NP: The Police, Message In A Box

I'll admit, I had been growing both a little wary and a little weary of Keith Olbermann's "special comments" on Countdown. I thought the first, on the anniversay of 9/11, was pretty powerful, but that power seemed to get diluted in successive weeks. It smacked a bit of grandstanding to me, and was changing the tone of a news program I had come to enjoy quite a bit, Craig Crawford appearances notwithstanding.

Last night, however, Keith was back on form. I think a lot of the effectiveness of this segment was that Keith, on a very personal level, was pissed. At times he looked like he was going to jump through the TV screen. Why was he so livid? Because he's a sportscaster and a New Yorker.

As the former, he immediately saw holes in an alleged terror plot against NFL statements that turned out to be a hoax, and yet the Department of Homeland Security released it to the media anyway. As the latter, he was incensed at the recent discovery of additional remains of 9/11 victims near the Twin Towers site, which is a story I hadn't even seen.

This goes back to that initial editorial and why it, too, was more effective. In that segment, Olbermann was speaking more as a New Yorker than a pundit. While I'm not saying habeas corpus isn't important, it's still a pretty sterile, academic thing to be talking about.

I still walk this line of recognizing that there needs to be someone somewhere on a real -- okay, almost real -- network willing to stand up to the administration with more frequency, to be a sort of champion for the left, and at the same time, wanting a level-headed newscast that cuts through bullshit without tacking too hard to an ideology. Countdown lives right on this line, and if you buy into what's at stake in two weeks, it's not hard to see why they would choose to cross it. I can't really fault them for that.