I won’t say much on this to avoid partisan commentary, but I feel it is necessary to say something about this as an American citizen and as a citizen of the world. This video, shown during the Republican National Convention, made me sick to my stomach. I have included it below, not because I think it should be shown again, but because I think it is important that we not allow this sort of exploitation to continue to occur.

This post relates to MediaSlackers.com for two reasons: One, the video reminds me of a FOX News promo and two, because out of all the broadcasts that I have watched, Keith Olbermann’s was the most American reaction possible and one to be applauded; for once as a journalist and not just a commentator. Tom Brokaw said a couple of things at the end by recommending a path to follow for either the McCain campaign or the Obama campaign (I can’t remember which, not believing what I had just seen), but Olbermann actually stated, in his few words at the end of the video, what needed to be said: The death of our citizens both at home and abroad should not be used for political gain by either side of the aisle and it is a disgusting and reprehensible thing to do so. And if MSNBC or ANY other network had shown as much footage of 9/11 as the RNC showed, they would and should be vilified appropriately.

I get all of my news and forms of digitized entertainment from the Internet. I have done so now for close to eight years. This isn’t to say I don’t watch television programming, I just choose to do so online. I don’t have cable and currently I don’t even have a TV. I have a couple of very nice laptop computers and a 10MB broadband connection which serves my needs more than adequately.

You might be asking yourself how on earth someone who writes about and discusses the state of mainstream media in this country is actually able to do so without cable… Well there is really a very simple answer to this: All of the news that is actually newsworthy on TV is also available on the Internet, without any of the other crap that comes along with the TV news. In addition, news almost always breaks online before you even see it on TV, read it in the newspaper, etc. (despite a couple of networks’ reassurances they have the “Breaking News”), I’ll decide for myself if it is “breaking”. Any of the associated commentary I want to see, I can do so online after the fact.

There are a couple of TV channels who actually work quite well with my method for information gathering and I appreciate them for it. Even with the embedded advertising (I don’t mind, as long as it isn’t intrusive and the volume raised), these networks are able to provide their content online: MSNBC and Comedy Central are the two that come to mind first. Because I spend a lot of time outside of the country, it is also important to me that I not have to spoof my IP address, therefore slowing any streaming video. Both MSNBC and Comedy Central allow me to watch programming from any IP address I damn well please. However, the content I watch on MSNBC.com and ComedyCentral.com is solely for the commentary, as well as the bizarre. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow (soon to come to MSNBC) round out one set and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert round out the other.

All of my actual news, I receive from approximately 60-70 RSS feeds I have set up in my reader, as well as strolling for domestic and international sources. This may seem like a lot, and at first it may seem overwhelming, but it forces me to look at what is actually news to my life. We each have different thresholds for what we want to consume as news; some may find they want to hear about the car accident, stabbing, house fire, cheating politician or set of twins that was born on New Year’s Day. However, others may want to let the general irrelevant buzz (irrelevant to my life, in this case) go by and concentrate instead on the news concerning their childrens’ education, parents’ health care, property tax rate, that little thing called war, national disasters or the issues discussed in the upcoming election (the real issues, nothing to do with flag pins or the number of houses) and whether or not you are going to vote. I encourage you to find out for yourself what your actual news wants and needs are and then choose where you get this news from, instead of allowing the networks, newspapers and commentators (posing as journalists sometimes) do it for you. If you would like suggestions for some starting points on where to find feeds or how I built up my network of contacts, please don’t hesitate to ask.

No word yet on where Dan Abrams is going, but MSNBC has decided to give Rachel Maddow her own hour-long show commenting on politics and news of the weird (I mean, world). This was announced coming after months of intermittently filling in for and commenting on Keith Olbermann’s show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I’ll let Olbermann introduce:

UPDATE: According to NBC, via the LA Times website, Dan Abrams role will be as follows:

“Abrams, who served as general manager of the channel for a period, will continue in his role as chief legal correspondent for NBC News, making additional contributions to “Dateline” and “Today,” and anchor on MSNBC during the day.

“Dan is the best legal analyst in the business,” Griffin said. “Our prime time focus is now politics, so this move will enable Dan to focus on what he does best.”

Abrams graciously called the decision “absolutely the right call.”

“I look forward to my future success at NBC News,” he said in a statement released by the network.”

With the upcoming release of Scott McClellan’s new book, “What Happened” the media have the fresh opportunity to report all sides of the story, but will they take advantage of it? So far, it has become the subject of the day and leading into the weekend talk shows, should prove to at least be entertaining (just don’t count on it being informative). One decent piece of coverage can be attributed to Keith Olbermann on Countdown and his extensive interview with McClellan on Thursday about his new book, his experiences as Bush’s Press Secretary and his thoughts about the events taking place in this country over the past seven years. Although much of the interview is very well done and worth the time to watch, we wish Olbermann would have held McClellan to it a bit more when asking him: ‘Why now? Why did it take so long to speak out about this?’ In March of 2004 when Richard Clarke, a former member of both Clinton and George W. Bush’s National Security Council and 30-year government employee, published a book criticizing the Bush administration’s handling of the 9/11 attacks and the premise behind the Iraq war, Scott McClellan’s response was, “why didn’t he raise this issue sooner?” Thanks to Slate video for the reminder:

Well, McClellan’s response on Countdown was reasonable, but certainly had its similarities with what Clarke was saying four years ago: ‘I needed time to simmer and remove myself from the bubble.’ McClellan was a bit more naive in his assessment that he still thought, in 2003-2004, that Bush would become the bipartisan leader McClellan thought him to be. Judge for yourself and hope the media focus on this, rather than just the drama of having another Bushee lift his skirt and run for the hills when the walls start to crumble.

At about 3 minutes into this section of the Olbermann interview, you can hear McClellan’s response:

Monday’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann featured a very interesting discussion with longtime, independent journalist Bill Moyers on the subject of bias in the media toward a particular political candidate or party. (Perhaps Keith was returning the favor after Moyers’ interview with Keith last December.) We have included Monday’s video below, but to point out a couple of specific quotes as they relate to our discussion of Media Slackers, Moyers stated that instead of bias toward a political candidate or party, the “bias in the media is toward simplification.” Moyers went on to quote Saul Bellows, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, as saying, “The day will come when no one will be heard who doesn’t speak in short bursts of truth.” Paraphrasing this journalistic icon once more, does this mean the media will start speaking with bumper stickers? Haven’t they already started this practice and what can we look forward to in the upcoming general election coverage?