Now Ted Koppel offers his two cents on journalism and integrity:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111202857.html

As much as I detest the type of programs that Olbermann and O'Reilly put on, I have more respect for them than I do for folks like Koppel who pretend to have no agenda and try to slant the reporting so that it manipulates public opinion.  Most of it was pretty obvious to me from just watching his presentation but there was a lot more to it than than.

Many years ago, he would pretend to have sort of an open mike program in which he invited in a general audience to watch him confront some spokesman that he wanted to discredit.  In fact, he made it a practice to send out his minions ahead of time to make sure the audience was packed with folks who would hoot and hiss, if not shout down, the person he was seeking to discredit and would cheer every misstatement and conclusory assertion of fact that Koppel used to advance his perspective.

On one occasion, he had some fundamentalist leader of a group who was very prominent at the time appear as the featured opponent here in Memphis.  Weeks before, a good friend of mine who then president of the local chapter of the ACLU got a call from one of his advance people to make sure she would be available in the audience as a plant.  And of course they contacted a number of folks from local colleges who would presumably have been hostile to everything the guy had to say and could be counted on to weight the audience response very heavily in Koppel's favor.