Ted Koppel's Hypocrisy

Listening to Ted Koppel's regular appearances on National Public Radio forces me to stifle the urge to scream at his arrogance and sloppy analysis, but Sunday's Washington Post Op-ed by Koppel takes the cake. Koppel took Keith Olbermann to task for a lack of objectivity in the wake of Olbermann's contributions to three Democractic candidates and subsequent suspension from MSNBC earlier this month. Koppel equates Olbermann and other MSNBC commentators with reactionary bomb throwers at Fox News like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.

Never mind as Olbermann noted in his Monday night special comment rebuking Koppel that he has probably criticized President Obama more in the last couple weeks than Fox criticized George W. Bush in the last eight years and MSNBC's lineup includes conservative former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough who's on for three hours during morning drive. To Koppel both networks are the same and their viewers are being told what they want to hear, not the hard truths they may not want to hear, but need to know.

"We are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers," Koppel wrote.

In one nonsensical passage Koppel blames credit card debt, the national debt, the housing collapse and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on the "dangers of entitlement run rampant." So if you ran up credit card debt and took out a second mortage on your house to pay your bills, it's your fault, not the Wall Street corporations that profited off of it. And when Bush invaded Afghanistan and and Iraq and gave tax cuts to the superrich turning a surplus into a deficit, that was due to your sense of entitlement.

Koppel also goes on the praise the work of his generation of broadcasters "the trusted gatekeepers" who cut their teeth during the Vietnam War and calls for more fact-based journalism and "willingness to present those facts without fear or favor." Koppel's Nightline was often must see television and he deserves credit for tackling issues in depth, including topics that T.V. journalism often just scratched the surface of.

But Koppel is the last guy to lecture about objectivity and the need for more fact-based journalists. As author Eric Boehlert details in his book Lapdogs: How the Rolled Over for Bush, http://www.amazon.com/Lapdogs-Press-Rolled-Over-Bush/dp/0743289315, former Secretary of State Colin Powell is such good friends with Koppel that he joked in a speech about how he stopped by Koppel's house to take one of Koppel's muscle cars for a test drive.

Powell is the guy who held up the fake vials of anthrax in making the case for the Iraq invasion to the United Nations. Powell later admitted in his biography http://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Colin-Powell-Karen-DeYoung/dp/1400041708 that he had serious doubts about the case for war before the speech. The truth was Powell got to have it both ways: If the invasion led to finding weapons of mass destruction he was the guy who sounded the alarm and if it it didn't, he was the good soldier who made the speech out of loyalty to Bush.

But Boehlert notes that when Powell did three sit down interviews with Koppel a year after the U.N. speech, his old buddy Koppel never asked him about it. When Koppel took heat from reactionaries for reading the names of soldiers killed in Iraq, he said those who believed he read the names because he was against the war were wrong. Koppel told Democracy Now host Amy Goodman he supported the invasion because he believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

In Ted Koppel's world, that's objective, fact-based journalism. If Iraq has WMD, there's no debate on whether the U.S. has the right to invade a sovereign nation. A case can be made that Pakistan, with over 100 nuclear weapons an al-Qaeda presence and a population increasingly angry at the U.S. due to it's killing of civilians in drone strikes, is far more dangerous than Saddam's Iraq was, but Pakistan is an ally and you won't hear Koppel defending an invasion there.

Besides lacking objectivity, Koppel is also short on facts. On NPR this year Koppel absurdly asserted the U.S. built bases in Japan after World War II to keep Japan from developing nuclear weapons when the idea of developing nukes was obscene to a generation of Japanese people after the nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth was the bases were for keeping soldiers who could be quickly dispatched to Korea or Vietnam and as a deterrent to Chinese expansion.

Koppel also asserted this year on NPR that the Obama's Deficit Commission members were all former politicians who could make politically unfeasible recommendations because they no longer had to be elected. He had to be embarrassingly corrected on the air by commission co-chairman Alan Simpson who noted that some members are elected officials.

Despite Koppel's yearning for more fact-based journalists, the truth is he wasn't very big on them himself. Like brushing up on the policies of the men who sought to become the leader of the most powerful nation of the world before they debated.

"Honestly, it turns my brains to mush," Koppel said on Larry King Live after moderating the first 2000 Bush-Al Gore debate in which Gore said Bush's tax plan didn't add up. " I can't pretend for a minute that I'm really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it I haven't a clue to what they're talking about."

It's not the only thing Koppel is clueless about.