• March 13, 2006 | 4:18 p.m. ET
Daily Made-up News (Keith Olbermann)
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SECAUCUS – Everybody who writes for a living ought to be subjected to one day in which they are written about. The results would be mortifying – and educational.
Today’s lesson in this subject should go to gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, his assistant Katherine Thomson, and their employers at The New York Daily News, who are guilty of taking quotes out of context in such an egregious manner — and ignoring an extraordinary conflict of interest for Ms. Thomson — that what they published wouldn’t have gotten past the editor of my 4th Grade Class Newspaper.
In an interview with CSPAN that aired last night, I managed to compliment both my boss at MSNBC, network president Rick Kaplan, and our bosses at NBC and the parent company GE – Kaplan for his support of Countdown and the corporate types for never letting what might be their own personal ideologies get in the way of the news, or their corporate mission to make money.
Compliments. On tape. On television. And Grove and Thomson twisted them into negatives, into insults.
Grove wrote today: “BLOOD FEUD? MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann deeply distrusts the top brass at NBC and its parent company, General Electric, judging by his interview with C-SPAN’s grand inquisitor, Brian Lamb. ‘There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE, the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all,’ he claimed, without naming names. ‘Moral force and money often do not mix in the slightest.’”
Well, that’s a fantastic job of selecting quotes, draining them of their context, and trying to start trouble where none exists.
Here’s what I said, in full, according to the CSPAN transcript. The parts Grove and Thomson pulled, in their bush league attempt at journalism, are in italics.
“I haven’t met a lot of flying monkeys at NBC. I have met people who — and by the way, this is the great freedom and the great protection of American broadcasting, commercial broadcasting.
“We made a mistake in the ’20s. We let broadcasting in this country develop with commercial broadcasting taking the lead and all other kinds of information on radio or television secondary or tertiary.
“But the protection of money at the center of everything, including news to the degree that it is now, is that as long as you make the money, they don’t care what it is you put on the air. They don’t care. There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE, the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all. Anybody who knew anything about American history and stepped out at any point in American history and got an assessment of this presidential administration would say, yes, I don’t know how much they need to be criticized, but they need to be criticized to some degree.
“There are people who I work for who would prefer, who would sleep much easier at night if this never happened. On the other hand, if they look at my ratings and my ratings are improved and there is criticism of the president of the United States, they are happy.
If my ratings went up because there was no criticism of the president of the United States, they would be happy.”
Brian Lamb then asked me “What does say about moral force?” I replied, “It says that moral force and money often do not mix in the slightest. They are often separate beams of light traveling through the universe, and you may have to jump off one to ride the other for a while.”
In short, I was praising NBC and GE for not – as Fox and other corporations do – letting their personal opinions override the assessments and inquiries of the people they’ve hired to do the news. In other words, they don’t mess with it. Far from “distrusting” – as Grove put it – the brass here, I actually trust them.
Shame on Lloyd Grove.
He also tried to make it personal. Last August he printed an exaggerated version of the kind of “the boss gets angry” moment everybody in every office in America has gone through. Grove happily wrote of Rick Kaplan yelling; he never wrote of Rick apologizing, nor of his support for the show.
As Stewie Griffin says in “Family Guy” – “Oh, here we go.”
From Lloyd and Thomson’s column today: “When Lamb asked about MSNBC President Rick Kaplan dressing him down last August for a commentary about Peter Jennings that featured a graphic account of Olbermann spitting up blood, the “Countdown” host explained that Kaplan ‘is a very emotional, very high-strung, gigantic man, also a very squeamish man. … He just was squeamish about blood.’”
I was – as the CSPAN transcript again points out – complimenting Rick Kaplan, and explaining what happened, something Grove never attempted to do. All of this had followed my cancer scare, when a benign growth had been removed from the roof of my mouth, leading me to do a commentary about how even if smoking isn’t going to give you cancer, the often bloody mess that ensues from its benign results is bad enough. Again, here’s what I said, with the selective edits by Grove and Thomson in italics:
“So I come back the following Monday to do a commentary on this, and Peter Jennings finally passed away and we did most of the show about Peter Jennings. And then at the end, I said, if somehow Peter Jennings’ death has not convinced you, let me tell you what happened to me in the roof of my mouth.
“We were premiering a new 9:00 show that night and Rick, as the President of MSNBC, is a very emotional, very high strung, gigantic man, also a very squeamish man, was very surprised to hear, even though it had been discussed before, I was talking about spitting blood into a garbage can and all the rest of this stuff.
“And he was – he was mortified. He just assumed everybody would be terrified by what I was saying, change the channel, and here we have the premier of this new 9:00 show that I would have just ruined, and he was yelling and he was yelling uncontrollably.
“And a couple of days later, after he calmed down, he was apologizing to the same degree of giant-sized gestures and such. He just was squeamish about blood, that was all it was.”
Brian Lamb then asked, “So it wasn’t an attack about you?” I answered “no, not at all.” “Or on you?,” he asked. “No, Rick – if he’s not the biggest fan of the show within NBC, he’s doing a very good impression of it. No, he’s been completely supportive of the show, all the way through.”
There’s one more element in play here that should worry the editors of The New York Daily News. Grove’s lackey, Katherine Thomson, used to work here at MSNBC, and her departure did not exactly bring tears from her ex-colleagues. Last week, an awful item appeared in the column in which she helps Grove shovel manure about the personal lives of two producers at another NBC broadcast. The producers aren’t famous, they aren’t public figures, and a freshman student in J-School somewhere would question why they were subjected to public scrutiny.
But they were.
In a column partially written by a woman who recently left the company for which they – and I – work.
So, on top of disgraceful de-contextualizing quotes, there is the issue of a bald-faced conflict of interest.
We’re naming Thomson and Grove tonight’s Worst Persons In The World. That is scarcely sufficient for their journalistic recklessness. They should be fired.
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