Tonight, Chris Hayes Became This Generation's Joy Behar

The integrity that Al himself lacks is certainly made up for in chutzpah.

Having tacitly declared environmentalism’s mission accomplished by selling out to Big Oil at the start of the year, Al Gore assuages his guilt by declaring MSNBC newsreader Chris Hayes “this generation’s Edward R. Murrow,” Twitchy notes:

Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore is no stranger to dubious awards, so MSNBC’s Chris Hayes might want to check if he can trade in that unofficial “Edward R. Murrow Award” for some ratings. Why all the praise? Because MSNBC managed to cut through all of those “phony scandals” plaguing President Obama and dedicate an hour of prime time tonight to “The Politics of Power,” a special on climate change, with Hayes bravely reporting from the front lines.

What makes Gore’s praise so special, though, is that his former employee at Current TV, Keith Olbermann, holds an actual Edward R. Murrow Award he earned (somehow) while working at MSNBC, and he recently revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that Gore is a clod.

When you’re working for somebody whom you admired politically, who turns out to be a clod, the scales fall from your eyes. Sorry. Al underdelivered. I mean that’s just simply the case. I don’t want to dwell on it, but it’s true.

Maybe it’s time to give the “next Edward R. Murrow” card a rest.

There are certainly lots of fingerprints staining the cards on this deck. As I noted in 2010, “In the Future, Everyone will Be Edward R. Murrow for 15 Minutes:”

“In ‘Daily Show’ Role on 9/11 Bill, Echoes of Murrow,” our pop culture-obsessed self-described paper of record claims:

Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?

And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?”

Of course — because everyone’s the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow:

• The Nation magazine, Sept. 2007: “Is Keith Olbermann the Next Edward R. Murrow?”
• New York magazine, June 2008: “Dan Rather Has His Edward R. Murrow Moment.”
• About.com, July 2008: “Edward R. Murrow Smiles on Award-Winner Katie Couric.”
• Frank Rich [then still with the New York Times], September 2008: “In our news culture, [Joy] Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.”
• Mediaite.com, September, 2009: “Glenn Beck, The New Edward R. Murrow Of Fox News: Who’s The Next Target?”
• Business Insider, October 2009: “Is Shep Smith the new Edward R. Murrow of Fox?”
• Current.org, May, 2010: “Writer David Halberstam declared Bill [Moyer] the new Edward R. Murrow” in 1977.

Good night and good luck — and much like Time magazine declared you (yes, you!) to be “Person of the Year” in 2006, maybe you’ll also cop this nearly ubiquitous prize as well.

Oh, and speaking of Hayes’ show tonight on the Closed-Circuit Network of the Ruling Class, as Tim Graham writes at Newsbusters, “TV Critic Slams MSNBC for Chris Hayes Climate-Change Documentary Without Dissenting Voices:”

Brian Lowry, a former TV critic for the Los Angeles Times who now writes for the trade paper Variety, slammed tonight’s MSNBC eco-documentary by anchor and bicyclist Chris Hayes: “the editorial approach of this Chris Hayes-hosted hour continues an all-too-common trend of cable news preaching to the choir, where not a single dissenting voice is incorporated in any serious way.”

It’s called “The Politics of Power.” Lowry’s liberal enough that he conceded agreement with the notion that “there is no such thing, scientifically speaking, as a credible ‘dissenting voice’ on the subject of climate change.” But he’d like a program where Hayes invites the global-warming “denialists” and makes them squirm in the hot seat like a classic “60 Minutes” patsy:

“Politics of Power” would be more provocative — and potentially more persuasive — if it included people who insist global warming is all a myth concocted by tree-huggers. It’s worth noting, too, that conservatives are not monolithic on the subject, even if they generally still dislike Al Gore.

Besides, speaking of ticking clocks, “60 Minutes” didn’t make a name for itself simply by doing happy-talk pieces, but rather by confronting subjects with hard evidence and tough questions, then watching them squirm in the hot seat.

The left always views resistance to the greens as a corporate conspiracy: “Hayes draws a direct comparison to the days when the tobacco lobby insisted nicotine is not addictive.”

Presumably, that would include inviting Hayes’ bosses on the show and watching them squirm as well. But perhaps Hayes’ ability to speak Truth to Power evidently doesn’t reach even as far as own employer, which is so concerned about the horrors of global warming, they recently stole NASCAR coverage away from ESPN and Time-Warner-CNN-HBO’s TNT channel in a ten year deal.

Although come to think of it, perhaps that’s a fiendishly brilliant way to dispatch the popular fossil-fuel driven sport deep into the bowels of the memory hole, considering NBC’s cellar-dwelling ratings as of late!