A Spectre is haunting Twitter; the Spectre of @FOKNewsChannel.

Workers Social Networkers of the world unite!

Just as I had thought the world of liberal media had taken a blow that it could not recover from, FOK News Channel went online last night. FOK, or Friends of Keith, News Channel is what I would assume is Keith Olbermann's ball-punch to MSNBC's contract agreement barring him from being on another television news program. After tweeting throughout the State of the Union last night, making both valid and hilarious points, Keith reported that he will be using the outlet to re-post articles he finds important and also little op-ed gems that he is so famous for.

But why does it matter? It's Twitter, not a national news program. And we still have Rachael Maddow, who was seated centrally at the afterword of the SOTU. It matters because Keith is Keith. For one, regardless of what the actual reason is to his departure, he represents media martyr (in all the good ways, mind you) by being punished by a corporatist despot for his candor and conviction. While the well of liberal media has not run dry because of his loss, it has effected the entire circuit and those important in it; ie: he is important to those who are important.

Keith Olbermann is the Nikolai Chernyshevsky of our time, although much more interesting to read. As a journalist, he used his position to attempt to reach out against the backward regime of the Czar that had been strangling Russia for so many hundreds of years. Marx called Chernyshevsky "the great Russian scholar and critic who has in a masterly way exposed the bankruptcy of bourgeois economics". Chernyshevsky wasn't a Marxist, but rather a Utopian Socialist, closer to Fourier, and yet still he recieved the approval of Marx. Students carried his book "What is to be done?" like a radical's bible, contradicting social constructs and norms, especially those of women. Just like Chernyshevsky, Keith is not the leader of the revolution nor a radical philosopher, so to speak, but he is a voice that glavanizes people in such an intrinsic way that it gathers the attention of the leaders and philosophers. By being important to the leaders and philsophers, the inteligentsia and those outside of it begin to care. He is the voice of the tired, oppressed, and angry.

Keith, like Julian Assange, is a victim of morals. We have an individual who by the very simple drive of needing to identify and then call out wrongdoing is censored and chastized. Unlike Assange, Keith has yet to be accused of treason by a major part of our governement, but we shall see in good time. These wrongs are the things that drive us all mad: falicies in the news, lying and backroom dealing the government, the proud promotion of fascist corporatism, and the list goes on. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) "Injustice anywhere is a threat is justice everywhere." This simple truth is sort of no nonsense moral compass Keith, Assange, and those like them possess. As Thomas Jefferson so vigorously defended free press as it slandered him, so must we recognize the absolute indespensibilty of these Supermen who will call out against wrongdoing and malady to the people whenever it is found.

Show your support to the new FOK News Network by follwing both Keith and the News Network on the links below:

@FOKNewsChannel
@KeithOlbermann