PressEthic

Somebody is finally doing tv news analysis the right way.Daphne Eviatar of The Nation wrote a profile on Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's Coundown, airing weekdays at 8 p.m.

Olbermann "likes to call the news as he sees it--especially when almost everyone else in the media seems to be ignoring a critical play."

Olbermann first cast off the traditional reporter's role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, delivering a powerful indictment of the government's handling of the rescue effort. "These are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping this country safe," he said bitterly. The government "has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water."

[M]ost anchors quickly returned to business as usual, censoring their own criticisms no matter how bad the news continued to be. Not Olbermann. Encouraged by rising ratings, he's since turned his distincive take on the government's incompetence into a regular part of his show.

Last August he took the tone up a notch when he aired the first of his hard-hitting Special Comments. Regularly invoking some of the most shameful examples of American history to frame the Bush Administration in historical perspective, he's likened the President's recent acts to John Adams's jailing of American newspaper editors, Woodrow Wilson's use of the Espionage Act to prosecute "hyphenated Americans" for "advocating peace in a time of war" and FDR's internment of 110,000 Americans because of their Japanese descent. Ours is "a government more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from," declared Olbermann the day after the President signed the Military Commissions Act.

Olbermann is brave indeed. He often calls Bill O'Reilly of Fox News the "Worst Person in the World". Probably because he is Olbermann's antithesis. While O'Reilly screams at his guests, looks for political bias in media coverage and spins the news, Olbermann is providing the missing puzzle pieces in media coverage and giving intelligent analysis. His favorite (and most important) person to put on blast is Bush. Watch his brave commentaries, one on Bush's policies since 9/11, here and another one here, in which he asks the president, "Have you no decency, sir?"

Olbermann explains why his show is important:

"We are still fundamentally raised in this country to be very confident in the preservation of our freedoms," he said in a recent interview. "It's very tough to get yourself around the idea that there could be a mechanism being used or abused to restrict and alter the society in which we live."