Ted Koppel/Sean Hannity - A lesson in context

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Koppel was not only referring to Hannity but to all opinion shows.

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In other words he was referring to the entirety of the MSM.

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A lesson in context

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No doubt b/c I saw that headline on Yahoo.......then realized it was Yahoo so it was probably fake news. Sure enough.

I wondered, so I went to a NOLA.com article (which is headlined "Fox News host Sean Hannity is bad for America, Ted Koppel says."

Inside the story, however, is this:

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In the decade-plus since he stepped down as host of ABC's "Nightline" after 25 years, Koppel has lamented a changing media landscape that he says "celebrates the opinions" of overtly partisan news hosts at the expense of neutral reporting. He has criticized journalists on the right and the left for biased coverage, particularly those at Fox News and its liberal-leaning rival MSNBC.

"The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic," Koppel wrote in a Washington Post column in 2010.

"Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it," he said. "They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone."

In the same column, Koppel called then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann the "most opinionated" among the network's "left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts. More than a million viewers flocked to his nightly program because Olbermann was "unabashedly and monotonously partisan," he said.

Koppel lumped MSNBC host Rachel Maddow into the same category, along with Glenn Beck, who was a Fox News host at the time.

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I bet he thought Eric Sevareid and John Chancellor opining liberal pablum on CBS and NBC was A-OK, though

And how can I forget David Brinkley? He was a smartass liberal on NBC and ABC (he was a news anchor before the Sunday morning show).

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In the long haul I think you and all these opinion shows....." are bad for America.

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The Bizarro take-away here is that in Koppel's opinion, opinion shows and the people who run them are bad for America. How does he not see the sweet irony of his very opinion- based question?

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"In the long haul I think

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Koppel, sounds like you have opinions, too.

According to Hannity, it was a 50-55 minute interview. yet only 70 seconds of the interview was actually made public, and Hannity said that Koppel told him the full interview would never be aired.

That's bizarre.

Probably most of you on here were still chasing coeds in the 1990's when Koppel was at his highest. Overall, Koppel was a straight shooter, he would go after people he thought were spinning him or evading him....did not matter whether they were left or right. He would go in depth on a subject.

He might have been an old fashioned liberal, but he was not of the type we see today. I put him up there in the fairness department with the late Tim Russert.

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Hannity is a clown....Limbaugh blows him out of the water on his worst day as does Tucker Carlson on TV. He's not very deep in his analysis, he's just a regurgitator of talking points

It's Koppel's opinion that other people's opinions are bad for America?

Somehow, Ted Koppel's opinion show is righteous, but everyone else's opinion shows are bad for America.

The problem is when people think a opinion show is news and they think the host is a journalist.

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Somehow, Ted Koppel's opinion show is righteous, but everyone else's opinion shows are bad for America.

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Exactly.


Also, wake me up when Koppel ambushes someone like Maddow, Stephanopoulos, Blitzer, Matthews, Pelley, Tapper, Raddatz, etc.

There was 50 minutes to that interview.

I would love to hear the whole thing.