Juan Williams, Keith Olberman & Intellectual Celibacy

Don’t tell anyone that I am actually thinking….

Last week, NPR fired Juan Williams for commenting on Fox News that seeing a person in Muslim dress on a plane made him nervous.

Now MSNBC has suspended on-air host Keith Olbermann for contributing $2400 to a Democratic candidate.

Both of these events show just how messed up our conventional media are.

They are messed up because they expect their reporters and correspondents to hew to a ‘higher standard’. They want them to be non -political, to be intellectual cyphers, to be, in short, about as interesting as oatmeal.

This idea came from a time when there were essentially only 3 networks and access to the public came from the government’s granting frequency licenses of the public airwaves to broadcast.

The tacit agreement was that the networks could grow unspeakably rich by mining this public access at no cost, in exchange for presenting the news as a public service.

And as it was a public service it had to be scrupulously unbiased and un-opinionated.

This neutering of the press, this castration of passion and opinion stood in sharp contrast to the entire history of a free press, which has always prided itself on just the opposite – taking a stand and an opinion clearly voiced.

In Britain the papers make no bones about their politics – and neither does Fox News, which, coincidentally has the highest ratings.

People want someone with an opinion.

They want someone with a backbone.

They want someone with beliefs and passions – right or wrong, agree or disagree, at least you know where they stand.

When the ‘state’ takes control of the media (and CBS and NBC are nothing but functionaries of the State in many ways), they like to neuter their functionaries so on one gets upset.

There is a reason that the Catholic Church demanded celibacy of its priests.

There is a reason that NPR and NBC demand intellectual celibacy of its staffers.

And it’s a reason that is all wrong.

All wrong.