The Death of Real News, According to Ted Koppel

An article by former ABC News anchor Ted Koppel appeared in the Washington Post on Nov. 14, 2010, proclaiming “the death of real news” due to the rise of “partisan news organizations” like Fox News and MSNBC. Daniel Tencer of The Raw Story commented on Koppel’s article two days before its publication.

Koppel writes that news hosts like Bill O’Reilly of Fox News and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC are symbols of the fact that American society has lost interest in the objective truth and now exhibits “a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality” that contributed to the banking collapse of 2008, the housing crisis and uncontrollable deficits and military spending.

He argues that “when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster.”

The United States is not only headed for disaster; it has already arrived. And worse, the U.S. is dragging the world along with it.

Koppel bases his assertions on the temporary suspension of Olbermann because of his flagrant financial contributions to the Democratic Party’s election campaign but says nothing about Fox News, which represents the ideological and logistical arm of the bellicose Straussian neocons, as well as that of the Mexicophobic and Islamophobic tea party.

Nostalgic for his heyday as anchor of the highly-successful ABC News program “Nightline” — which we used to watch every night when universal truth was “unipolar” and we had not yet lost our primeval innocence — Koppel wrote of a time “when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.” But that was another era. Today we have entered the new world of WikiLeaks, where uncomfortable truths from anonymous sources are leaked to the system that established the dictatorship of deliberate mendacity.

Koppel does not understand that deregulated financial globalization was metaphorically privatized by Goebbels: a public good of Nazi propaganda.

What is the metaphysical difference between Goebbels’ state news and the “private” misinformation of Fox News?

According to Koppel, Olbermann’s partisanship attracts TV viewers (over one million every night), whose donations to the Democratic Party are “consistent” with the market.

The same Olbermann, on his return after a suspension of only two days (during which the network’s ratings fell), said unashamedly that the old rules of professional ethics “[need] to be adapted to the realities of twenty-first century journalism.”

Koppel cites well-known U.S. anchors who play the bipartisan game: “Individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.”

In my opinion, an unfailingly indicative axiom of the degree of political development in the twenty-first century could be: “Tell me who your anchors and commentators are, and I will tell you the level of democratic development in your country.”

Koppel remarked that “[t]he commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me.”

Can a non-partisan commentator no longer live in the U.S. in this time of privatization — I was about to write deprivation — of the media and its “financial logic”?

Koppel admits that “absolute objectivity is unattainable,” but that “Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt” to practice anything other than that which is “to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment.” Ouch!

In black and white, he contrasts the “facts” versus the “opinions” that have taken over the news because they are very “cheap” (note: in cost, obviously, all the while providing irrepressible salivation) and leave a lot of money, regardless of the virtues and/or flaws of their oracles (note: the majority are of a very low intellectual level; especially now, their mediocre résumés say more).

In his view, the deterioration — the financial contamination of the news — began with CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 1968, when the owners became aware of the big business that constituted broadcast news. (Note: Censoring and not disclosing the news are also big business.)

Soon, the three big chains of the time — CBS, NBC and ABC — produced news as “profit centers” and lost both their “innocence” and their “fear” of revocation of their licenses in accordance with privatization.

He acknowledges that “[t]he transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible” when the competition has intensified.

Beyond the inevitable axiology, at least the American television viewer has the dichotomous opportunity to choose between Fox News, on the far-right, and “left-leaning” MSNBC — something that does not occur in countries with unidimensional media totalitarianism, such as the very primitive “neoliberal Mexico.”

The major drawback is that privatized news has contaminated the democratic act a fortiori in the U.S., where the age-old Athenian democracy has undergone a market transmogrification that alters the media (in both senses) and the objectives of a genuinely civic (s)election.

Is the marketization of the very sui generis “American democracy” irreversible, the marketization of nineteenth-century characteristics that in reality conceals the true plutocracy that rules from Wall Street?

Daniel Tencer writes that Koppel “paints a grim picture of the future of news, arguing that even as news consumers have more choice in media than ever before, that choice is leading to a fragmentation of the U.S. public,” because of the multiplier effect of technology and the market.

Although the obituary announced by Koppel is appealing because it comes from the bowels of the minotaur to which he belonged, he sticks with very tangential asymptotes of multimedia neo-totalitarianism — be it public or private, while not interactively civic — which the epistemologist Karl Popper feared.

The “facts” indicate that the prevailing multimedia neo-totalitarianism in the U.S. suffered its transmogrification in conjunction with market privatization and, above all, by means of the deregulated financial globalization that entails a transnational characteristic, thanks to its enormous meta-frontier satellite penetration, to export news tailored to the ultimate goals of U.S. global military dominance. The “principle of reality” (the mother of mental health) became impervious to the deranged minds of a society perpetually deceived by its mendacious media devoted to producing illusions.

The complication now lies in how a society inoculated with so many lies — that were used to wage its global wars for energy (e.g. from 9/11 to Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction) — can be detoxified to retrieve its judgment of reality and return to the path of true light.

The democratic optimization of the twenty-first century inevitably lies in the control and domination of the mass media.