Considering Maddow, Schultz, O'Donnell and now Uygur are all on MSNBC I can't fathom. . .

. . .a progressive boycott of the channel.

I still encourage folks to avoid MSNBC's State of the Union coverage on Tuesday night by watching C-SPAN's coverage, including the pre and post speech analysis. This is an excellent opportunity to stand with Keith Olbermann. But we need to support Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Lawrence O'Donnell and Cenk Uygur. We should not be biting our nose off to spite our face. There are too few progressive voices on the airwaves, MSNBC gives them a platform and we need to support them.

I love Keith and will support his next endeavor, but let me remind everyone what he said about President Obama on December 7th 2010:

"It is not disloyalty to remind him that we are not bound to an individual. We are bound to principles. If the individual changes, or fails often and needlessly, then we get a new man. Or woman. None of that is disloyalty. It is self-defense."

Progressive media is bigger than Keith, supporting MSNBC's primetime line-up is not betrayal of him.

If you piece together the reports/speculation of what lead to his exit from MSNBC it would appear that according to some Keith wanted out, he wanted his freedom. That is an important point to consider when we evaluate our anger at MSNBC, WHICH STILL HAS A PROGRESSIVE PRIME TIME BLOCK!

Also, lets be honest while many respect Keith, it is obvious that Keith was not popular with his colleagues. That is something he needs to work on. It is not grounds for firing but it is something management has to consider when it comes to attracting/retaining talent for the other shows/day parts.

I don't raise this point to call out Keith, quite the opposite, I want him to be successful and to the extent his temperament/personality impacts his career he would be well served to do something about it.

Keith is a smart man who has constantly shown on air humility by acknowledging his on air mistakes. I hope that as he embarks on his next step he considers any off air mistakes he might have made and corrects them.

I am not happy Keith is off of MSNBC, but there are some great people still there who do not need to be punished as a result of it.

FORGET GLENN BECK: the UPS Store has temporarily halted buying ads on Fox News Channel as a whole

While I'm definitely thrilled to see the success of Color of Change's threatened boycott of companies that advertise on FOX NEWS CHANNEL (FNC) during the Glenn Beck Show, I'm more excited by this line from the Associated Press article on the effort:

-snip-
"This is a good illustration of that conundrum," said Rich Hallabran, spokesman for UPS Stores, which he said has temporarily halted buying ads on Fox News Channel as a whole.
-snip-

Now does this mean that the UPS Store will stop advertising on FNC completely? Who knows. But what it does mean is that the boycott on Beck is making advertisers really evaluate where they advertise and hopefully this is the beginning of a new era in broadcast advertising, a new era in which personalities are not rewarded for spreading lies and hate.

I do feel that the AP and others do the public a disservice when they group MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman with FNC's Beck and Sean Hannity because the reason for the backlash is not liberal/progressive vs. conservative, its about responsible rhetoric vs. irresponsible rhetoric.

By drawing this comparison we are being led to believe that they all do the same thing, they don't. Folks like Beck, Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs are not problems because they represent a conservative point of view, they are problems because they use misinformation and outright lies to divide us. I am no fan of MSNBC's MORNING JOE, but while Joe Scarborough has not entirely avoided misinforming, this show for the most part is responsible when it comes to dealing with some of our most divisive issues of our time.