Ted Koppel’s Washington Post op-ed about the ruination of television news by those darn cable-news kids elicited some feisty responses from the very cable shows the network legend criticized. Surprise, surprise! First up on our compilation, Bill Maher informs Keith Olbermann that because the masses don’t read anymore, he must turn to Olbermann’s cable-news ilk for the in-depth coverage he seeks, but he only listens if the talkers “stick to the facts.” Next, on The O’Reilly Factor, The Weekly Standard’s Mary Katharine Ham highlights C-SPAN as an example of a cable-produced, unbiased public service that Koppel’s old-school, FCC-dominated news model would be hard pressed to duplicate, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow wraps things up by making the point that a journalist who simply writes down what a politician says, and not what they do, is a publicist, not a reporter.
