Skip ahead to halfway through or else you’ll have to endure an especially tedious few minutes of Murrow reading from his enemies list, punctuated naturally with Bill O’Reilly being named one of the worst people in the world for having a silly book title. How egregious is this? Egregious enough to precipitate a minor yet welcome “I never realized he was this bad” lefty blog backlash, the star entry of which is HuffPo’s Rachel Sklar gawking at the spectacle of unfair coverage of Hillary being dismissed as “nonsense” on, of all places, MSNBC. I’m less amused by that than by the thrust of Olby’s defense of Lee Cowan, the reporter taken to task by Couric for admitting that it’s hard to stay objective in covering Obama. It’s only by acknowledging the temptation towards bias, our man suggests, that the true pros are able to rise above it and “separat[e] the hype from the news” — a statement so precious in its obliviousness to his own M.O. that I half-believe he’s joking. If, as he claims, Couric is wrong to confuse “commentators” with reporters, we know just the guy to blame for having blurred the two roles, don’t we?
He’s back tonight, incidentally, with a Speshul Komment about McCain’s Iraq comments that’s sure to feature the balletic grimacing and run-on sentences that say Anger! like no one else can. Exit request: Read this. You won’t regret it.
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