Olbie Addendum
By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 27, 2008 - 0 Comments
Lots of good comments on my Keith Olbermann post (plus one that accuses me of hating him for being a strong liberal voice, which strikes me as a very unusual interpretation of what I wrote). One thing I wanted to add, though, is that I don’t think Olbermann’s problem is a failure to be balanced. Pundit shows are primarily about entertainment — they have enormous drawbacks as news programs, but the format does work as entertainment — and part of the entertainment value comes from the fact that the host is picking a side and sticking with it. Of course a successful liberal pundit will never be as hard on a liberal politician; that’s just part of the whole idea of playing for a team. Whenever a Republican is in office, Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News pundits and Glenn Beck have to find something else to be outraged about other than the President. And they usually find it pretty easily.
What I find problematic about Olbermann is that because he never really set himself up as a liberal pundit in the way that Donahue did (with more success than he’s given credit for), or the way that some of the Air America hosts did (with very little success) he has no obvious “team” except the anti-Bush team, which will no longer exist after January 2009. What was interesting about his Obama comments was not so much that Continue…
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Olbermania? Not So Fast!
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments
The increasing ratings of Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, and the enormous popularity of his Edward R. Murrow-esque “Special Comments,” have led to a bunch of recent articles about how he’s the new big thing in cable punditry, the first truly successful liberal pundit on TV, the liberal counterpart of O’Reilly. I’m not completely convinced, and here’s why: I’m not sure his popularity will outlast the Bush administration. Not because he’ll be out of material, exactly. Even if Barack Obama becomes president, there will be plenty of things to be outraged about. The problem is, I’m not sure if he will be outraged, because Olbermann has never struck me as having particularly strong convictions. He just doesn’t like President Bush and more generally what the Republican party became in the ’90s, with the Clinton impeachment and all that. Well, most Americans don’t; that’s why Bush is unpopular and the Republicans were voted out of control of Congress. But what happens if, come 2009, there’s a President that Olbermann likes?
Well, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald noticed that Olbermann not only forgives Barack Obama for the same things he criticized President Bush for, but actually seemed to go out of his way to praise Obama. Olbermann did a “special comment” earlier this year about Bush’s demand for a bill legalizing his controversial (and, let’s face it, probably illegal) wiretapping and immunizing the telecom companies who helped do it. But now that Obama supports a bill that will give Bush most of what he asked for on this issue, Olbermann said last night:
But not cowering to the left, not going along with the conventional, the new conventional thinking on the FISA bill, that’s something altogether different, isn’t it?
Olbermann likes Obama, which is fine. I like Obama. But if that’s a sign of how he’ll act if Obama becomes President, then we can’t expect much of interest from Olbermann come 2009. The Daily Show, by comparison, has shown itself much more willing to make fun of politicians Jon Stewart likes — both Obama and John McCain, who has been on the show often and whom both Stewart and Colbert admire very much — and seems well-positioned to find material long into the next decade. Olbermann, not so much.
Of course, Olbermann’s counterparts on Fox News went even further into Bush-worship than Olbermann ever has into praise of Obama; starting in 2001 Bush became a cult figure in the conservative movement that led to hagiographic Fox profiles and books by Fox contributors like Fred Barnes’ “Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush.” So how did these guys manage to keep it going even during the years when Republicans controlled all branches of government? Simple: Fox News contributors, and Rush Limbaugh, and all the rest, are politically conservative. Even when they love whoever’s in power, they can advocate their conservative views and rail against enemies (feminists, professors, Hollywood) that are out to destroy them.
The difference between Olbermann and these guys, and why I don’t buy him being a liberal icon, is that Olbermann isn’t exactly a liberal. If you watch his show, you’ll notice that he rarely advocates policy views that can be considered liberal; he rarely seems to advocate policies at all. O’Reilly or Limbaugh will go on the air and tell us that things should be this way; some of the things they want may be kind of appalling, but at least they can tell us what they want. Olbermann is almost like an apolitical commentator who was pushed into advocacy by his dislike of Bush and the modern Republican movement. He is against the Bush administration’s ideas about war, executive power, and torture. These are, in my opinion, common-sense positions, but they are not liberal positions. You often hear people talk as if anyone who opposes the Bush administration is automatically a liberal, but that would mean that 75% of Americans are liberals.
Olbermann became famous because of a weird gap on cable news: after 9/11 and the increased success of Continue…
