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It’s off.

The Democratic presidential debate originally scheduled for September 23rd has been cancelled. The debate – co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Political Education and Leadership Institute and to be aired on Fox News Channel – had already been boycotted publicly by frontrunners Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. According to the Associated Press:

Fox News and a black political group say they will not hold a Sept. 23 Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, which the leading candidates already were planning to skip.

A new date had not yet been set, Fox News spokesman Michael Murphy said Thursday.

The campaigns of U.S. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards had said they would not participate in the debate. Opponents have criticized Fox as biased against Democrats.

Keith Olbermann, no fan of Fox News Channel, advised the candidates against this a month ago. We here at Public Eye made our feelings known in May when the invitees began begging off:

America’s media landscape is already polarized enough. Partisans listen to their own radio shows, watch their own media outlets and generally seek out information that reinforces their political leanings. The Democratic presidential candidates are missing out on an opportunity to get their message out, confront the channel they view as a foe, and define themselves in their own words, rather than letting themselves be defined by what they see as Fox's mischaracterizations.

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"I don't know if I would have advised (the candidates) to avoid free television time, whether it's on Fox or Al Jazeera."

-- Keith Olbermann, on the decision of many Democratic presidential candidates to not participate in a Fox News Channel debate. (From a report by Aaron Barnhart.)

When you think of political debate moderators, you think of old school types like Jim Lehrer and, over the years, Edwin Newman or Sander Vanocur. These journalists could be relied upon to navigate discussions dispassionately and professionally – and occasionally keeping the peace.

Welcome to the 21st century, folks. According to the AFL-CIO, a certain MSNBC host and frequent George Bush critic is going to moderate an upcoming Democratic debate held by the union:

Keith Olbermann, whose biting, pull-no-punches commentaries on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” have been known to spike the blood pressure of their targets—ask Fox News’ belligerent right-winger Bill O’Reilly—will moderate the AFL-CIO Presidential Candidates Forum in Chicago on Aug. 7.

The debate will consist of some questions posed by AFL-CIO members in an online contest and a number of questions from Olbermann himself.

As you’d expect when a partisan personality gets involved in a debate, it’s causing a stir in some media quarters. One critical view comes from Inside Cable News:

A year and a half ago MSNBC could have probably worked Olbermann in to moderate a debate without drawing too much fire. But not now. Not after Olbermann has firmly placed himself on the left side of the political spectrum with numerous Special Commnets/attacks at the Republican administration, and one aimed at the Democratic Congress for not having a spine to stand up to Bush on the Iraq War, I don’t see how anyone can watch Olbermann moderate a debate without thinking of his biases. MSNBC is taking a big risk here.

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Keith Olbermann has developed a reputation – he’s earned media capital, if you will — by raising serious questions about the political climate in America. But last night, he squandered a bit of that account in a 16-minute segment in which he attempted to make the case that the JFK terror plot was little more than a cleverly-timed political ploy by the Bush administration.

The segment went through chapter and verse of how curious the timing has been of many Bush terror alert announcements and arrests – how they frequently seem to follow, and swallow, news that isn’t friendly to the White House. There has been rampant discussion of the consistencies of these coincidences in the media over the years.

It’s a concern. But Olbermann stretched that concern to a very thin and tenuous extent last night.

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Pac-Man Fever Gives Way to Newsbreaker Nausea: It’s not quite the natural combination of peanut butter and jelly, but MSNBC has a new online game called NewsBreaker that's worth, well, considering. Imagine if an Atari 2600 and a news ticker had a baby and you’ll have an idea what you're in for. When we played we learned that Wisconsin is having trouble with sex toys and that Omega-3 oils may help the brains of the elderly, so we’ve got that going for us. Which is nice.

May Madness: We've had Dan versus Dave. Ecks Versus Sever. And now: David versus Joe. (That would be Gregory and Scarborough, of course.) MSNBC is trying to figure out how to fill their 6am-9am slot, which was previously held by Don Imus. Not sure what happened to that guy: Didn't he get into hairdressing or something? Anyway, you can tell them what you think. Yes, you! Will it be David Gregory – you may remember him as a backup dancer for MC Rove? Or could it be former congressman and nighttime talker Joe Scarborough – who seamlessly worked Public Enemy lyrics into his show yesterday morning? MSNBC has retained an “online opinion panel” called newsVIPs to collect votes from the audience.

From the Department of Nowhere to Go But Up: Ever since they made the decision to feed the rats-on-crack audience of political junkies, MSNBC has seen their fortunes rise – Olbermann’s viewership is up 72 percent over last May and Joe Scarborough’s ratings have improved 50 percent. Former MSNBC host Alan Keyes must be beside himself.

Last night, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste appeared on MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann.” Batiste has been a CBS News consultant, but last night it was disclosed that he has been asked to leave that position due to his participation in an ad criticizing President Bush. Says Batiste in the ad: "Mr. President, you have placed our nation in peril." You can watch the "Countdown" segment here.

CBS News Vice President, Standards and Special Projects Linda Mason confirmed to me that Batiste was asked to vacate his position.

“When we hire someone as a consultant, we want them to share their expertise with our viewers,” she said. “By putting himself front and center in an anti-Bush ad, the viewer might have the feeling everything he says is anti-Bush. And that doesn’t seem like an analytical approach to the issues we want to discuss.”

She said that Batiste's appearance in the ad marked a violation of CBS News standards, in which “we ask that people not be involved in advocacy.”

Added Mason: “We might still go to the general to ask about things, but not as a consultant to CBS News.”

UPDATE: Mason contacted me this afternoon to expand on her comments.

“General Batiste took part in a commercial that’s being shown on television to raise money for veterans against the war,” she said. “It isn’t just that he took an advocacy position.” She also said that the decision would have been the same had Batiste appeared in a similar ad in support of the president.

Earlier today I mentioned the debate over whether "60 Minutes" profilee (and Early Show contributor) Lou Dobbs should be called a journalist. The same question, as the Associated Press' David Bauder notes, has arisen around MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who recently hosted MSNBC's coverage of the Republican presidential debate.

Olbermann hammered frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani in a commentary eight days before his hosting duties. MSNBC's decision to give the liberal host the job, Bauder writes, prompted complaints from the Giuliani camp and other campaigns, which privately contacted NBC to express concerns.

NBC News senior vice president Phil Griffin says Olbermann can play both roles.

"He can tell when it's appropriate to express himself in a commentary and when to be a journalist," Griffin told Bauder. "That's one of his strengths. He knows exactly the tone and his role when he's doing anything."

It's certainly possible to be a straight reporter one moment and a commentator the next. But it does create a perception problem. Mainstream media outlets have long pushed the notion that they are in the business of giving viewers the facts, not their twist on it. And having those facts offered by people who are publicly giving their opinions undercuts that effort.

To be sure, nothing has really changed since the time before Olbermann and Dobbs found their niche. Reporters have always had opinions, even if they pretended otherwise. Perhaps we're better off when those opinions are aired publicly – that way, viewers can take them into account when consuming news.

But it's interesting that news outlets, in allowing folks like Olbermann and Dobbs to straddle the line between straight news and opinion, are now making the tacit admission that they are moving away from the useful fiction that journalists striving for objectivity don't have opinions to overcome to achieve it.

Last night on the "Evening News," CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian brought us a story about Pete Rose, the baseball legend whose legacy was tarnished by revelations that he bet on baseball. Rose, Keteyian reported, told ESPN's Dan Patrick "I bet on my team every night."

The "Evening News" gave the story pretty big play, with a roughly 90 second package before the first commercial break. (ABC's "World News" didn't mention it; NBC's "Nightly News" gave the story 20 seconds.) Rose's comments are also being widely reported elsewhere in the media.

But Keith Olbermann, who conducted the interview with Patrick, suggests in a blog post today that the story has been significantly overblown. He writes that the notion that the comments represent "a damning admission that his gambling was far worse than we ever thought" is "fiction." Here's why:

His admission of nightly betting came up only because, before he came on the air with us, I had repeated the standard history of his gambling while Reds’ manager: that he never bet against his own team, but that he often didn’t bet at all on their games. This, to me, was as great a transgression as the gambling itself, because it left open the prospect that he wouldn’t use his closer or would rest his key players during the games in which he had no wager. To me that was a kind of passive-aggressive game-fixing.

Rose was correcting me. Used that term. The emphasis was not “I BET on the Reds every night,” but “I bet on the Reds EVERY night.” To me, that takes a little of the sting out of the process. At least Pete Rose the manager wasn’t subservient to Pete Rose the compulsive gambler. At least the game outcomes weren’t affected because he was saving John Franco until a night he had $500 riding on the result.

Pete doesn't exactly come out smelling like a rose (sorry) after all this. But with the context provided by Olbermann, he does appear in a better light than he does in most of the stories about his comments, which don't go much beyond the stand-alone quote.

Writes Olbermann: "Every reporter should have a story written about him, or failing that, have about 100 stories written about a story he generated. It’s the best reminder you can get of how easily assumptions, misunderstandings, and sloppiness can creep into the coverage of almost anything, from the weather forecast to a Pope’s funeral."