't going away, folks. If NBC News can get away with ambush editing today, it will get even worse in the next few months, as NBC and MSNBC and the rest of the MSM go all-out to elect Barack Obama.

"Is MSNBC a Political Liability to NBC?"

Cable Game ace Brian Stelter reports, you decide. But here's the gist:

Critics are increasingly citing MSNBC for what they say is left-leaning partisan political coverage and commentary. More and more, NBC shares staff, office space and an identity with MSNBC, exposing the news division to complaints about opinionated cable hosts like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews.

And as a kicker, Brian adds:

MSNBC’s critics are not limited to conservatives. Aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign have privately expressed a different grievance: namely, that MSNBC hosts show favoritism toward Barack Obama.

It seems that NBC/MSNBC have placed a pretty big bet on Barack Obama.

The White House vs. NBC, Continued--"In Case You Missed It."

This just came from the White House press operation, at 3:19 PM ET. It's obvious that the Bush folks are not giving up their tussle with NBC, and so Counselor Ed Gillespie is sharing his side of the fight with, in this case, Fox News' Megyn Kelly.

The White House does not want people to miss this:

"We Are Not Going To Allow For People To Say, As Fact, That The President Attacked Anyone On The Floor Of The Knesset. He Asserted American Policy And We Are Going To Continue To Do So."

– Counselor To The President Ed Gillespie, 5/20/08

MEGYN KELLY: The White House is not at all happy with NBC News. In an unusual move, the Administration is calling the network's story reporting on its recent interview with President Bush, "utterly misleading and irresponsible." The controversy is over the President's answer to a question asked by an NBC reporter about the President's policies when it comes to negotiating with Iran and Barack Obama. The White House says there is a difference between what the President said to that reporter and what NBC viewers actually saw. Here's the interview as it appeared on NBC Nightly News. (Fox News' "America's Newsroom," 5/20/08)

RICHARD ENGEL: You said it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barack Obama?

PRESIDENT BUSH: You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has. And when a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you've got to take those words seriously.

KELLY: Here with us now to talk about what exactly the problem is, is White House Counselor Ed Gillespie. Thank you for being here with us. Alright, it gets a little confusing, but just so our viewers understand, the reporter asked President Bush – he said, President Bush, you said negotiating with Iran is pointless and that it's appeasement. Were you referring to Barack Obama when you made those comments? Now, in response, President Bush said to him – you didn't get that exactly right. And he went on to clarify his actual position on negotiating with Iran. Then he said that bit about, my positions have not changed but the political calendar has. You say NBC selectively edited that exchange, for what purpose?

ED GILLESPIE: Well, to take out the part where the premise of the question was challenged by the President, where he rejected the notion. He said, read the speech, you did not get that exactly right either. Then he went on to say, here is what I said. They removed that, very artfully by the way. If you look at the clip you wouldn't know that there was a removal of an edit of the President's remarks that was masked by NBC. That's why I say it's deceptive. What we have asked is that they run the full response by the President. Let his own words speak for themselves and do not take them through editing, out of context, and make it seem like he was affirming the charge being made by the interviewer there. They have said they're not going to do that, because even though they aired that deceptively edited piece on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News," they said that viewers can go on their website and stream video of the actual answer itself. So, that's their response; if people want to see the truth, they can go on the website and download it.

KELLY: So at the end of the day, your charge is that NBC viewers are left with the impression that the President agreed with the reporter's premise, that "negotiating with Iran is pointless." When if fact, the President had said – that is not what I said, and my position has always been that we would talk to Iran if they suspended their uranium-enrichment program.

GILLESPIE: Well, two things, Megyn. The President's position on Iran has been clear, which is we are bringing multilateral pressure on Iran to abandon any effort to obtain a nuclear weapon and if they suspend verifiably their nuclear-enrichment programs, then they can come to the table with the international community. We have always said that. That part of the question was ignored – or that part of the answer was ignored. More importantly, the notion that when the President states American policy and the policy of this Administration somewhere, that it could be taken as an attack on anyone, and in the case of the question here: an attack on Barack Obama. The President said, read the speech, you didn't get that exactly right. The President's policies have been clear for a long time. We believe that we need to stand by Israel as a friend and ally in the Middle East. We believe that we shouldn't allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. We don't believe that you should negotiate with terrorists like Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. That is the long-standing position of the United States. If people disagree with that, they are free to, but it is not an attack on anyone. We are not going to allow for people to say, as fact, that the President attacked anyone on the floor of the Knesset. He asserted American policy, and we are going to continue to do so.

KELLY: Let me ask you, because NBC came out and said, look, editing is part of journalism. And that is true. We, in the news, are hard pressed to pick clips that will fit into a two-minute piece and so on, and they have those pressures there as well. What is your response to that defense? They also say that it is a gross misrepresentation of the facts to say that they engaged in deceitful editing.

GILLESPIE: All I can ask is to allow your viewers – and of course they can go on the website at MSNBC.com, to find out the actual airing of the President, what he actually said. But they didn't just truncate the President's comments; they excerpted the part where he took exception to the premise of the question and made it seem like he was agreeing with the premise of the question when he absolutely, utterly did not. That is what is misleading about it and they masked the edit. You couldn't tell that that response had been edited by NBC News. Our concern is that when you have people like Keith Olbermann and Christopher Matthews at MSNBC and the frequently blurring of the lines between that commentary – that advocacy on their part on behalf of certain candidates, with the NBC news division increasingly commingling, that there may be a spillover effect here that is disconcerting. We also asked NBC if they still considered Iraq to be a civil war, when we have seen the unity government of moderate Shia and Sunni go after Shia and Sunni extremists in Iraq, reclaim the port of Basra. They still have this public hand-wringing over deliberating and coming to a conclusion that Iraq was in civil war. They stopped saying it – that was in November of 2006, around September of 2007 they stopped saying it – but they have never said, were they wrong to declare it in the first place, or that they declared it over. They question whether or not official government data about the economy is believable. Why did they think that? They did not respond to those concerns at all.

KELLY: We put the statement from NBC on the screen about it being in charge of its editorial process.

GILLESPIE: I can request that they make available to their viewers what the President actually said and they're free to say no, which they did.

KELLY: We appreciate you being here. It is an extraordinary story and we appreciate your clarification.

"White House takes swipe at NBC News" -- What Do The Jeffs, Immelt and Zucker, Think About That Headline? And Oh Yes, GE Shareholders. Remember Them?

That was the headline of an article atop the website of The Hill today.

The Hill, as in Capitol Hill, is one of those insider-y publications that normally intimidate The Cable Gamer. But this piece, by Klaus Marre is clear as a bell:

The White House on Monday sent a scathing letter to NBC News, accusing the news network of “deceptively” editing an interview with President Bush on the issue of appeasement and Iran.

At issue were remarks Bush made in front of Israel's parliament earlier this week.

Specifically, White House counselor Ed Gillespie laments that the network edited the interview in a way that “is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that [Bush] agreed with [correspondent Richard Engel's] characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it.

“This deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline is utterly misleading and irresponsible and I hereby request in the interest of fairness and accuracy that the network air the President’s responses to both initial questions in full on the two programs that used the excerpts,” said Gillespie in the letter to NBC News President Steve Capus.

Gillespie used the opportunity to also inquire whether NBC News still believes that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. In November 2006, the network decided to label the infighting in the country a “civil war.”

“I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a ‘civil war,’ ” Gillespie wrote. “Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?”

Gillespie also hit NBC News on its reporting on the state of the economy.

“I’m sure you don’t want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the ‘news’ as reported on NBC and the ‘opinion’ as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines,” Gillespie concluded. “I welcome your response to this letter, and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network’s viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don’t hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division.”

So it will be interesting to see how NBC and MSNBC react to this blast from the White House. Of course, Keith Olbermann will be delighted, because he obviously enjoys being in a war--any war. As Peggy Noonan once said of Bill Clinton, he is a teabag who brings his own hot water. Although in Olbermann's case, it is more apt to say that he brings his own too-small-tea kettle. Or, come to think of it, he is, in fact, his own too-small tea kettle.

So count on Olbermann to blow his stack soon enough, quitting in a media martyred rage, whereupon he will go on to some other gig, paid for by some adoring liberal billionaire groupies.

But I wonder what the Jeffs think about this. They lack Olbermann's pyrotechnics--which some insist on calling "talent"--and besides, they have a lot of stock options to hang on to.

NBC president Jeff Zucker, of course, will be getting high-fives from his fellow MSMers. No doubt they will give him an Emmy, or a Peabody, or a Polk, just for getting under George W. Bush's skin.

But Zucker's boss, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt is in a more complicated situation. Maybe he's a Bush-hating lefty, too. But more likely, he is just your basic non-ideological corporate suit. That is, smart enough, even if he obviously isn't smart enough to fill the shoes of his predecessor Jack Welch.

And now, thanks to MSNBC and now NBC, Immelt finds himself even more over his head--he is in the deep waters of politics. Immelt & Co. find themselves in a war with not only Mark Levin, and now the White House, but soon enough, the entire conservative half of the country. That's not good for advertisers, shareholders, and customers.

If the libs are smart, they will think of some sort of award to give to Immelt, as a consolation prize for getting his corporate you-know-what into the bad-press grinder.

GE will regret the day that MSNBC hired Olbermann, thus introducing the left wing cancer into its body corporate. Heck, GE will eventually regret the day that it bought NBC.

Mark Levin vs. Keith Olbermann: The Two Jeffs, Immelt and Zucker, Scheming to "Bluewash" GE--Too Clever By Half?

The Cable Gamer has always figured that one key reason why the corporate hulk of GE/NBC/MSNBC keeps Keith Olbermann around is that the Two Jeffs (GE chief Jeff Immelt and his sidekick, NBC chief Jeff Zucker) figure that Olbermann "covers" their corporate conglomeration with the political/environmental Left.

That is, if GE is a $320 billion company, doing all sorts of, well, corporate things, then it's going to inevitably have lots of enemies among anti-corporate activists. So what to do?

One answer would be to put someone like Olbermann out there as a sort of one-man ideological bait-and-switch. (And with all of MSNBC moving in the same direction, call it a one-network bait-and-switch.) That is, cloak GE in the liberalism of Olbermann and the rest of MSNBC. Does that make sense? Sure it does!

(There's a phenomenon in corporate circles known as "greenwashing"-- that is, a company such as BP, which is basically an oil company [BP=British Petroleum] wakes up one day and declares itself to be an environmental company. It's all b.s., of course, but if BP spends enough money, a few eco-activists will either fall for it, or else simply be bought off.)

So if you're a lefty anti-corporate activist, you might think that GE, which has operations all over the world, from Africa to Latin America to Iran, might make a good target for some sort of "soak the rich" campaign. GE makes... plastics? Yuk! Jet engines? Ugh!! Nuclear power plants? Argh!!!

But hey, such an anguished lefty might say to himself or herself, wait a second! GE also has Olbermann on the payroll, and he hates George W. Bush. I mean, truly hates Bush. And he despises all Republicans, too. So Olbermann provides GE with some "bluewashing," as in blue-vs-red.

Indeed, so eager is MSNBC to push Olbermann to the forefront that it flouts the normal journalistic conventions. One might think, for example, that Olbermann's obvious anti-conservative bias would stop stop MSNBC from using Olbermann in presidential debates. One might think that, but one would think wrong, because there he has been. (By contrast, Fox has never dared to use Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity in its presidential debates.)

But in fact, Olbermann's overt bias is why the Jeffs like him! The more the GOP-bashing overtness, the better the cover for GE!

Also, it must be noted, Olbermann is getting better ratings lately--the Zeitgeist is so anti-Bush these days that perhaps even a foamer-at-the-mouther such as Olbermann might be acceptable to larger audiences. In which case, Jeff + Jeff might hope, MSNBC will go from being a loss-leader--an acceptable waste of money, given the ideological false-flagging he provides--into an actual profit center.

It could happen. But maybe not.

Why? Because eventually, conservatives will all figure out GE double game. Conservatives, God bless 'em, tend to be kneejerk supporters of private property and free enterprise, and so any corporate chieftain gets the benefit of the doubt-at least for a while.

But eventually, conservatives figure it out when a private enterprise is taking their support for granted--and then kicking them in the teeth. And that's just what GE is doing. When GE sucks up to the Left--trying to "greenwash" itself into acceptability in the eyes of, say, Al Gore and "bluewash" itself into the hearts of Democrats--well, GE can only do that if its implicit "base" on the pro-business right is secure.

Only now it's not secure. GE's suck-up-to-the-Left-while-taking-the-Right-for-granted strategy is about to meet its negation, which can be summed up in two words: Mark Levin.

OK, Levin is not quite a household word, but TCG predicts that he is soon to get a lot better known. Specifically, Levin is launching a campaign to get Olbermann suspended or fired. As hot-talking Levin puts it:

Let me tell you, this guy is really the scum of the earth...Hey Olbermann, I said you're the scum of the earth. And you know damn well what I'm talking about. [...]

This is the highest rated guy on MSNBC because he's taken up a radical position which one of his girlfriends wrote me and said he doesn't even believe, but does it, and he does it for ratings, because he knows there are nutjobs out there who will tune him in. But this is over the line. [...]

I'm calling on MSNBC to suspend Keith Olbermann because in the middle of a war, I don't think a phony journalist should be able to use his position to give aid and comfort to the enemy, and worse than that even, to smear the American GI. [...]

"Cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives." That's how you view the uniform? You're a disgrace. Why are on you on MSNBC? I ask General Electric, "What is this man doing on your network?" [...]

I believe in firing his ass! Why have boycotts and censorship? Fire his ass! And yet, I'm compassionate. I said, "At least, suspend him. Let's meet halfway on this." And I'll tell you why. If in World War II, Tokyo Rose were given a format like MSNBC night after night to undermine the American GI, to give aid and comfort to the terrorists, to pander to the worst elements of American society, to become a propagandist for the enemy, it would not have been tolerated. It's not as if Keith Olbermann brings anything to the table. He's a very dumb guy. He's not qualified to be a newscaster. He's not qualified to hold serious opinions, and that's why he relies on the Daily Kos, a Media Matters, leftwing Democrat operatives for his talking points each and every night. But for MSNBC, and NBC, and GE to prop this guy up and give him a soapbox, I'm sorry. He is the anti-soldier. This isn't an academic matter where we're debating some issue of import, but not an issue of life and death, but he is the mouthpiece, the prominent mouthpiece for our enemy. If you're going to call our soldiers cold-blooded killers who kill people to achieve their political objectives, then you're excrement. You're absolute excrement.[...]

Spitting on the American soldier. You think that's a good thing? You think that's entertainment? You think that's great for this country? I don't expect you to suppot the President. Great. But I do expect you to treat the troops with respect That's correct. [...]

How is it that only the liberals can make issues out of things they want to make issues out of when they're offended? Here we have a guy smearing hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, calling them cold-blooded killers who kill people to achieve their political objectives. I mean, what is this? [...]

NBC clings to this bitter, little know-nothing because he gets ratings from the far left in this country. The hate America, commie-left. They tell everybody, "Watch Olbermann, watch Olbermann." And so he plays to them, he panders to them. I see the hair-splitting going on. The fact is, if he were to compare any American to al Qaeda terrorists, it's so over the top. And yet to do it in the context of the United States military. I know what he's talking about. I'm not going to have the spin fly here, I can tell you that. It is so grotesque. And I am demanding that MSNBC say something about this, do something about this because Keith Olbermann is basically Tokyo Rose in a suit.

Phew! Thanks, btw, to Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters for that transcription.

In other words, in this war of words, Olbermann has finally met his match. Cable Gamers know Levin as a veteran of cable news, but now he has a radio show with a pretty good reach--and a great new cause.

Of course, there's no guarantee that Levin will be successful in his effort, but TCG thinks that he will find at least some success, because Olbermann is so over the top, and because it's now becoming clear that Immelt and GE are turncoats. Immelt & Co. use the instinctive support of conservatives as a platform, or stepping stone, to what they really crave--the approval of the Left.

Well, perhaps the two Jeffs can win the Left, if they sell out enough. But in doing so, they will lose the Right, along with fair-minded moderates.

GE has been willing to keep MSNBC around as a loss-leader, but those losses are about to go much higher, threatening to poison the whole of GE.

All About the O's: Olbermann vs. O'Reilly Smackdown Makes Front Page of The Washington Post! But Wait--Is This More Than Just a Tabloid Tussle?

There it is, big as life--or at least as big as the shrunken front page of the much downsized and bought-out Washington Post this morning. Under the headline, "Feud Fuels Bill O'Reilly's Blasts at GE"Post-man Howard Kurtz provides some scoops about the extraordinary escalation of the Keith Olbermann vs. Bill O'Reilly feud.

As Cable Gamers know, the two O-men have been ripping into each other for years. Olbermann, for example, routinely awards O'Reilly his nightly "worst person in the world" award--except when he is giving that dubious achievement award to Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and others he associates with "Fixed News," and "Fox Noise."

For his part, O'Reilly has responded, not so much by fighting with Olbermann, but by going after Olbermann's ultimate corporate boss, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, calling him "a pinhead" and "despicable," just as he is getting warmed up, as O'Reilly rips into GE's relationship with the terror-state of Iran.

OK, that's just cable-news hardball, back and forth, right? Well, no. Olbermann and O'Reilly have a right not to like each other, but there is an empirical question: Is General Electric doing business with Iran? And the answer clearly, is yes. Even Kurtz, while clearly preferring the "colorful feud" angle, acknowledges:

GE has long had a corporate presence in Iran, which U.S. officials say is providing weapons and training for Shiite militias in the Iraq conflict. Under growing criticism from the public and its own shareholders, GE announced in 2005 that it would accept no new business in Iran and would wind down existing contracts, which mostly involved sales of oil, gas and energy and health-care equipment. The remaining work, valued at less than $50 million, amounts to less than .01 percent of GE's income, and the company says the final four contracts will expire within weeks.

And Kurtz cites Tom Borelli, a portfolio manager and dissident GE shareholder, telling Immelt, at a GE annual meeting, that the company's products are keeping Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "comfy when he's plotting to kill U.S. troops and trying to annihilate Israel. It's just an outrage."

Interestingly, there hasn't been much coverage of this whole story--the MSM is strangely uninterested, for example? Could it be that reporters don't want to suggest, in any way, that George W. Bush might have something of an argument when he says that we are fighting terrorists in Iraq sot hat we don't have to fight them elsewhere? Or could it be that GE, which owns NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC, is simply so big that other MSMers are intimidated?

Those are interesting questions--no, actually, they are important questions. Vital questions. If GE is really is helping the Iranian regime--and why put the "if," since it's an empirical fact that GE is trading with Iran--then that's an outrage that transcends the to-ing and fro-ing of the Cable Game.

I should stop there, but I do have just one more thing on my mind: GE shareholders should be mindful that none of this controversy is doing them any good. This blogger, The Reasoned Skeptic, makes the point that GE has been hurt financially by all this ruckus. And when I see that GE stock is at 32, I think that surely somebody is going to come and rescue shareholders from this worst of both of both worlds--an amoral relationship with an American enemy, as well as poor economic performance.

So forget Olbermann. The real issue is Immelt.

Spiro T. Obama?

Spiro T. Agnew might be a somewhat obscure figure to Americans, even if he was the 39th vice president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1973--when he resigned in disgrace, amidst corruption charges. But he's not so obscure that his ghost isn't inhabiting the presidential campaign of Barack H. Obama.

While in the White House, Vice President Agnew became best known for his attacks on the news media--"nattering nabobs of negativism" was one favorite line as Agnew ripped into the media's coverage of Vietnam and other hot topics of four decades ago. Back then, it seemed to make sense for Agnew to attack the media; it was a stepping stone to his own presidential ambitions in 1976. Which, of course, were never realized, because Agnew was, after all, a crook, like his boss, Richard Nixon. But it wasn't a bad tactical plan for Agnew, because the press is always unpopular with somebody.

And now Obama is starting to sound like Agnew--blaming the press, or at least Fox News, for his misfortunes. Here's the way TV Newser summed it up, under the headline, "Obama Blames FNC For Likely Loss in Kentucky":

With two days before the vote, it appears Sen. Barack Obama is already conceding Kentucky and blaming his loss, in part, on Fox News Channel. Obama conducted a phone interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader's Ryan Alessi Friday. Alessi writes, Obama is "trying to 'reverse a lot of misconceptions' about his background" including his religion:

"Part of it is because there have been these e-mails that have been sent out very systematically, presumably by various political opponents, although I don't know who," he said. "And there are a lot of voters who get their news from Fox News. Fox has been pumping up rumors about my religious beliefs or my patriotism or what have you since the beginning of the campaign."

Clinton is expected to win handily in Kentucky, while Obama is ahead in the polls in Oregon. Voters in both states go to the polls Tuesday.

'Tis funny. First the Democrats tried to ignore Fox News. Then both Obama and Hillary Clinton started appearing on FNC air, breaking the attempted boycott of Fox demanded by Moveon.org and the lefty blogosphere.

But now, Obama is no longer ignoring Fox News, he is busy attacking Fox News. As long as they spell the name right, I guess Roger Ailes should think to himself.

Still, it's interesting to think about the alleged impact of Fox News. Can it really turn a whole state? In the Democratic primary? Wasn't that the job that MSNBC staked out for itself--be the "go to" network for Democrats, and to hell with Republicans? Could it be that gun-owning, God-fearing Democrats--the kind who "bitterly" resist enlightenment from the likes of Obama--really do like the earthy Fox News more than the limousine liberals at MSNBC?

In which case, where does that leave Obama for the general election? I mean, if he does win the Democratic nomination, as seems likely, won't he have to win Kentucky in November?

One would think Obama would try a different strategy, such as moving toward the center. But instead, he is replaying the Spiro Agnew playbook, of shooting--or at least shooting at--the messenger.

Maybe this press-bashing gambit will work for Obama, but it's worth recalling that the plan didn't work so well for Agnew.

"Scratching" Donny Deutsch: "Sometimes You Just Do Schmucky Things"

The Cable Gamer has never really had an opinion on Donny Deutsch's show on show on CNBC, mostly because I have only watched it a few times.

And now, I see from Jeff Bercovici that no one else is watching, either. In fact, the show "scratches" sometimes--that is, falls below the threshhold for a Nielsen rating.

But Deutsch is actually more interesting than his show--in a bad way. I followed a link from Jeff's Portfolio this article in The Pennsylvania Gazette, the Penn alumni magazine, which suggests that Deutsch has political ambitions, but seems to be more likely to be on the receiving end of a sex-harassment lawsuit than occupying Gracie Mansion.

Author Jordana Horn did even more damage to whatever political hopes Deutsch might have had. As such her article might be compared to the demolition job that Mark Leibovich performed on MSNBC's Chris Matthews last month with that piece in The New York Times Magazine, which eliminated any chance that Matthews would run for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010--or anytime thereafter.

But in point of fact, Deutsch gave Horn a lot of material to work with--even more than Matthews gave Leibovich. Here's some verbatim:

It is at this point that I notice, looking up from my notepad, that Deutsch is unbuttoning his shirt.

“You’re gonna have to watch me take my shirt off, because I have to change, all right?” he says. He stands up and finishes unbuttoning his shirt, facing me and sliding it off to reveal a bare chest and a not-bad set of abs for a 50-year-old guy. It’s clear that he’s aware that it’s a not-bad set of abs—perhaps more than a little aware.

“This isn’t part of the story,” he says perfunctorily, but immediately follows up by saying, “Oh, you can mention it. I did it in advertising once—I ripped my shirt off in front of a reporter and told her I had the best body in advertising.” He grins sardonically. “I can no longer make that statement.”

I want to tell him, I know you did. I’ve read your book, Often Wrong, Never In Doubt: Unleash the Business Rebel Within (2005). I recall one chapter devoted entirely to the incident when he took off his shirt in front of an Ad Age reporter in 2002 (noting “It didn’t hurt that the reporter was a woman”), and she reported it straight, rather than as the tongue-in-cheek move he’d intended. The title of that chapter—and I reconfirm it when I get home—is “The Big-Shadow Principle: Why taking your shirt off for the press is a really bad idea.”

In that chapter (on page 234), he had written, “I should have known there’s a difference between taking my shirt off among friends and colleagues and doing it in front of a reporter. Sometimes candidness, a certain goofball lunacy, a willingness to let people into your world and have some fun, just backfires. It certainly did this time.” The chapter concludes, “Sometimes, you’re a wise guy and it backfires on you. Sometimes you just do schmucky things.”

"Sometimes you just do schmucky things." Horn reports, you decide.

"McAuliffe: 90 percent of media for Obama""

I report, you decide.

Actually, Michael Calderone of The Politico did the reporting.

Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe has spoken favorably before of "fair and balanced" Fox before, but today on Fox & Friends, he went even further.

Host Steve Doocy asked, "What percentage of the mainstream media is in-the-tank for Barack Obama?"

McAuliffe responded: "Oh, 90 percent. I mean, from day one it is what it is. We’re not complaining. We have to deal with the hand we’re dealt with...."

Later, McAuliffe said that "Fox has been one of the most responsible in this Presidential campaign."

Another great brunet! Calderone, that is.

MSDNC: How the Left Sees MSNBC--As An Ally!

MakeThemAccountable is a liberal pro-Hillary Clinton website. But now that Barack Obama looks to be the Democratic nominee, even Hillary Democrats are seeking to warn Obama about the GOP onslaught to come. Perhaps Hilary Dems are in I-told-you-so mode. Perhaps they are legitimately trying to help Obama.

But either way, the cartoon above shows the way that Democrats see "their" network, MSNBC.

Here's the text that accompanied the cartoon--note the reworking of the Obama logo:

So far the pins tossed at the Obama Hot Air Balloon have pretty much bounced off. But wait… The Republican attack machine is formidable and already in the sky. The Republican National Committee has a 1,000 page dossier on Obama, and operatives have reportedly been lurking around Chicago looking deeper into Obama’s past actions and his pals who helped push him up the political ladder… Let’s hope the Democrats come up with a better solution as to who their nominee will be while an alternative is still available. Otherwise…well, my cartoon says it better than I can in words.

These Project for Excellence in Journalism Guys Need to Lighten Up--"The Daily Show" Is A Comedy

Leave it to the heavy-handed Project for Excellence in Journalism to produce a dull report, complete with elaborate footnotes, on a funny show. I can only hope that Jon Stewart has some fun with this.

"Lanny Davis on CNN primary night: 'Worst experience I ever had on television'"

You know, maybe The Cable Gamer should get in the habit of only running verbatims in the headline. Because that's what the above header is, a verbatim--courtesy of Michael Calderone, one of the many hot writers for that hot publication, The Politico.

Here's the text, which sure makes CNN's Anderson Cooper and all of MSNBC look like putzes. Here's the best stuff:

Regarding CNN’s competitors, Davis said that MSNBC is “shameless about their bias toward Obama,” and Fox has been the fairest — which is saying a lot coming from a self-described member of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

“Fox, no matter how much you might criticize an ideological bent, in this campaign, they have been religiously middle-of-the-road, point-counterpoint,” Davis said.

And that’s what Davis said he expects from CNN, the network where he’s had “the longest history, best friends, and most respect.”

And here's the whole thing, verbatim:

When Clinton supporter Lanny Davis appeared on CNN during primary night, shortly before 10 p.m., there was a peculiar exchange with host Anderson Cooper.

Cooper: Lanny, let me start off with you. We haven't heard from you tonight. Your take on Barack Obama's speech earlier?
Davis: You haven't heard from me tonight. And I'm not sure — I’m not sure you want to hear from me tonight but —
Cooper: We heard from Paul Begala. This is your big chance.
Davis: Well, actually, I don't think we heard very much from Paul Begala. We did hear an awful —
Cooper: All part of the conspiracy against Hillary Clinton, I suppose.

During the Election Night broadcast, there was palpable tension between Davis and CNN reporters and panelists on camera — and apparently, with producers off camera.

Looking back, Davis said by phone this afternoon, he considers it “the worst experience I ever had on television.”

What bothers Davis most is that CNN is the network with which he’s had the longest relationship, where he’s maintained close friendships through the years, and that he's always considered middle-of-the-road in its coverage. But in his opinion, CNN has not treated Hillary Clinton fairly in the ’08 race.

Formerly special counsel to President Bill Clinton, Davis admits wholeheartedly to being a partisan and strongly supports Clinton against Obama.

So what happened on Tuesday night?

Davis, by his account, was invited to appear on the CNN panel in New York but declined because of a family commitment — his son’s baseball practice in Maryland. Instead, he opted to participate by remote from the network’s D.C. studio.

He was instructed to arrive around 8:30 p.m., he said, in order to take over the pro-Clinton position once Paul Begala left. So Davis left the baseball practice early in order to arrive at the studio on time, but he didn’t make it on air until almost 10 p.m.

A CNN spokesperson said that Davis was scheduled to go on-air at 9pm, but CNN didn't go to him or any commentator during Sen. Obama's speech in the 9pm hour, just as no commentators were on-air during Sen. Clinton's speech later the same night.

Davis said he told a producer several times before getting on-air that he wanted to offer a counterpoint to CNN’s panel, which he thinks is too pro-Obama.

Regarding the panel's make-up, Davis said that he believes Gloria Borger, David Gergen, Donna Brazile and Carl Bernstein are all tougher on Clinton than on her rival. And he maintains that Roland Martin is definitely a “partisan for Obama.” (Martin has not official endorsed Obama and is not labeled as such on the network,)

“I have seen the stacked deck on the so-called panels, which always struck me as imbalanced against Hillary on Election Night,” Davis said, adding that a producer assured him there would be “equal time.”

So after waiting for nearly 90 minutes, Davis finally got on the air only to hear Cooper’s “sarcastic crack about anti-Clinton conspiracy.”

“I literally had to take a breath,” Davis said.

A Cooper spokesperson at CNN, when contacted by e-mail about the exchange, wrote, “I believe Davis mentioned his problem with our coverage on the air that night.”

Indeed, Davis offered his critique right from the start.

“First of all, the rules say that the majority of delegates will carry the nomination,” Davis said on the air. “And although John King constantly refers to the number of delegates elected out of the states, the rules don't say pledged delegates or unpledged delegates. They say delegates.”

Later, Davis called King a "friend” and a “good journalist. However, Davis said, “I do think he has assumptions in his reporting that I simply disagree with, respectfully.”

Also, Brazile, who had already sparred earlier with Begala, said to Davis: “Now, if you want to keep fighting, let's fight. But let's you and I go in the green room and fight, and not keep this fight up.”

“I'm not fighting with you, Donna,” he responded.

While Davis now maintains that the pro-Clinton position wasn’t given ample time, he did acknowledge on air that he’d gotten to make his point. “Thank you for letting me speak for so long, Anderson,” he said at one point.

But off camera, Davis considered leaving altogether, but decided not to storm out of the studio. So he remained in the Washington for a couple hours, and had been told he'd get the opportunity back on the air after Clinton’s speech. But Cooper never came back to him.

“That’s when I went ballistic,” Davis said.

Since Tuesday, Davis has spoken to CNN political director Sam Feist and has decided not to appear on the network during election coverage.

"Our coverage on May 6 was abundantly fair to all sides,” said a CNN spokesperson.

“The facts speak for themselves — numerous Clinton supporters appeared on CNN during Tuesday's primary coverage including Lanny Davis, Paul Begala and Clinton campaign spokesperson Kiki McLean," the spokesperson continued.

And despite Davis’s protest of election night coverage, he’s actually appearing tonight on “Larry King Live.” Davis said that King is always fair, and he will never stop going on his show.

Regarding CNN’s competitors, Davis said that MSNBC is “shameless about their bias toward Obama,” and Fox has been the fairest — which is saying a lot coming from a self-described member of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

“Fox, no matter how much you might criticize an ideological bent, in this campaign, they have been religiously middle-of-the-road, point-counterpoint,” Davis said.

And that’s what Davis said he expects from CNN, the network where he’s had “the longest history, best friends, and most respect.”

"New MSNBC-New York Times Show Limps Out of the Gate"

That's the headline atop Felix Gillette's piece in The New York Observer. I report, you decide!

The liberal media, of course, worship The New York Times. And so liberal media-tors have a hard time coming to grips with the reality that many, if not most, Americans dislike the Times. One might assume that a few cold reality-splashes in the face would cure the liberals of this infatuation, but it never seems to happen--the libs keep drinking the Times koolaid.

Heck, even Mrs. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has jumped ship--but you can always count on MSNBC to bring up the liberal rear, in politics, and in ratings.

Here's Gillette's report:

On Monday, MSNBC kicked off The New York Times Special Primary Edition, a new irregularly recurring daytime political show hosted by John Harwood in which Times scribes chew over news from the campaign trail.

So how did the show's premier do?

Not great!

According to Nielsen data, "The New York Times Special Primary Edition," finished fourth among cable news networks in the 2 P.M. time slot.

Here are the numbers in terms of total viewers:

(1) FOX News Channel – 873,000

(2) CNN – 508,000

(3) CNBC – 401,000

(4) MSNBC (New York Times)– 271,000

(5) Headline News – 199,000

The show's debut put up similarly lackluckster numbers among viewers aged 25-54:

(1) FNC – 205,000

(2) CNN – 185,000

(3) CNBC – 135,000

(4) HLN – 101,000

(5) MSNBC (New York Times) – 101,000

So Fox beats MSNBC by triple in overall ratings and double "in the demo." Heck, even CNN kills 'em.

Another Step in The Cable Game--Hyperlocal Networks

The New York Times' TV beat reporter Bill Carter hasn't been laid off yet, so he continues to do excellent work, to wit, this scoop on NBC flagship station WNBC's plan to create itself a 24/7 "content center," providing news along the lines of New York One. Carter got the 411 on "NBC New York" from John Wallace, whose brand new title is "president of local media":

If the plan is deemed a success — and Mr. Wallace said that should be clear by the second quarter of next year — NBC will begin to take the same steps with the other stations it owns, in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. NBC owns 10 stations; two of them, in Miami and Hartford, Conn., are for sale. The reasons for the reshaping of WNBC are tied to the coming expansion in digital capacity for local broadcasters as well as the sharp decline in profitability for local stations. Stations will soon be able to add a number of separate channels as digitalization will make possible the division of the local broadcast spectrum. (NBC may also add a separate channel devoted to local lifestyle coverage, like real estate listings and restaurant reviews.)

The Cable Gamer has been plenty critical of NBC and its various offshoots and excrescences for their obviously biased political coverage, but TCG admires technical innovation.

In the cool new world of Convergence, it only makes sense that there would be a proliferation of portals. Cable, Net--what's the difference? It's all streaming ones and zeros, by any name.

Oh sure, TV is still "hot," in the sense of live and immediacy, and at least the chance that watching is some sort of collective communal event, but just as valuable to people is the ability to get the news that they want, about the topic that they want, when they want it.

And that's the promise of hyperlocal news. The Cable Game has always been about lots of channels, and lots of choice. It will be soon be about lots and lots of channels, and lots and lots of choice.

"Clinton Camp Chides NBC"

That's the headline above the Howard Kurtz item in The Washington Postthis morning. And here's the verbatim:

It's no secret that Hillary Clinton's top aides have long been angry at MSNBC for coverage they consider blatantly pro-Obama.

But the final straw seems to have come Tuesday night, when Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, declared on MSNBC: "We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it." Other MSNBC pundits agreed, and Russert repeated the verdict yesterday, saying that barring a collapse by Barack Obama or an act of God, "this race is over."

In an e-mail yesterday, Jay Carson, Clinton's press secretary, told NBC's political director Chuck Todd: "Can you think of one good reason we should continue to cart you guys around the country with us, given that your network has declared the entire race over?"

No wonder Bill O'Reilly calls NBC "Obama HQ." It's now obvious that the Clinton campaign agrees. If Obama does end up winning the Democratic nomination, we'll find out what the viewers--and voters--think about the coverage, and the candidate such coverage created.

CNN Follows MSNBC in Sucking Up To Obama

Credit must go to AP's David Bauder for first catching CNN anchor John Roberts as he declared that his interview with Barack Obama would be a "Reverend Wright-free zone." And secondary credit must go to TV Newser, which played up the Bauder story.

But neither Bauder nor Newser seem willing to come grips with the real news here: CNN is now following the Obama-philic lead of MSNBC in an obvious attempt to curry favor with Obama, and his supporters.

You know, Keith Olbermann and the rest of gang at "Obama HQ," who are doing their best to win the Democratic nomination for Obama.

And now malleable reporters are falling into line. A reporter such as Roberts (pictured above) undoubtedly has conventional enough liberal views--he did, after all, work at CBS News under Dan Rather. Moreover, Roberts is undoubtedly tired and fearful of netroots nastiness. And so the solution, if one can call it that is, to not only fail to ask Obama the tough questions about his associations, but to actually go so far as to brag to their lefty viewers that they are taking a dive on Obama.

So now CNN is following the lefty lead of MSNBC. That might be good for ratings, but John, it is a pathetic abdication of the journalistic mission.

How Obama Will Win "The MSNBC Primary," And Thus Probably The Democratic Nomination...

...although the general election in November is a completely different story.

It's hard for The Cable Gamer to believe that Barack Obama's can survive, for example, images of his good friend Bill Ayers
deliberately and delightedly stomping on an American flag.

But TCG offers this confident prediction: that photowill never be seen on MSNBC. Why? Because MSNBC is going to get out of the game of noting anything that might be wrong with Obama.

A case in point is the way that Sen. John Kerry shouted down MSNBC's Alex Witt. MSNBC is "the place for politics," of course, and so that would seem to mean that MSNBC would blitz-cover the political story of the day. Indeed, as noted here on Monday afternoon, that's what MSNBC did to Obama in the wake of the speech by Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club. MSNBC covered the story heavily, and of course, Obama was hurt badly that week, by the combined weight of all the coverage, almost all of it negative.

Of course, it's not the job of the news networks to do favors (or disfavors) for anybody. But wait! We're talking about NBC and its offshoots, which Bill O'Reilly correctly describes as "Obama Headquarters."

So what does that mean, in terms of coverage? This is what it means. Now that the Obamans have got their legs underneath them again, they are spinning, and spinning hard--and that means that they are going to insist that the American people wish to "move on" from considerations of Ayers, Wright, etc.

Well, maybe they do, and maybe they don't. But we know that MSNBC is about to move on. And the lefty media will cheer. For example, Jason Linkins, writing for The Huffington Post, was eager to chime in, under the headline, "Kerry Rips MSNBC On Wright: 'You People Need To Let Go Of This.'" (That's a screen grab above.) And here's the Witt-Kerry transcript, as provided by Linkins at Huffpost:

WITT: Okay. He said it. A 20-year relationship. Reverend wright married him. He is the one who baptized a god parent. How personally painful is this for him?

KERRY: Can I say something to you? Obviously it is painful and he said it. You folks need to let go of this. Television needs to stop dwelling on something that is in the past. I thought Barack Obama yesterday gave America his second big presidential moment of this campaign. The first when he spoke out about the issue of race. The second yesterday, when he made it clear, every one of the statements of the minister are just unacceptable. They're not the person that he knew before. Now let's move on to how we'll put people to work. How are you going to give people health care? How are you going to create jobs in america? What Barack Obama is offering in this gas price issue is real leadership. I mean, do we want people who sort of put their fingers in the wind and throw out an idea for the short term that is sort of politically pleasing, or do you want a here who stands up and says, no, what we need is to really lower gas prices by having a real energy policy, an intelligent policy that puts in place the incentives for renewable fuels and alternative fuels. That's what Barack Obama is doing. And it is you guys have to focus on the thing that really matter to the American electorate. The other thing is just worn out, old history now. This guy had his narcissistic moment and it is finished.

WITT: Okay. Point well taken. Did I say to begin, can I just say, sir, I knew you weren't going to like that question. On the record.

KERRY: Let's move on to the thing that really matter to people. I think people in America are tired of this stuff.

WITT: Okay.

Don't we all wish that we could tell everyone else what we did, and did not, want them to ask us about! After we issue an order, we hear a meek "Okay" as the response. Now that's a power move!

Well, of course, that's exactly what the Obamans want--to change the subject. And then Witt and the rest of MSNBC, plus much of the MSM, will be happy enough to comply.

But there is one little thing. Actually, a not so little thing. Not all the rest of the media will be as obedient--make that eager--as MSNBC to overlook Obama's flaws. Most Americans, for example, are probably curious as to whether or not Obama is a radical who hangs out with radicals.

After all, others knew better. If Oprah Winfrey chooses to reveal that she stopped attending Wright's church in the 90s, according to The Chicago Tribune, well, then, what does that say about Obama, and his judgment, that he kept going till just a few months ago?

To MSNBC, none of this means probably means anything. Orders are orders. The party line is the party line. After all, MSNBC and its sister networks, NBC and CNBC, have a lot invested in Obama. As Jim Pinkerton observed on "Fox News Watch" over the weekend, Obama has won what Pinkerton called "the MSNBC primary," but now Hillary is competing in "the Fox News primary," viz. her interview with Bill O'Reilly.

It will be easy enough for the Obamans to mau-mau MSNBC into nothing but Witt-like servility. And some, such as Huffpost, will cheer.

But the rest of the media will be harder to intimidate. And less eager to please.

The Cable Gamer never makes political predictions, but it's safe to say that John McCain could win this election. It's at least a possibility, but you'll never know it from watching MSNBC.

James Wolcott--All About Keith Olbermann and His Ilk

The Cable Gamer has always been a fan of James Wolcott. Of course, Wolcott is no conservative in the partisan political sense, but he does seem to have an instinct for excellence and justice of a kind. And as Plato explained 2500 years ago, that's the true test of a virtuous conservative.

So while nobody likes snobs, snobbery has a larger social value if it serves to uphold and enforce standards. Every month in Vanity Fair, and just about every day in his blog, Wolcott, in his own sly style, seeks to elevate the best and execrate the worst. And so obviously, Wolcott has no sympathy for the likes of Keith Olbermann, or any of the rest of the mean-spirited left-wing yakety yaks at MSNBC. But hey, don't take my word for it--here's the proof, from his latest column in the June issue of VF (yup, the one with Miley Cyrus inside):

The garrulous MSNBC host and Gatling gun Chris Matthews was so egregious in his anti-Hillary slant that he apologized after receiving a coast-battering storm of critical backlash, and colleague David Shuster was put in the penalty box after asking if Hillary had “pimped out” daughter Chelsea.

That's pretty bad. But of course, you-know-who always wins the prize for wretched excess. Here's what Wolcott wrote next:

Keith Olbermann would later outdo both with an excoriating “Special Comment” on his MSNBC show that accused her of being complicit in the race-baiting of Obama: “Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth.”

"Awash in filth"? Words fail me when it comes to adequately challenging Olbermann's unique ability to turn over-the-top vilification of others into even more over-topping self-congratulation.

Happily, I can always rely on Wolcott to help adjudicate wreckless and wrecking rhetoric. Indeed, in his piece, Wolcott goes on to deliciously dish Andrew Sullivan, who would seem to have a crush on Barack Obama, if you know what I mean and I think you do. Happily, the whole article is online, VF seems to have changed its editorial policy of late. Yay!

As such, Wolcott reminds me of George Sanders, pictured above, who won an Oscar for his 1950 portrayal of a wily theater critic in the classic "All About Eve." Here's a bit of Sanders, in his best-ever character:

"My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater -- as ants to a picnic, as the boll weevil to a cotton field."

That's good neo-Wildean wit--tinctured, of course, a tiny touch of knowing self-loathing. But in fact, The Cable Gamer believes, critics--honest critics, at least--have a useful keep-'em-honest function. The diabolical DeWitt is a case in point--he has a streak of divine justice in him. As fans of the film recall, DeWitt catches the conniving Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter) in all her lies. It seems that Eve has lied not only about her devotion to aging stage diva Margo Channing (Bette Davis), but also fabricated her entire background. Eve isn't really Eve, and she even lied about a fictional boyfriend, "Eddy," who was killed, she averred, in World War II. The vile truth about Eve is all too much for even a cynic such as DeWitt, who confronts her in the film's climactic scene. In particular, DeWitt denounces Eve for her lie about "Eddy," calling that "a slur on our dead heroes and the women who loved them." (That's from memory, anyone who has the exact quote is welcome to correct me.) But the point here is that DeWitt understands that the bitchy and backstabby world that he lives in, and revels in, is only made possible by the real sacrifice of real Americans. And so DeWitt is a sort of Platonic Guardian, allowing lies about little things, but making sure that the truth is told about important things. And nothing is more important than war for national defense. It's their sacred memory, DeWitt knows, that must be protected. And the solemn reverence of loved ones is also not to be trifled with. The collective maintenance of civilization must always trump individual ambition.

And so it is with Wolcott, who uses his writing skills to preserve some decent sense of reference and proportion. That's decency made all the more pointed, of course by a wicked wit. Thus Wolcott jibes that Arianna Huffington has turned The Huffington Post into "the celebrity clubhouse of Obamamania." And going further, Wolcott arches an eyebrow as he observes:

The majority of Huffpo’s high-profile contributors were so over the rainbow about Obama that it was as if they had found rapture in the poppy fields and were rolling around on their backs like ladybugs.

I have little doubt that Wolcott will attack some other target next, including, perhaps, some figures that I like. And so I reserve the right to disagree with Wolcott, even as I have forfeited my right not to adore him, Like the fictional DeWitt, the real Wolcott is always entertaining, and always compelling.

As I said, I am a fan.

The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times Catch Up To The Cable Game

The Cable Game believes that both Brian Stelter and Matea Gold are excellent TV reporters, for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, respectively. So it's not their fault if I beat them!

Both Gold and Stelter both deserve lots of credit for their pair of stories, "Democrats and Fox News Make Friends," and "Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton embrace Fox News."

Hats off to both Gold and Stelter. But this Cable Gamer is doffing her cap, too, because I was all over this story on Wednesday! It's quite possible, of course, that both Gold and Stelter had the idea at the same time as me, or maybe even before, but thanks to the miraculous nature of blogospheric communication, this humble no-frills no editor website beat both of those august, albeit faltering, broadsheets.

But without a doubt, Gold and Stelter both pushed the story forward. As Gold put it, a year ago, FNC "was considered a pariah" by some Democrats, but now, things have changed:

"Fox has given Hillary Clinton better coverage than all the other cables," Clinton campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe said during a radio interview last week with Fox News' John Gibson.

Of course, the far left is furious:

"It legitimizes a right-wing network that is going to use that credibility to smear them in the general election," said Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org. "They're doing this because it helps them in the short term, but we all know it hurts them in the long term."

Well, we all know that the far left hates Fox, but it would seem clear that the Moveon-ites have shot their wad. In calling Hillary Clinton a "racist"--an absurd charge by the way--the left forced Hillary to look elsewhere for votes, away from her traditional base in the far-left feminist left. And when Hillary moved to the center, she started winning states--Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania. And so then Obama had to move to the middle, too. It wasn't a race to the bottom, as the lefty mag The Nation magazine put it, it was a race to middle. Sorry, lefties!

As Stelter explained, the Democratic candidates are simply, uh, hunting--yes, plenty of Democrats are gun-lovers!--for the biggest clusters of political "ducks":

“It’s probably true that we appeal to white working-class voters,” said Brit Hume, the network’s Washington managing editor and the host of “Special Report.” “The candidates are going where the voters are.”

But don't take Hume's word for it. The proof is the footing--the Democrats are footing over to Fox, where nobody on the payroll has ever said "God Damn America."

Some say, of course, that this is just a temporary relationship, between FNC and top Dems. More precisely, many on the left are hoping that this is just a temporary relationship. And maybe it is, although by most accounts Obama gave one of his effective interviews ever to Chris Wallace last Sunday (pictured above).

But if Hillary and Obama conclude that Fox can be helpful in winning inside a Democratic primary, how will they regard Fox in a general election? When swing voters, "Reagan Democrats," really really matter?

Yet to be heard from, of course, are the far-right conservatives, and how they might react to Clinton and Obama's moves to the center. As Bill O'Reilly has observed, some on the right are so blinded by hostility that they can't even so progress when it is being achieved.

And, in fact, it's progress when news audiences get to hear all points of view, and then, with the guide of honest (albeit oftentimes opinionated) reporters and experts, those auds get to make up their own mind.

That's the American Way. And Fox, Obama, and Clinton are all doing their part in the great deliberative process of democracy. At least for now!

UPDATE: And now I see that Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean is going to be on "Fox News Sunday"--the liberal blockade is really crumbling.