Friday, August 29th, 2008
This is why we call them “Associated Wankers”
Editor & Publisher notes that Keith Olbermann took partisan hack Charles Babington to task for a very shoddily written article on Obama’s acceptance speech last night:
NEW YORK In an unusually heated attack on a veteran political reporter by a cable news host, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann laced into the Associated Press’s Charles Babington an hour after Barack Obama had concluded his speech in Denver on Thursday night.
Nearly all of the top commentators and reporters on the three cable news networks had hailed Obama’s speech as something new and powerful, and filled with specifics, and predicted it would have a positive effect on his chances vs. John McCain. This hallelujah chorus included conservatives such as Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan and the longtime Republican David Gergen, as well as Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams. Buchanan called it the best and most important political convention speech he had ever heard, going back 48 years.
So the liberal Olbermann was outraged that the AP’s Babington had written, in his analysis of the speech, just off the wire, that Obama had tried nothing new and that his speech was lacking in specifics. He read the first few paragraphs on the air, lamented that it would be printed in hundred of newspapers on Friday, and concluded, “It is analysis that strikes me as having borne no resemblance to the speech you and I just watched. None whatsoever. And for it to be distributed by the lone national news organization in terms of wire copy to newspapers around the country and web sites is a remarkable failure of that news organization.
“Charles Babington, find a new line of work.”
Amen, Keith. Incidentally, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano predicted that the Rethuglicans would “try to Catch-22 his speech:”
She said Republicans will criticize him no matter what. They will argue that his lofty speeches lack substance and details, she said, and a detailed speech that scrimps on soaring rhetoric will prove “he has lost his gift.”
Little did Gov. Napolitano realize that the ranks of the Republicans included the “librul” media.
Question: Did partisan hack Charles Babington even watch Obama’s acceptance speech? Apparently not.
I don’t know a lot about a reporter for the Associated Press named Charles Babington who also spent a lot of time at the Washington Post — it seems like he’s written things over the years that have annoyed the left and and annoyed the right, which means either he’s a “balanced” journalist or maybe a lot of his articles are just bad. I’m suspecting the latter after reading his analysis of Obama’s speech tonight, a speech he conceivably may not have even watched as he filed his analysis just about 26 minutes after it ended.
One interesting thing about Babington is he doesn’t seem to care about an informed electorate. This is what he said earlier this year on PBS with Gwen Ifill:
Sometimes we like to think, oh, they get a spreadsheet out of all the issues. Most voters don’t get that. Most voters probably don’t even know why they vote for someone and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Tonight, he did his part to keep the electorate uninformed.
I guess partisan hack Charles Babington went to The Ron Fournier School of Propaganda Journalism™®©…
