Bloggasm

FNC’s Bill O’Reilly is known for his ethically-challenged ambushes of media personalities, whether it’s following bloggers for hours while they’re on vacation or claiming that the ambushees were given the opportunity to come on the show when they weren’t. But his latest ambush has reached a new low; the reporter he sent to interview comedian Janeane Garofalo not only didn’t say right away who he was, he lied when asked directly by Garofalo:

GAROFALO: What are you doing here?

JENKINS: I’m just a blogger [who] reads blogs. He’s a radio host.

GAROFALO: But what do you do with all those blogs?

One can debate the merits of following a Think Progress blogger for hours in a car and running up to her while she’s on vacation, but failing to disclose your employer and claiming you’re a “blogger” even when confronted directly? I know that O’Reilly is a ratings draw and so therefor holds a lot of sway at Fox News, but executives should in this case step in and lay down some ground rules, especially since this involves underling correspondents and producers at Fox News more than O’Reilly himself.

How random. A “psychographic-research company” called Mindset Media has performed personality tests on thousands of individuals, all in order to ascribe personality traits to different kinds of media consumption. Like horoscopes, I think personality tests lure people in with the irrational tendency to gravitate toward confirmation bias — especially if all the personality traits are positive — but some of the consumption trends for different mediums were interesting. For instance, did you know that heavy internet users are “153% more likely to always buy organic products and 104% more likely to drive a hybrid car”?

Oh, and we now know where the conservative blogosphere’s readership comes from:

Low-level consumers of the internet tend to rank high in dogmatism, and are described as socially conservative people who tend to look to a religious or moral authority for guidance. “People who are more liberal are more likely to have the internet as the most consumed media,” Ms. Welch said.

A survey found that 65% of Daily Kos’ discussion of a recent Olbermann segment is negative.

Last week, Fox News’ Sean Hannity made an off-the-cuff offer to partake in waterboarding for charity, an announcement that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann met with his own charity offer.

“For every second you last, a thousand dollars — live or on tape, provided other networks’ cameras are there,” the MSNBC anchor said. “A thousand dollars a second, Sean, because this is no game. This is serious stuff. Put your money where your mouth is, and your nose. Oh, and I’ll double it when you admit you feared for your life, when you admit the horrible truth — waterboarding, the symbol of the last administration, is torture.”

Over the past few years, members of the liberal blogosphere have been among Olbermann’s most ardent supporters, perhaps none more so than the diarists at Daily Kos. During every show of his the community hosts an “open thread” and Olbermann himself often blogs at the liberal site.

But the negative response the Kos community had for this Olbermann segment and others indicates a certain level of animosity is growing towards the MSNBC host. As of this writing, Olbermann’s charity offer has spawned nine diary posts and nearly 1,400 comments at Daily Kos. I surveyed a sizable percentage of these comments and found that approximately 65% of the discussion of Olbermann is negative. About 30% of the comments are positive, while the remaining 5% is neutral.

“Someone should ask Olbermann why he would want to inflict any such treatment on any other living human,” one commenter wrote. “And, if what he is proposing comes up short of what we did with our ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ what’s to be gained by giving Hannity any attention.”

Much of the negative coverage followed in this vein, while Olbermann supporters said that the anchor’s offer was a good idea, one that would finally teach Hannity that waterboarding constitutes torture.

“I disagree,” one person wrote. “This is co-opting Hannity’s stunt. I think Hannity is now in a losing position. Either he backs out, or Olbermann makes some actual good come out of Fox News.”

This isn’t the first indication that the Daily Kos community has soured on Olbermann. When CNBC’s Jim Cramer appeared on the Daily Show — an appearance that many considered an embarrassment to CNBC and its parent company — the Kos community harshly criticized Olbermann for not highlighting the interview on his show. Many accused him of bowing down to alleged demands that MSNBC anchors not mention the Cramer/Stewart interview. Olbermann himself showed up in the comment threads to defend himself from these charges.

But if this is a sign that the Kossacks have turned on Olbermann, who will take his place in the cable news lineup as the liberal blogosphere’s darling? Both Rachel Maddow and (ironically) FNC’s Shepard Smith have been getting favorable coverage from Daily Kos in recent months. Might one of them become the blog’s newest champion?

I’m about 60 pages into his new book, Outliers, which he talks about in the clip:

He seems to have genuinely not meant to do so, but it’s funny how this went up on Youtube within minutes after it happened:

The youtube video embedded below is hilarious. Two guys start going at it and making out directly behind a CNN news correspondent while he’s on the air live.

Every time a journalist asks Jon Stewart whether the Daily Show is a major driving force in politics and media, he ardently denies such influence. I think it’s time that he stops making these denials and just admits he’s one of the most powerful journalists in the U.S.