Filed under: Media
Keith Olbermann’s long and winding reign as MSNBC’s top dog ended tonight, with the unexpected announcement that tonight would be his last episode of “Countdown.” I must confess that I’m not exactly torn up about this. While there are political opinions and personality traits of Olbermann’s that I’ve always had a soft spot for, his show was enough of a punditry echo chamber that its maximum potential for illumination and information ultimately went unfulfilled. The charity that his viewers engaged in, though, which Olbermann referenced in his final thoughts on the show, is a pleasant reminder of what the generous and politically motivated can contribute, across the ideological spectrum. It’s always worth recognizing things like that (Lawrence O’Donnell’s promotion of desks for Malawi schoolchildren, as well, has been commendable and valuable).
On to the future at the MSNBC, though- this move, coming right on the heels of Comcast’s NBC acquisition, raises inevitable questions about whether the talent that the network has groomed might be under fire for reasons unrelated to their success. To be clear, I don’t think anybody is under any obligation to employ Keith Olbermann, or any media figure, such as the deeply unpleasant Laura Schlessinger seemed to imply when she claimed protests over her racist remarks (and I’m not talking just about the word) to be an infringement of her “first amendment rights.” That said, a very important distinction between MSNBC and their arch-rival Fox News has always been the difference in how they got their political reputations.
MSNBC has not always been the way they are now. The process that created what we know today- a cable news network that is typically held up as a left-wing equivalent (generally unfairly, in my view) to Fox News, has in fact been the result of a progressive (no pun intended) evolution of the personalities that have brought them success. Many forget the brief experiment, for example, of giving infamous right-wing zealot Michael Savage his own show (which was canceled after he told a caller to “get AIDS and die, you pig”).
There has never been a liberal Fox News host who was even half as radical in their beliefs as Savage was, and that speaks to the difference; MSNBC threw things at the wall to see what would stick. What ultimately stuck was Keith Olbermann, who gave rise to a charismatic fill-in host named Rachel Maddow, as well as (a perhaps less charismatic) Lawrence O’Donnell, who also got his start filling in on Countdown. Perhaps the biggest indictment of MSNBC, to my mind, is the hiring of Ed Schultz, who’s unrelenting bombast legitimately irritates me, but that hiring still fits into a sort of Darwinian explanation for the ideological slant of the channel. Fox News, on the other hand, is editorial creationism; you write the script, then hire the players.
The concern is whether this Olbermann decision was related to job performance (which is wholly possible), or whether it reflects an effort by the new higher-ups at Comcast to alter MSNBC’s opinion content. Again, this is entirely within their right to do, and it doesn’t sting me too bad to lose Keith Olbermann specifically, but it’s important to say: such a choice would be, in reality, much more similar to how Fox News operates than MSNBC ever had been before, institutionally speaking. And seeing as this slides Rachel Maddow into the role of de facto face of the channel, which I’m enormously happy about, I nonetheless fear the chance that she might eventually meet a similar fate.
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