"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.

"The problem isn't YouTube, it's CNN."

The problem is CNN? Don't take my word for it--take the word of someone who works for a corpporate sibling to CNN.

This Cable Gamer has always been a fan of Ana Marie Cox, ever since her Wonkette days. Indeed, since she went to Time magazine, I have worried that her distinctive voice, both saucy and fearless, was going to be lost.

But I felt better when I saw this piece of hers, on the Republican backlash to a future debate to be sponsored by CNN and YouTube.

It would have been easy for Cox to heap all the blame on the Republicans, for being killjoys in the face of new technology. But instead, Cox dived straight into the heart of the issue, which is anti-Republican bias.

Her piece was fair, but it included this important graf:

The view from the right was less favorable about the impact of this technological shift on politics. White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters that the President had not even watched, saying Bush was "not big on YouTube debates." Hugh Hewitt, a popular right-wing blogger and radio talk show host, got more specific about what conservatives might object to in a CNN/YouTube debate — he alleged that CNN cherrypicked the submissions for biased questions that a "responsible" journalist wouldn't ask: "the CNN team used the device of the third-party video to inject a question that would have embarrassed any anchor posing it." One staffer for a Republican candidate now leaning toward not participating put it this way: "The problem isn't YouTube, it's CNN."

Those last words are worth noting, and repeating, and re-bolding:

"The problem isn't YouTube, it's CNN."

In other words, Republican presidential hopefuls, and the GOP overall, are starting to wise up--CNN is not their friend. In fact, it's an enemy--a bad enough enemy to make some Republican presidential candidates, including Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, say that they won't take part.

But at the same time, hats off to Cox, because CNN, of course, is owned by Time-Warner, which also owns her employer, Time magazine. So for Cox to put this dig at CNN in print--well, she has made a gutsy and important contribution she has made to the proper understanding of media coverage in the 2008 presidential race. And that understanding includes the fact that two of the three cable news networks, "MSDNC" an CNN, are pretty much openly siding with the Democrats now.

Still, TCG hopes that the Republicans attend the debate, becxause on principle, TCG objects to boycotts, by either side. Why? Because they hurt the free discourse of ideas and thus hurt The Cable Game overall. So I don't want to see the GOP boycott the upcoming CNN/YouTube debate--I want to see CNN play it straight.

Even you, La Anderson Cooper!

And yet it seems as though the boycott mania is spreading, viz. this signficant article from the AP's TV veteran David Bauder, headlined, "Liberals Going After Fox Advertisers." The liberals can't change Fox--because as we know, FNC is fair, balanced, and unafraid.

But liberal boycotts can set loose conservative counter-boycotts, and thus cause an escalating arms race of boycotts, which would be bad for all of us who want a lively Cable Game. So TCG hopes that the GOP plays in the next debate, scheduled for September 17, and that CNN earns back at least a little of the trust that it has lost over the last decade or so.

You, The Tube, and YouTube

So Time magazine, joined at the corporate hip to CNN, has picked "You" as its "Person of the Year." Well, it will be hard for any of us to dislike that choice, won't it? After all, aren't we all flattered to be accorded this honor, for all "our" hard work in terms of generating and aggregating content for YouTube and Daily Motion and 50 million or more blogs? Which is to say, Time has simply pandered to its readership. In its glory days, decades ago, Time would have scanned the horizon, and looked for the most newsworthy figure, including villains, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Kim Jong Il of North Korea. After all, Adolf Hitler was a Time "Man of the Year," twice, and so was Josef Stalin. And the Ayatollah Khomeini. And by any good logic, Osama Bin Laden should've been the "Man of the Year" for 2001--what with 9-11 and all.

But Time has lost its standing with its audience, and so this Norma Desmond of magazines now has to grovel for its closeup with audience. Just give people what they want--and then beg them to take it.

Nothing wrong with the free market, of course, even at its most cynical and craven, but then one must ask: Why bother with magazines at all? Or editors? Why not just let RSS, or Google News be in charge of news-aggregation? Once again, nothing wrong with that, but Google News, or RealClearPolitics, or even the lefty Buzzflash, are free!

Call me old-fashioned, but I sort of like the idea of an editor who simply decides what's important and tells it to us. We have doctors who are expert at what they do, and we rely on them to help us cut through the "noise" of our own physical conditions and tell us what's serious and what isn't, and what's causing symptoms, and so on. So why not the same utilization-of-expertise for news? Nobody makes you watch, of course, but if you come to trust one outlet over another, then outlet ought to be your guide--your virtual Virgil, taking you, Dante-like, through the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradisio of our reality.

Meanwhile, in a relatedly interesting development, there's lots of corporate wrestling over this self-same issue of content aggregation, and who can aggregate it--what with everyone either suing YouTube, or joining with YouTube, or planning a rival consortium to take on YouTube. As a sign of the changing times, it's indicative that one of the new-media players watching this story is an outlet called Laptop Logic.

So, please keep your seatbelts fastened and your hands in the car--it's going to be a wild ride through the second century of The Cable Game.