How thrilled are you that political commentator Rachel Maddow is replacing Dan Abrams in the 9 p.m. slot on MSNBC?

“MSNBC has put heavy emphasis this year on presidential election coverage (it has given itself the tag line “The Place for Politics”), and it has turned to Ms. Maddow frequently both as a guest and as a substitute for its most popular host, Keith Olbermann,” writes Bill Carter in The New York Times. “Mr. Olbermann’s emergence as the signature personality on MSNBC has led to its unofficial rebranding as the liberal alternative to Fox News, which is dominated by conservative hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.”

In a story published in The Nation this month about Maddow’s unlikely career path, Rebecca Traister writes:

What’s remarkable about Maddow’s ascension is not its velocity — Hurricane Katrina made Anderson Cooper in less than a week — but the shifts in media it may demarcate. Maddow is one of the few left-liberal women to bust open the world of TV punditry, which has made icons of right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Unlike her beautiful, bilious conservative female counterparts or the cocksure boys-on-the-bus analysts, however, Maddow didn’t get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season’s discovery isn’t a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.

All of which raises a crucial question: does Maddow’s unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliché and categorization at every turn, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and the angry and toward the lucid and sophisticated? Or has her powerful charisma and canny career management allowed her to break the rules — without actually breaking a mold?

Plus: We also learn of a new public television show to focus on — wait for it — world news …

Before moving on to other subjects, I thought I’d add a final word (for now) on the Great Keith Olbermann Debate. Is he a progressive savior amidst the morass of mainstream media or is he a progressive demagogue doing more harm than good?

Well, it’s nice to hear someone coming to his defense. Aaron Barnhardt at TV Barn goes so far as to say that the Olbermann bashers are actually feeding a Republican attack machine that wants to KO KO. He takes particular issue with the views of Jamie Poniewozik, the Time magazine TV critic, whom I reference in a previous post.

The discussion that ensues in the comments is quality stuff, including a lengthy response from Poniewozik himself.

That discussion leads, in fact, to the contemplation of what it means to be a modern journalist — and whether someone like Olbermann is one of those rarified sorts. All of which gives me an excuse to mention a great column by Glenn Greenwald of Salon, in which he condemns Politico and self-conscious editor-in-chief  John Harris — among many others — for the fixation “on meaningless, ephemeral trivialities in lieu of substantive reporting.” You might have heard it all before, but it’s worth hearing again (as well as looking at the statistics Greenwald cites at the end of the piece):

That’s the defining activity of the modern American political journalist: copy down what political officials and campaigns say. That’s what they consider to be “reporting.” Their “scoops” are determined by whoever gets chosen to be the first one to copy down (or cut and paste) those statements first. They focus on trivial stories not only because they think doing so will get them quick attention, but also because — by definition — trivial chatter requires no analysis, thought, or critical faculties.

The real harm inflicted by the behavior Harris describes isn’t that we’re all subjected to an endless stream of worthless gossip from our political journalists. That’s more of an avoidable annoyance than anything else. It’s that the trashy gossip completely crowds out any discussion of anything that actually matters, allowing our government and political class generally to get away with the most extreme acts of corruption, lawbreaking and destruction while those assigned to “report” on what they’re doing prattle on about haircuts, horse races, and an endless stream of soap opera storylines. Those who know best how to feed journalists their easy, gossipy items are those who best manipulate their “reporting.”

Which brings us back to Mr. Olbermann. In this context, he doesn’t seem so remarkable.

In a post from a couple weeks back, I wrote about enjoying Keith Olbermann’s castigation of President Bush over his “giving up golf” comments. I even appreciated the freshness of finally having an unabashed liberal beating the O’Reillys and Limbaughs at their own sensationalistic game. But I did express a bit of a hesistancy over the way Olbermann’s style risks losing the message within the machinations of the messenger/entertainer.

Well, I think Olbermann’s latest “special comment” concerning Hillary Clinton’s reference to the assassination of Robert Kennedy just confirms my worries. And I’m not alone. James Poniewozik, TIME’s TV critic, writes:

The substance (or lack thereof) of the controversy notwithstanding … Olbermann is edging ever-closer to self-parody, or, worse, predictability. (As soon as the Clinton gaffe broke, blog commenters were wondering how ballistic he would go, and he obliged, and how.) Even if we concede his argument — that Clinton was at best callously and at worst intentionally suggesting she should stay in the race because Obama might be killed — every time he turns up the volume to 11 like this lately, he sounds like just another of the cable gasbags he used to be a corrective to.

While years of frustration might have — might have — justified Olbermann’s outburst over Bush’s disregard for soldier’s lives, Clinton’s comments don’t rise to that level.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I see Clinton as the consummate Machiavellian — and I’m sure, apologies notwithstanding, that she really was saying that an assassination might just happen this year and that is a reason to stick in the race (although I can’t imagine she wanted to say it publicly). I don’t give her the benefit of the doubt.

But all she did was make herself slightly more irrelevant than the day before. And that’s not worth the anger.

If you didn’t catch Keith Olbermann’s screed last night — inspired partially by President Bush’s commitment (which he didn’t really keep, apparently) to give up golf in honor of those servicemen killed in the Iraq War — it’s worth watching. Oh, and buckle yourself in — it’s a pretty wild ride:

As genuine as Olbermann intends it to be — and as right-on as he is about it all — his tone and self-righteousness bother me.  Olbermann condemns Bush at the end of the piece for thinking that the Iraq War is all about Bush himself.  Well, I’d like to say to Olbermann that criticism of the Bush administration and the war machine it perpetuates is not all about Olbermann.

And that’s the larger problem with a personality-driven pseudo news show.  It’s never really about the news.  Olbermann, even at his most poignant, feels more like an entertainer than a social critic — and I’m not sure that inspires much action or even critical thinking in his audience.

I could be wrong …. What’s your reaction?