Fighting Fire With Fire

I'm becoming a big fan of Ed Schultz. As the latest addition to MSNBC's weeknight lineup, he's continuing the network's transition into a liberal mecca (within the confines of corporate cable news, anyway). He first impressed me with his adamant demands for single-payer health care, a topic I thought was strictly out-of-bounds in the world of mainstream American news. Ed apparently has the courage to go where no other TV news personality will. As if to confirm that, yesterday he tore into Dick Cheney with a vengeance. It was pure magic.

You can watch the clip here. Former Cheney aide Ron Christie was on to regurgitate the former VP's standard talking points, but Ed didn't let him get away with it. He constantly reminded him of Cheney's numerous crimes and misdemeanours - you even heard him use the phrase "war crimes" at one point, a stunning admission of the kind you barely ever hear on typically sycophantic American news. It was a startling demonstration of speaking truth to power, supposedly the whole point of the fourth estate, but a quality that very few mainstream journalists ever demonstrate (with many doing the exact opposite, as we've seen in the cases of those reporters urging that we not prosecute Bush administration officials for war crimes).

That said, it did occur to me that in some ways, Ed was copying a technique used by the worst, most obnoxious Fox News propagandists, which is dominating the conversation, talking loudly and not letting the other person finish. Usually, I watch that happen with Bill O'Reilly or whoever and it really upsets me, because I'm not there to listen to some blowhard spout his opinion; I want to hear what the guest has to say. When Ed Schultz does the same thing, am I justified in treating him differently, merely because I happen to agree with his opinion? I think I am, and here's why.

The average TV news viewer is probably not that politically savvy. He tends to agree with the newsman, who is apparently on his side. This country ignorance is what allows professional liars like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck to cram right-wing propaganda down the throats of Fox News viewers. Ed Schultz is an avowed, proudly liberal voice on the airwaves. In my experience, liberals and progressives tend to be more interested in hearing other people's opinions, and as a result are more laidback in the interview format, allowing the guest to say whatever he has to say. HOWEVER, in this age of spin doctors and pundits, half the time your guest is some professional hack paid to voice the approved talking points of his masters. Enter Ron Christie.

In cases like these, it's doing a disservice to the viewer to have a guest on and allow him to spew blatant lies without follow-up questions. This tends to be the modus operandi of Fox and CNN, but Ed Schultz clearly has balls. In the kind of media environment we have today, sometimes you need to fight fire with fire, and if Schultz needs to adopt similar tactics to O'Reilly to quash the reactionaries that use the airwaves to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, than I say all power to him.