You probably missed it, but last night Keith Olbermann included CNN’s Campbell Brown, who appears in the same time slot as he does at 8 p.m., on his list of “Worst People in the World.” Calling her a “lame duck” anchor, he ripped on comments she made in the Los Angeles Times about the difficulties of producing a show with “an unbiased perspective.” Olbermann slammed her style of news, “where you just read what’s handed to you and you pretend that both sides — correct and wrong — merit equal consideration and you believe that you, and you alone in the world, are objective.” And he touted his own style, “where you stick your neck out and tell the echo chamber it’s wrong, and you try to get people thinking.”
“CNN’s eight o’clock news programs haven’t failed because they’re competing with opinion and interpretative news programs,” he observed. “They’ve failed because CNN hasn’t figured out that everything it puts on the air is available to everybody who watches all day on the Internet.” It may be that we have a soft spot for Campbell Brown ever since she rightly raked McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds over the coals after he refused to answer questions about Sarah Palin’s foreign-policy experience, but we feel the need to point this out: Lashing out at people when they are down, and exiting because of poor ratings performance, is never good form. And even though Olbermann continues to enjoy ratings that dwarf Brown’s (he more than doubled her in total viewers last month), slamming someone’s numbers the day before the monthly ratings show that indicates you yourself have had your lowest month of the year (23 percent down from last year in the key demo) is just a little silly.
