My "Countdown" of today's top stories.

In homage to Keith Olbermann, who has filed a lawsuit against Current TV for wrongful termination, I present to you my "Countdown" of the top stories.  So I suppose I ought to begin with the immortal words...

...Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?

5: George Zimmerman's lawyers and a forensic audio expert, both claim that Zimmerman used the word "punks" on that now infamous cellphone call.  CNN aired the "cleaned-up" audio, which if I'm honest, as an audio man myself, didn't sound that different to the original, but on listening back to it myself, I can't hear the word punk.  What I do distinctly detect is an "ooo" sound, that might come from a particular racial slur, and that "ooo" sound definitely is not present when you pronounce the word "punk".  Listen to it yourself, and see if you agree.



4: Sky News has become the latest part of the NewsCorp clan to have been caught up in hacking.  Now we know why James Murdoch resigned this week.  Sky News today confirmed that two email accounts, one belonging to a suspected paedophile,and one belonging to 'canoe man' John Darwin were hacked.  Both resulted in information that was passed onto the police.  Sky News claimed the hacking was done in the public interest, but hacking emails is a crime under the Computer Misuse Act, and that act does NOT have a public interest defence attached to it.

With Ofcom investigating British Sky Broadcasting, there is a number of possibilities now rearing their heads, and I'll talk about them in a future post.

3: Rick Santorum obviously doesn't know when to quit, or indeed how to lose with good grace.  The Republican Party establishment has been telling him to leave the race, but Santorum, much like Newt Gingrich, has stuck two fingers up to the establishment.  And he met with supporters to discuss the way forward. 

Mathematically, it's getting beyond the realms of possibility, especially given that the only remaining state with a winner takes all race, California, looks like a certainty for Mitt Romney.  But it does appear right now that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are both in line for a fairly major Republican Party smackdown, before we get to Tampa, maybe even before we get to the end of the primary process. 

2: Is it ethical for a journalist to express their own political viewpoints through signing a petition?  Apparently, some TV stations in Milwaukee don't think it is.  WTMJ, WISN and WITI have confirmed that journalists on their payrolls have signed the recall petition against controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  WTMJ went as far as to say that they took this matter seriously and would be dealing with it internally.  Apparently, one of the people who signed the petition was an on-air anchor at WTMJ.

One thing is for certain, Scott Walker has done incredible damage to Wisconsin.  Any attempt by these stations to censure their staff for signing the petition would be a direct contravention of the First Amendment.  And no news station, no matter how good their checks and balances are, could ever claim to be totally unbiased.

1: Current maybe now being sued by Keith Olbermann, but they may soon have bigger problems.  A report from Reuters indicates that Current needs to hit ratings benchmarks every quarter.  Should they miss those benchmarks two quarters in a row, they could be dropped by Time Warner Cable.  So far they have not missed those benchmarks, thanks to Keith Olbermann, but with his sudden departure last week, Current's ability to hit those benchmarks consitently maybe in doubt.

Current TV fires Keith Olbermann

I seriously wonder what's been going on between Current TV and Keith Olbermann.

Back in January there was a lot of stories appearing about problems between the two parties.  It seemed to me that the information was being leaked out by someone within Current TV itself, and the slant being given by the stories was very anti-Keith Olbermann.  How much of it was true and how much was spin was quite frankly open for discussion.

But today, came official word from Current that they had indeed fired Keith Olbermann, in an open letter written by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.

"To the Viewers of Current:

We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet.  We are more committed to those goals today than ever before.
Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.

We are moving ahead by honoring Current's values. Current has a fundamental obligation to deliver news programming with a progressive perspective that our viewers can count on being available daily -- especially now, during the presidential election campaign. Current exists because our audience desires the kind of perspective, insight and commentary that is not easily found elsewhere in this time of big media consolidation. 
As we move toward this summer's political conventions and the general election in the fall, Current is making significant new additions to our broadcasts. We have just debuted six hours of new programming each weekday with Bill Press ("Full Court Press" at 6 am ET/3 am PT) and Stephanie Miller ("Talking Liberally" at 9 am ET/6 pm PT).    

We’re very excited to announce that beginning tonight, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer will host “Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer,” at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. Eliot is a veteran public servant and an astute observer of the issues of the day. He has important opinions and insights and he relishes the kind of constructive discourse that our viewers will appreciate this election year. We are confident that our viewers will be able to count on Gov. Spitzer to deliver critical information on a daily basis.

All of these additions to Current's lineup are aimed at achieving one simple goal -- the goal that has always been central to Current's mission: To tell stories no one else will tell, to speak truth to power, and to influence the conversation of democracy on behalf of those whose voices are too seldom heard. We, and everyone at Current, want to thank our viewers for their continued steadfast support.

Sincerely,
Al Gore & Joel Hyatt
Current's Founders"

Keith Olbermann responded to this via his twitter account.

"My full statement:

I'd like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV.

Editorially, Countdown had never been better. But for more than a year I have been imploring Al Gore and Joel Hyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I've been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract.

It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current's statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain. http://nyti.ms/HueZsa

In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.  "


I imagine this story will continue to play out for a while yet.  I especially wonder if Current will be able to maintain the audience levels they had at around 50,000 during Keith's tenure.  Neither The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur nor The War Room with Jennifer Granholm got  anywhere close to Olbermann's numbers and it's very unlikely that their new show with Eliot Spitzer will match the Olbermann numbers.


Current have been trying to position themselves as the new news network with progressive leanings.  Now they've fired Keith Olbermann, have they got the firepower to be successful?  Time will tell, but I will not hold my breath waiting for them to spring up the ratings charts, because I don't see it happening.

Occupy Wall Street.

Having been quietly observing the events in Zucotti Park, New York, across the United States and around the world in relation to the "Occupy" movement, it disappoints me to find that some of the politicians in the cities where these protests are happening have been strangely tone deaf about the movement.

Also, the media has behaved very strangely over the whole affair, at first trying to ignore the protests, then only begrudingly reporting when the police started to bring the violence to the protests. These protests were peaceful expressions of people's belief that too few people exercise too much power, a failed system. Yet, the media continued to portray these protests as anti-capitalist, which is taken to mean that the protesters wanted to replace the capitalist system.

I saw no inidcations that any of the protesters actually wanted to replace the capitalist system, rather they wanted to reform it so that unelected corporations could not buy their way into political power with politicians at the expense of the people who actually elect those politicians.

And now with the evictions of encampments from Zucotti Park; Oakland and the eviction notices served to the protesters in London, it seems the movement might be being forced out of its home encampment. But the Occupy Movement, along with it's British cousin, the Uncut movement, have both taken root on the net, especially on Facebook and Twitter, and now the movement is global, and is growing. Tone deafness like the kind displayed by local politicians like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, will only feed the movement, not make it go away.

Keith Olbermann, on Current TV's Countdown With Keith Olbermann, highlighted other occassions when this has happened.



Below is the transcript of his "Special Comment".

"For the entirety of the life of our nation, democracy has been protected - not merely by the strenuous efforts of those of us who cherish it, but mostly, and most profoundly, by the limitless stupidity of those who would ration it, keep it for themselves and themselves alone, or destroy it.

The protests that ended the war in Vietnam reached critical mass only in 1970, when Governor James Rhodes of Ohio pounded on a desk at a news conference and called the student protesters at Kent State University un-American. They were not un-American, they were unarmed. And the next day, four were shot and killed by the National Guard and 10 days later, two more were killed at Jackson State.

Those protests had themselves only gone mainstream 20 months earlier, when Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago overreacted with mindlessness and sadism to the massing of demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic convention and the whole world watched.

A century of the institutionalized, codified, legalized, pseudo-slavery that followed the real thing was fatally stricken only Governor George Wallace of Alabama used his inaugural address to promise, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Within two years came the marches on Selma and the atrocities at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And ten weeks after the first violence, the president had proposed the Voting Rights Act to Congress.

The mounting paranoia of three decades of scapegoating of - and fear mongering about - liberals, only ended when its last white knight self-destructed on the national stage of televised hearings, when Joe McCarthy questioned the loyalty of the US military and - towards one junior attorney - he revealed the depths of his cruelty and megalomania. And he revealed that - at long last - he, indeed, had no shame.

Pick any moment in our history - our history as a country founded by and invigorated by and re-invigorated by protests - and you will find men like George Wallace and Joe McCarthy and Jim Rhodes and Richard Daley. Go back further - to men like the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company or the officials who sent the police to the Haymarket Square and the troops to the Pullman town or John Brown or George Grenville, the British politician who had a bright idea about the American colonies, an idea called the Stamp Act.

American freedom has not flourished in spite of these morons of history, it has flourished because of them - because they overreacted, because they under-thought, overreached, under-understood. We owe them our traditions of protest. We owe them our freedoms. We owe them our very independence. None of them ever understood that - around these parts anyway - suppression always creates the opposite of the effect desired.

Such a man is Michael Rubens Bloomberg, mayor of New York City and - as of today - the most valuable, the most essential, the most irreplaceable man inside the Occupy movement.

Who else but a cliché like Bloomberg could take a protest beginning to grow a little stale around the edges and vault it back in the headlines, complete with mortifying scenes of police dressed as storm troopers, carrying military weapons, using figurative bazookas to kill figurative mosquitoes?

Who else but an archetype like Bloomberg could claim a group of protesters was making too much noise in a residential area and then choose to try to disperse them by bringing out LRAD audio cannons, machines that send painful waves of sound indiscriminately over the very same residential area?

Who else but a cartoon like Bloomberg could have become rich creating a multi-billion-dollar media and news company and then authorize illegally preventing reporters from witnessing police actions he claimed were utterly legal, and then authorize the arrests of four reporters at a church?

Who else but a human platitude like Bloomberg could have just gotten back from Jerusalem - and the dedication of a ten-million-dollar medical facility for which he generously paid - and then enabled the image of policemen seizing 5,500 books from the Occupy Wall Street library, and throwing them in a Dumpster as if the cops were book burners?

Who else but a hypocrite like Bloomberg could have overridden - by a backroom deal with the New York City Council - the results of two separate referendums, limiting those in his office to just two terms as mayor, so he could serve a third term? And then had police arrest, beat up and incarcerate a member of the New York City Council?

Who else but a putz like Bloomberg could have insisted protesters were not above the rule of law and yet - when the courts ruled he could not seize the protesters' tents and sleeping bags, nor kick them out of Zuccotti park, nor keep them from returning with their tents and sleeping bags - who else could have stalled for hours until he could find another judge to give him the ruling he insisted upon?

Who else but the epitome of tone-deafness that is Bloomberg could have better illustrated the fundamental issue of Occupy, when he puts the entire weight of the most people-driven city in the history of the Earth behind already-crushingly rich and their efforts to grab themselves still more advantages from those people and he, himself, is the 12th richest man in America?

Who else but a publicity addict like Bloomberg could have enabled the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge and yet, two months later, frozen 20 square miles of New York City in gridlock traffic over two days, so somebody could film another goddamned Batman movie on the 59th Street Bridge? Leading to the inescapable conclusion that - if you want to tie up a little traffic during a protest for equality and freedom from corporate domination on a bridge in New York City - you will be arrested. But - if you want to tie up all of the traffic during a goddamned movie shoot for the financial benefit of corporate domination - the city of New York will embrace you and give you tax breaks.

Michael Bloomberg - no such a figure, no such a living, breathing embodiment of all that is wrong and all that is stupid in the establishment in this country could be ordered up from the works of fiction, or the casting calls of that goddamned Batman movie they filmed the weekend before he ordered the raid on Occupy Wall Street.

Obviously, Mayor Bloomberg, you should resign and your little bully of a police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, should go with you. You have overstepped all reasonable interpretations of your rights and responsibilities and you have made Americans and people around the world realize that you are simply smaller, more embarrassing versions of the tin-pot tyrants who have fallen around the globe in the past year.

But - as some of us first thought you might be, back on that fateful afternoon that sadistic cops pepper-sprayed four women who had already been trapped inside a police overreaction, and as we thought again the following weekend during the arrests on Brooklyn Bridge - Michael Bloomberg, you have now, indeed, become the symbol of the Occupy movement. You are ready to take your historic place with Mayor Daley and Governor Wallace and Senator McCarthy and Prime Minister Grenville and every other idiot who has made the fateful and fatal mistake of thinking that - just because he had power and money - that this was a nation in which everything has a price tag on it.

We need you, Michael Bloomberg. We need you to keep making these mistakes - tone-deaf, sensibility-offending, world-changing mistakes - like the pepper spray and the Brooklyn Bridge and the paramilitary assault on Occupy Wall Street last night.

Hell, Mike, the freedoms of this wonderful and transcendent nation - corrupted by the endless greed of you and the other dozen richest people in it, and the corporations who nevertheless have still managed to own you somehow - these freedoms will not be restored to us in just the next two years. I am endorsing you for a fourth term! Your nation needs you, Mr. Mayor! Occupy needs you!

Bloomberg now! Bloomberg tomorrow! Bloomberg forever!"

I think some sarcasm may have crept in there at the end...

Time Marches On: The Buck Stops Here.

Time Marches On: Crashing on the wrong side.

From Current TV’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Thursday 25th August 2011.