An honest brawler: Why I’ll miss Olbermann

With each new iteration of conservative thought, every new conservative encroachment on a previously placid domain, the liberal reaction began to evolve, from indifference to condescension to irritation to tantrum. By the time Mr. Olbermann got into the business, the tantrum had given way to something stronger. Intellectual eclampsia. His genius was to embody it…

Nor was Mr. Olbermann only good for capitalism. For a long time, the dominant mode of liberal argument was to ironize, or tut-tut, or dissemble, or manipulate the terms of discourse, or stack the deck in debates that are supposed to be balanced. The “Countdown” host did away with the old-fashioned liberal snigger and replaced it with a full-frontal snarl…

Rather, the real threat is Good Morning America-style niceness, USA Today-style consensus-seeking, all-round squeamishness when it comes to words like “Islam,” the political masquerade of “news analysis” from papers like the New York Times, and so on. In today’s media landscape, audiences are being presented with a choice between voices who are honest (at least about their biases) but not objective, and those who claim to be objective but are rarely honest. Not surprisingly, Americans increasingly prefer the former.