Day 3: October 3

32 days to Election Day

The show opens with discussion of supposed Republican spin on Sarah Palin's debate performance. There's some moderately admirable reporting -- they do use two clips of the candidates themselves which are a bit longer than normal -- but there's also quite a bit of loaded language. There's some apparent journalistic bias, like when Olbermann describes the McCain campaign's account of her performance as "hyperbolic" and claims that if they really believed it, they would "free her" to do Sunday morning talk show interviews -- essentially saying that they don't believe what they're telling the public. There's also some political bias, in Olbermann's typical "FOX 'Noise'" reference and when he makes the claim that FOX would provide her with written previews of their interview questions for her -- though there's some cynical journalistic bias inherent in that claim, as well.

Howard Fineman then joins Olbermann to discuss the matter, and starts out by essentially claiming that McCain, in fact, doesn't believe what he is saying at all, and is simply trying to "fire up his troops" -- a mix of the aforementioned journalistic bias and the game/battle schema. There's also some speculation about why McCain's top "spinmasters" and campaign chairs weren't at the debate -- Fineman says he thinks it was because they feared the result and wanted to stay clear of the "blast zone." He then sets the McCain-Palin/media relationship as sort of a competitive or combative one, and then speculates on her authority within her own campaign, saying that they probably see her as a "useful prop" and makes a joke about Palin being too busy deciding what the Senate will do when she's running it as vice president to be told what's happening in the campaign.

The next segment is a fact-check on claims made by the vice presidential candidates in their debate. It's actually on one level a pretty good segment: it fulfills the press's watchdog role that Patterson calls a "vital function." Olbermann uses sources that are generally viewed as legitimate and less biased -- the Washington Post, ABC News, and the New York Times, primarily. However, there's some possible political bias shown in that all of the fact-checking was done on Palin, and not on Joe Biden. It's possible that Biden didn't make any factual errors, but based on how Olbermann presents it, it's hard to make that a convincing argument. He uses loaded language, referring to her slip-ups as "lies" when it's possible that they could be simple lack of knowledge or misunderstanding, and he uses a sweeping generality near the end of the first part of the segment, saying, "In fact, almost every fact that Governor Palin deigned to touch, she got wrong."

He then talks to The Nation's Chris Hayes about the debate, and Hayes is actually able to raise the quality of the discourse significantly. He's able to discuss Palin's performance fairly objectively, and makes a point about the connection between the ability to perform rhetorically and the ability to perform in office -- though he does refer to "the entire mystique, aura, and message of Sarah Palin" as built on lies...but he does, in fact, cite examples and refute some supposed lies she's told.

The next section attempts to make a direct connection between Sarah Palin and George W. Bush by comparing sound bites from Bush's 2000 debates with similar bites from Palin's debate. There's no egregious offenses here, aside from a possible political bias that could cause such an idea -- but the clips aren't doctored, and don't seem to be taken out of context.

In the subsequent segment, the bailout bill is discussed, and Olbermann starts out strong by referring to John McCain's speech patterns as "a language of his own invention that occasionally sounds like American English." He does, however, do some solid reporting on the effects of the economic crisis, primarily on unemployment numbers. He also reports on a McCain aide's quote to Politico.com about the campaign's happiness that the passing of the bill would mean that George W. Bush would be less visible. After this Olbermann speaks with CQPolitics.com's Craig Crawford, who's asked to speculate on whether the economy can "even seem to" improve enough to take the focus off for McCain, and about the status of the McCain campaign in Michigan.

Next is the day's "Worst Persons in the World," who include a teacher who used a racial epithet to describe Barack Obama, "Bill-O the Clown" for claiming that he could increase debate ratings, and National Review's Rich Lowry for a moderately sexually-tinged review of Palin's debate performance. Obviously Olbermann's targets are all conservative, thus this is politically biased.

The show's final segment is dominated by a highlight package of clips from the debate that hadn't been used yet. They're set in a mildly derogatory angle with respect to Sarah Palin, so it's mildly politically biased, but it's not nearly as striking as other segments in the show.