Keith Olbermann vs. TVNewser…

Before I go completely offline for the next few days or so I just have to comment on this Keith Olbermann post on Daily Kos regarding TVNewser’s reporting on whether MSNBC producers were told not to mention the Cramer/Stewart showdown…(via J$)

So I’m reading the TVNewser post for the first time.

Frankly, the guy who posted this, the site’s Associate Editor, Steve Krakauer (“SteveK”), is well known around the industry as being entirely in Fox’s pocket.

His “MSNBC producers have been told” not to mention this, is, frankly, bullshit.

Have a look at his posts on this otherwise successfully neutral site: they are Fox News and Fox Business Channel press release rewrites, and anonymous criticisms from “industry sources” of people at CNN and MSNBC.

The Fox Business stuff is particularly egregious and particularly relevant to this. If a newspaper with a circulation of 500 people runs a feature on somebody on that channel, SteveK summarizes it, posts a picture from it, posts a link to it. I mean, seriously, if there’s been any publicity for this channel that has yet to get a measurable audience after a year on the air (that means they’re under 15,000 viewers), that hasn’t gotten a link on TVNewser courtesy SteveK, it’d be a shocking upset.

Rachel could get the cover of Newsweek and he wouldn’t link to it.

So, did Stewart do a good job? Obviously. Did we get ordered not to run it? Nope. Was stirring up rumors about a ban in the interest of a Foxophilic blogger with the credibility of a bush league Drudge? You bet.

Wow. Just wow. Ok, first of all I know for a fact of at least one incident where FNC was seriously pissed off with something Krakauer wrote and stood by so that sort of undermines Olbermann’s argument that Krakauer is in FNC’s pocket. Second of all, Olbermann can’t seperate Ariens away from Krakauer on this. Krakauer may have wrote it but you can bet your ass Ariens approved it. If he’s going to attack Krakauer, he has to attack Ariens. That would put Olbermann in a bind though because whatever you may think of TVN, and I’ve had my issues with that blog on occasion for ducking taking a stand on things they probably should, Ariens has been more than fair and even handed for the most part in how TVN covers the industry. And that would include Ariens’ management of Krakauer. It would also include Maddow getting the cover of Newsweek.

But Olbermann is showing with his attack that he doesn’t understand TVN’s purpose and position in the industry. It’s the Entertainment Tonight of cable news blogs. I choose those words deliberately because it’s known in the industry as the place to go to get your story out without serious blowback. And this doesn’t apply just to FBN or FNC, but MSNBC, CNN, and HLN as well. I reject a bunch of stuff that gets sent my way because it doesn’t fit with in what I want ICN 2.0 to be about. When I was doing ICN 1.0, things were of course different and you’d see a lot of stuff like what you see on TVN. But I realized I was posting fluff that basically amounted to free advertising so when I took that break and then came back I decided I was going to avoid that stuff this time around. But even going back to the days when Stelter ran the blog you would still see the types of articles that Olbermann complains about. So this is hardly anything new or anything that falls under the sole discretion of Krakauer.

I do dissagree with Olbermann that viewership levels should dictate coverage. Information is information. If someone writes an article on Bloomberg TV, which in many circles is considered even less of a player than FBN, and it’s newsworthy it should be posted. Let the reader decide if it’s worth their time. There is a difference though between posting newsworthy articles and posting about some guest appearance on a network or posting that some personality was an exclusive guest, after some other network had the same guest the day before.

I don’t know where Olbermann gets that 15,000 viewer number. The minimum subscriber level for Nielsen rating is 45 million, not 15,000. FBN may indeed be under 15,000 viewers, though there’s no way to know since that info isn’t publicly available, but it’s not the sole gating item to FBN getting rated.

Do I think Krakauer is in FNC/FBN’s pocket? Of course not. But then I once heard years ago from a very reliable source that Olbermann believed that right wing entities were paying people to comment on ICN. So maybe I’m compromised too.