Smirking into the sunset

Former Times Television Critic Howard Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism in 1985, will be writing occasional commentaries about news on television and the Internet.

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It seems like a couple of centuries since His Holiness Pope Walter reigned as God's deputy on the airwaves. Even longer if you think about leave-'em-laughing funnyman Keith Olbermann.

The leer, the smug histrionics, the relentless needling, the shameless self-puffery, the accusatory rants excoriating Bushies and other Republicans as well as cable competitor Fox and its temperamental bully, Bill O'Reilly. And, of course, the comedy.

"Countdown With Keith Olbermann" is the bean ball between "Hardball With Chris Matthews" and "Verdict With Dan Abrams" in MSNBC's weekday lineup. This trio has spent the election season heckling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton from deep inside Sen. Barack Obama's hip pocket and hammering Sen. John McCain since Day One.

Olbermann and Matthews co-anchored MSNBC's coverage of this year's party caucuses and primaries, and when Obama clinched the Democratic nomination this week, calming down these guys would have required a defibrillator. But the low point was New Hampshire, when they spent probably 15 minutes giggling at and making fun of the speech McCain gave after topping that primary's GOP field.

All right, McCain couldn't give a good speech even if he were lip-syncing Obama. Yet inept as he was, the news nihilism of Olbermann and Matthews was worse. And Olbermann hasn't let up; he's now attacking McCain's grammar.

We worried in Walter Cronkite's day in the '60s and '70s that a news anchor would sway public opinion merely by raising a brow in subtle response to a story. Oh the horror.

Yet today, mainstream TV and the blogosphere regularly market opinion and speculation as news, and few viewers would be shocked if Olbermann slapped on Groucho brows to get a guffaw. Anything -- anything -- to get a laugh.

Is this to be the standard during this period of media transition? What do we have, a few years at best, maybe 10 before news goes all Internet all the time and moves to fingernail-sized screens that we read with a magnifying glass? Technology-driven change is transforming news media, and news consumers, at warp speed. How many years before newspapers like this one are available in present form only as antiquities, like the illuminated manuscripts on display under glass at the Getty Center?