Release the Cackle (of Deliciousness)!
June 23, 2011 9:08 am ET by Eric Boehlert
This week, Keith Olbermann debuted his Countdown show on Current TV, having left MSNBC earlier this year. According to Nielsen numbers released by Current, Countdown’s Monday night debut attracted 179,000 viewers between the ages of 25-54. It was an impressive showing for Current, a cable channel whose primetime audience in the past has hovered around 30,000 viewers.
Countdown did well enough to beat out its CNN competition in the 8 p.m. time slot. What’s also telling is how, in just one night, Olbermann managed to completely obliterate the ratings of Fox’s Eric Bolling, whose nightly Fox Business show continues to be mired in a ratings wasteland.
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Last minute Turkey-cooking help from Eatocracy, via CNN. (Ah, yet another way vegetarianism leads to restful sleep.)
At least anonymous bloggers are very clear and truthful about what they are: often citizens whose jobs or other interests prevent them from attaching their names to their political expression. By stark contrast, all of these establishment media outlets perpetrate a total fraud on the public by pretending that they have standards for when anonymity will be used even though, as these examples from the last 24 hours alone prove, they routinely violate those alleged standards for absolutely no reason. It just never ceases to amaze how much establishment journalists like Roberts and Phillips love to rail against the Evils of Internet Anonymity when reckless, cowardly anonymity — for purposes ranging from catty, trivial gossip to pernicious propaganda and everything in between — is a central tool of their “profession” and of the political class they cover.
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has posted this CNN interview of Fred McCallister, VP, Allegiance Capital Corporation by Anderson Cooper of CNN. According to McCallister,
Using the dispersants allows the oil to stay under the surface and this accomplishes several purposes. … It makes it a lot more difficult to quantify the amount of oil that’s coming out, which has a direct impact on damages and royalties that have to be paid; it keeps it out of sight and out of mind; and it allows BP to amortize the cost of the cleanup over several years — 10 to 15 years — because some of this oil is going to biodegrade but a lot of that oil is going to roll up on the beaches for 10 or 15 years. And if they can amortize that over 10 or 15 years as opposed to dealing with that over the next 15 months, that’s a much better financial position for BP to be in.
With a faint glimmer of journalistic integrity, Cooper challenges McCallister as to BP’s intentionality, proposing that perhaps they’re just incompetent. But as it has been documented, BP brings a great deal of skill to impression management, so this explanation is plausible. But also watch to hear how the rest of the world handles such disasters.
Bobby Jindal must have taken a correspondence course in leadership from Al Haig. Because if there is no photographic proof, the problem doesn’t exist.
Fri Jun 11, 2010 at 02:40:04 PM PDT
Here’s a question for Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal: Why are government officials under his authority joining forces with BP to block media coverage of the oil spill?
Here’s the background: Yesterday, CNN’s Jim Acosta reported that he and his camera operator were denied access to a facility treating oil-soaked wildlife despite authorization from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Acosta said he was blocked by a BP contractor calling itself the Louisiana State Animal Response Team as well as an official from the Louisiana Fish and Wildlife Service Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and a member of the Louisiana National Guard, both of which are under Gov. Jindal’s control.
When the CNN crew attempted to videotape the facility, a guardsman told them to stop, saying “I’m going to have to ask you to stop taking pictures here.” When CNN appealed, Chris Buco, an official from the BP contractor, also denied access, saying he had the “final” authority on who would get access to the facility. And an official from the Louisiana Fish and Wildlife Service Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (which operates under Jindal’s command) defended the BP contractor’s decision, saying “it’s more important for the animals to have a quiet, calm, controlled area at this point.”
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