The aftermath

I decided that it would be best if I waited a while after doing my research (that is, taking notes on a show I already try to watch as often as possible) so that I could get some perspective on what I saw and heard. I believe that there are two things that are the most crucial to be gained from this experience: what Thomas Patterson would think of Countdown, and whether or not he is right to think that. The first is much more cut and dried than the second, so that's the one I'll tackle first (also, it makes more sense to talk about whether something is right after you know what it is).

From a month and a day of Countdown, I believe that if Out of Order was being written now instead of in 1993, Patterson would have devoted at least a chapter to Olbermann, as well as his nemesis Bill O'Reilly (I prefer Bill-O the Clown, personally) and the other people in the cable news business with shows of a similar genre. This show not only violates the principles of journalism that Patterson discusses, it flouts them at nearly every chance it gets. I do not believe this is done intentionally, as I will discuss later. However, according to Patterson, this show would be nearly journalistically void.

The four main things I decided to look for most were use of the game schema, use of interpretive journalism, and the two biases -- partisan and journalistic. All four were found in spades, though not exactly in the proportions I expected from my prior knowledge of the show.

I was expecting to find that the game schema would be the issue that would appear the most. Honestly though, after watching the show for over a month with an analyst's eye, I cannot figure out where I got that expectation from. It was rare that an explicit case of a horse race reference would appear -- the ones that did show up were far more subtle than some of the other violations. This brings about two possibilities -- either Olbermann is really good at keeping that out of the show typically, or it's just really hard to see. To be perfectly honest, I lean toward the latter. I've been a political junkie for years now, and I watch and read a lot of news, so I believe that at this point, I've become irreversibly conditioned to think of elections -- and politics as a whole -- as a game, as a race, or as a battle. Because of that, I think it may be possible that even though I was expressly looking for it, I had trouble picking out instances to which the game schema applied.

Journalistic bias was also hard to find, and the more I think about it, the more I think it may be for the same reasons as for the game schema. This, I believe, proves Patterson's point, to an extent. At this point, I'm so conditioned to be cynical about politics and view it as a war that even looking for examples of these two concepts in news coverage is a challenge.

The other two concepts, though, weren't hard at all -- though both appeared more than I'd expected. Interpretive journalism dominates almost every segment of every episode of Countdown. It is an interpretive show, clearly. There is little to no descriptive reporting, unless news breaks while the show is on air. The preponderance of the show's coverage is based on the views of either Keith Olbermann or one of a number of recurring guests -- Richard Wolffe, Eugene Robinson, Chris Kofinis, and Nate Silver are the first who come to mind. Really, the first part of each segment, where Olbermann gives background information on whatever is the topic for the segment, is the only part of the show dominated by descriptive reporting. Practically everything else is interpretation.

If there's anything that is more omnipresent than interpretation, though, it is partisan bias. It's easy to tell that Keith Olbermann is a Democrat -- or at the very least, a liberal and an Obama supporter -- and basically every topic and every story covered on the show is viewed through that lens. His humor and sarcasm are what make the show interesting, but they are nearly always weaponized and directed at Republicans and conservatives. Entire segments of the show are based on this -- "Worst Persons" is usually just Olbermann's three least favorite Republicans of the day, and segments like "Bushed" and "McCain in the Membrane" are basically just opportunities for Olbermann to point out George Bush's and John McCain's screwups, respectively. I did not cover the latter two segments on a day-to-day basis because they would have ended up like "Worst Persons" -- basically naming the things he'd mentioned, then saying it was biased over and over again. I felt this was unnecessary, because of the repetitiveness factor, which I will discuss in more detail later. "Worst Persons" got coverage because it is a numbered segment.

Even the show's guests are chosen with a partisan bias in mind. David Axelrod appeared on the show several times, and not once did a member of the McCain campaign appear (except for the post-debate shows, where they pretty much had to). Michael Moore, Frank Rich, John Cleese, and other well-known liberals all appeared as well. Even the reporters who appear on the show appear to be like-minded.

On the other hand, as I mentioned when they were employed, I viewed the Special Comments -- though obviously politically biased -- as less intense violations than the rest of the show. This is because unlike everything else, the Comments were presented as pure opinion. They're editorial comments in the tradition of Edward R. Murrow. However, the rest of the show is presented as news, but given with a leftward slant. The separation between the Comment and the rest of the show is what I believe makes it less improper.

It also seemed like to a certain extent, as the election drew closer, the show had less partisan bias. This could have been an illusion, but I believe that as time passed, the level of reporting done on the show was raised. This was not a hard-and-fast rule -- one of the most biased shows of the period was five days before the election -- but it was generally the case, at least in terms of the intensity of the bias if not in the amount.

One other thing I noticed before moving on: the way the show is designed leads it to an awful amount of repetition. Anyone who watches can tell that the show has the same basic structure every day. In analysis, though, it's easy to see that every episode of the show has similarities on a more detailed level, as well. This led to a lot of repetition in my analysis, which is the reason why for a time I considered changing this blog into a paper instead (I decided not to because I'd already done this). This repetition worried me for a while, but I believe that my analysis correctly and accurately describes the show.

Now, Olbermann doesn't appear to be intentionally violating rules of journalism -- in fact, exactly the opposite, with his Murrow sign off, I believe that he wants to be the best journalist he can, and this is how he is trying to do that. This brings me to the second major point: is Patterson right? Is all of this -- the bias, the interpretation, the game schema -- really that bad, and worth trying to purge from journalism?

I do not believe it is -- at least, not all of it, or not completely. Again I will concentrate on the four concepts I focused on in my study.

Of the four, I agree most with Patterson on journalistic bias. The cynicism and distrust inherent in it isn't journalistically sound, as it causes deception. A lot of the things that bias tends to make journalists speak ill of are either not that bad or not even true. I'll use as an example the auto bailout bill that was the subject of discussion in the very first show I analyzed. There was a lot of talk about "goodies" and "sweeteners" and "playing politics," and while I know some of the time it's true and it's warranted, it's clearly used a lot more than it's true. And that hurts our political process -- if people don't believe in their leaders, then how can they possibly believe that their country is being led effectively, that they are safe, and that there's hope for the future? I'm not saying that the media should kowtow to the government, because that would be just as bad, if not significantly worse. I am saying, however, that the press shouldn't resort to claims that members of our government aren't in it for us unless they have good reason to believe it's actually true in a specific case, and can share that reason with viewers (or readers, listeners...the audience, writ large).

I also agree on the game schema to a certain extent, but not fully. Obviously this may be because I've grown up with it, and am therefore used to it. I do feel, though, that elections are competitions, and analogies made to communicate that notion are not really that bad. A lot of what's done in a campaign is done with the goal of winning the election, instead of making policy before taking office. This isn't really a bad thing, it's necessary -- if a candidate doesn't try to win the election, he or she probably won't, and because of that all the policy ideas conceived on the election trail will be largely useless. Game schema reporting shouldn't necessarily disappear altogether, but it should definitely be tempered a bit and mixed with more reporting on the ideas of the candidates simply as they are, rather as some part of a larger narrative on who's winning. Policy ideas on the campaign trail shouldn't be treated like they're political weapons, they should be treated like they're possibly the basis of the country for the next four years -- since, of course, they are. If these ideas would be reported differently, it's possible that voters would look at them more seriously and take them under stronger consideration when choosing a candidate. The game schema could mostly die out on its own in this way.

I am far more willing, however, to defend the other two Pattersonian concepts, at least in the context of Countdown. The first one, partisan bias, is a little more tenuous. I will admit that, at times, Olbermann got to be a little too much even for me, as is easily seen in a few of my write-ups. One of the shows that was harder to get through because of the partisan bias was October 31. Honestly, the combination of a clear mischaracterization of a McCain quote by Olbermann and him having Michael Moore on as a guest just seemed like overkill -- it was almost as if he was inviting criticism.

On the other hand, though, I honestly do not believe that Olbermann's bias colored the facts of his reporting one bit. I followed the election very closely, through many more objective sources, while I was doing this project. I don't remember a time (aside from the aforementioned quote) when Olbermann misreported something or lied or covered up information about the Democratic Party, which are things that FOX News is often accused of doing. I don't know whether they do any of that; that would be another project for another semester for me. But I do have faith that, while obviously Keith Olbermann wanted Barack Obama to win the election, he did not do anything dishonest to try to make that happen. He reported uncomplimentary things about the Republicans, McCain, and Palin, and he tried to make the point that they were inferior candidates to Obama and Joe Biden. But everything he said was true, at least as far as I can tell from the research that I did during the campaign season.

The easiest to defend, in my view, is interpretive reporting. I disagree with Patterson's claim that interpretive reporting only gives the audience the tip of the iceberg. In fact, I think it may be precisely the opposite -- that it's descriptive reporting that gives only the tip of the iceberg, and interpretation then fleshes out the idea. Now, it would not be good to receive only interpretation, because the audience then would lack the background to be able to effectively understand the analysis. I suppose that if the only news a person gets is from Countdown, that would be mostly what would happen. However, the opposite is true too -- if the only news an average person gets is from watching C-SPAN, it's highly unlikely that he will have any idea what is going on, because little to no explanation will take place. Neither type of reporting is bad, I think, and neither type can really stand alone.

To reference another author we have read, Farhad Manjoo claims that there are too many "experts" in news coverage today, and asks whether the experts we see are really "expert." In the case of Countdown, though, the experts are expert. They're high-level reporters and people who have worked in campaigns, and are introduced fully upon each appearance -- in fact, I've now heard the sentence "Democratic strategist, Chris Kofinis, former communications director for the Edwards campaign" so many times that I can recite it along with Olbermann. The point is that the vast majority of people who come on the show are real experts, and their interpretations of the day's political events are very useful. They should not be the exclusive source of news for a person, but they should be considered an acceptable supplement, rather than something to be shunned.

In summary, then, I am fairly certain that Thomas Patterson would have loud objections to Countdown. I, however, disagree with some of his stances, and because of that I believe that the show can be a valuable (though not sole) part of a person's news intake. I acknowledge that it is far from perfect, but it shouldn't be demonized. Patterson makes good points, and the things he talks about should be minimized as much as possible -- I have already said that the degrees to which Countdown meets negative criteria are too high -- but a utopian situation in which all news coverage is solely descriptive and wholly unbiased is impossible and, I argue, not to be desired, necessarily.