Bye, Bye, Keith Olbermann (Updated)

UPDATE (Saturday, Jan 22, 2011) - Law Professor Marvin Ammori of the University of Nebraska in today’s New York Times:

“Keith Olbermann’s announcement tonight, the very same week that the government blessed the Comcast-NBC merger, raises serious concern for anyone who cares about free speech.  Comcast proved expert in shaking down the government to approve its merger. Comcast’s shakedown of NBC has just begun.”

There were no rumors, no advance warnings, no fanfare.  Countdown with Keith Olbermann aired last night for the last time. Here is the video:



According to an MSNBC spokesperson, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell will replace Countdown at 8 p.m., and The Ed Show will fill the 10 PM time slot. The spokesperson denied any connection to the recent acquisition of NBC by Comcast.  Bullshit, I say.  For background, here is a post I wrote over a year ago::

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie - Bye, Bye to Liberal Media 

Act 1: Last August, Comcast removed MSNBC from its Digital Starter Package and moved it to one of its premium offerings.  Of course, Fox News remained in the basic Starter Package because Comcast is a conservative media conglomerate ... According to beachwriter429 at Daily Kos:

What this means is that one now has to pay an additional $17 per month ($204 per year) to view anything progressive enough to even remotely balance out FNC's right wing extremism (…) The neighbor who alerted me to the situation is an attorney, and he thinks this appears to be to be an FCC/Fairness Doctrine violation.

Act 2: Some Daily Kos readers in the Jacksonville area ganged up on Comcast with a letter writing campaign. In response, Comcast restored MSNBC to all customers and sent this reply (excerpt):

Thank you for the email. First and foremost, I wanted to let you know that today we restored access to MSNBC for all of our digital cable customers in the Jacksonville, Florida area (…) Please know that this week's disruption was not at all targeted at MSNBC - it was due to some changes to our digital channel security system (…) This issue was isolated to the Jacksonville area, and we have no reason to believe that Comcast customers in any other areas experienced any interruptions of MSNBC.

Except for the fact that Comcast customers in the suburban Philadelphia area still paying extra for MSNBC (and how many other markets that we don’t know about).  Comcast is lying. 

Act 3: Advance the calendar to November 4, 2009. In the Pittsburgh area, MSNBC has been replaced by the Golf Channel. When an irate Comcast subscriber called to complain, this is what Comcast said:

I was told that at my level of service, basic cable, it is no longer available. No way can I afford to upgrade my service, (and nor would I....it is Comcast after all) so no more MSNBC for me (…) The agent on the phone also told me that Comcast had nothing to do with this decision, but that because MSNBC is a national cable network, it was no longer available in a non digital format. Oddly enough, CNN and Fox are still in the same place.

Act 4: If you can’t beat them, buy them out:

General Electric and the cable giant Comcast have moved closer to a deal giving control of NBC Universal to Comcast (…) After a series of meetings last week, the two companies reached a tentative agreement on Friday over the main points of a deal …

Does this mean bye, bye to Keith Olbermann? Bye, bye to Rachel Maddow? Bye, bye to liberal media?  Sorry folks, but this wave of media consolidations spells b-a-d * n-e-w-s ! Once MSNBC is gone, that leaves only us, the netroots community, to keep the liberal flame from flickering out.

A year later, the deal is done, which is why I am willing to wager that Keith Olbermann is the first casualty.  And the worst is on the way:

Letting one company control the pipes and the content that flows over those pipes is a formula for abuse.  Comcast-NBC could soon hike rates, take away your favorite channels, or even stop you from watching your favorite shows online.  Comcast has already targeted Netflix and other companies that compete with its video and Internet offerings. This warning comes from Josh Silver of FreePress.net:

Today's deal, combined with the FCC's recent loophole-ridden, fake "Net Neutrality" rule, sets the stage for Comcast to turn the Internet into something that looks like cable TV. 

You might be saying, "I'm not a Comcast customer, so I'm not worried." But Comcast will jack up the prices that other cable and online distributors pay for NBC content, and you'll pay higher prices -- we promise. 

You might be saying, "I can just get a new Internet provider if I don't like it." But there's almost no broadband competition. And as TV, radio, phone and other services increasingly become Internet-based, cable will be the only connection that's fast enough to deliver high-quality media and services to most Americans. 

You might be saying, "Why should I care about a business deal between two giant companies?" But this merger is certain to be the first domino to fall in a series of mega-media mergers. The FCC's blessing of Comcast-NBC will embolden companies like AT&T or Verizon to try to gobble up content providers like Disney and CBS, creating a new era of media consolidation where even fewer companies control the content you watch and all the ways you watch it.

The Comcast-NBC merger is a catastrophe for the public and for the future of media, technology and democracy. It's time to get mad … and time to get involved.

On Moderation: KO, Jon Stewart and the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

I'm usually supportive of Jon Stewart and I like Colbert too, but I want to offer a few thoughts on their rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  And then there are those feisty tweets about the rally by none other than Keith Olbermann, to which I'll refer very briefly below.

The runup to the Restore Sanity event was predicated, I think, on the notion that if we could only get the extremists on both sides to pipe down, we could have a civil conversation about matters that are important to individuals and to the country as a whole. That's unavoidable as a justification of Stewart's brand of comedy -- he can't appear to support one political party or movement exclusively. He talks to people as if they were rational adults with the capacity to appreciate the silliness of political posturing and cheap rhetoric. While I don't for one minute credit the notion that an overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens are rational adults -- too many of them seem poised to vote for manifest imbeciles, ignoramuses, bigots, homophobes, and wild-eyed promoters of secession or worse to make that supposition believable -- if one doesn't posit something similar at least as an ideal or goal, we might as well admit that we can't hope to govern ourselves, that the grand experiment of the Founders was pointless. I don't suppose many of us would be pleased to make such an admission. Churchill's witticism about democracy being "the worst form of government except for all the others" still resonates with us.

One brief segment of Stewart's The Daily Show during the runup was instructive -- a series of vignettes in which six people chosen to go on a bus tour to the rally fail to transform themselves for the cameras into the sort of hacks and ogres whose ranting makes for good political fare. (Nice people may go to the theater just as Ian McKellen says, but they don't make for very good theater themselves.) Staged as it was, the series made Stewart's point: whatever the percentages, many people, at least, aren't ultrapolitical goons or raving fanatics; they're willing to treat their fellow citizens like equals and would prefer not to savage or dehumanize them. They have decent manners, want others to like them, and don't care for confrontation or violence. That characterization applies to the people in my own circle, and honestly, I haven't run into any full-on crazies lately (outside my television screen).

Still, if you don't mind a bit of contradictory meandering, another segment of the same show seems equally instructive: the one in which Stewart's editors put together an audio-video montage of all those supposed extreme-talkers on the left and right, neatly equalizing them. The trouble is, they are not anything like equal. That is where I must agree with the audacious KO, Keith Olbermann and his persnickety tweets about the logic underlying Stewart's rally: Olbermann and Company are not the equivalent of the motor-mouths coming at us from the extreme right. Outspoken liberals sometimes exaggerate and make much of little, but the right-wingers fabricate without conscience or remorse; liberals are in general eminently sane and humane, while the rightists are little more than squirming bags of appetite, irrationality, and, at times, even bloodlust. They betray no signs of consistent lucidity.

In this sense, the Great Middle Hypothesis is flawed because it posits that you can calculate a genuinely moderate position between two extant extremes raving at you through your TV box or laptop screen. If you follow this notion, you'll end up doing rhetorical battle with both hands tied behind your back. If you denounce or mock the patent absurdities of the other side, you'll be labeled an extremist, and of course (as KO reminds us) that other side will by no means "tone it down." It will just scream louder and play the bully with ever greater ferocity. Whenever the far right sounds reasonable, it's merely a tactic, sort of like a boxer's feint just before he clobbers you. Fundamentally, these people's worldview is cruel, paranoid, and illogical; for them, reason never is, nor can it be, anything more than a ruse. We forget that at our peril.

So while I like Jon Stewart and appreciate his wit, his persistent calls for middle-America-style "sanity" and moderation seem to me too easily transformed, tamed, or translated into our fabled liberal wishy-washiness in the face of an ill-intentioned opponent. Nice people are petrified of being labeled radicals, while rightists embrace such definitions. They have that over low-talking, reasonable libs. All of this is why I'm careful not to put too much intellectual stock in the rhetoric of civility and moderation, even though I don't want to dismiss it.

But I'm just a predatory dinosaur with huge, jagged teeth. What do I know about civility? What do you think?

The Bill

If you haven't seen Keith Olbermann's recent interview with Wendell Potter, discussing the benefits for the medical-insurance industry coming from the current Senate health care bill, here it is.

Informative and worth watching:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

BYE, BYE, MISS AMERICAN PIE - BYE, BYE TO LIBERAL MEDIA

Act 1: Last August, Comcast removed MSNBC from its Digital Starter Package and moved it to one of its premium offerings. Of course, Fox News remained in the basic Starter Package because Comcast is a conservative media conglomerate and wants to spread the Fox-Beck-Hannity-Billo message. According to beachwriter429 at Daily Kos:

What this means is that one now has to pay an additional $17 per month ($204 per year) to view anything progressive enough to even remotely balance out FNC's right wing extremism (…) The neighbor who alerted me to the situation is an attorney, and he thinks this appears to be to be an FCC/Fairness Doctrine violation.

Act 2: Some Daily Kos readers in the Jacksonville area ganged up on Comcast with a letter writing campaign. In response, Comcast restored MSNBC to all customers in the Jacksonville area and sent this reply (excerpt):

Thank you for the email. First and foremost, I wanted to let you know that today we restored access to MSNBC for all of our digital cable customers in the Jacksonville, Florida area (…) Please know that this week's disruption was not at all targeted at MSNBC - it was due to some changes to our digital channel security system (…) This issue was isolated to the Jacksonville area, and we have no reason to believe that Comcast customers in any other areas experienced any interruptions of MSNBC.

Except for the fact that Comcast customers in the suburban Philadelphia area still paying extra for MSNBC (and how many other markets that we don’t know about). Comcast = L I A R S !

Act 3: Advance the calendar to November 4, 2009. In the Pittsburgh area, MSNBC has been replaced by the Golf Channel. When an irate Comcast subscriber called to complain, this is what Comcast said:

I was told that at my level of service, basic cable, it is no longer available. No way can I afford to upgrade my service, (and nor would I....it is Comcast after all) so no more MSNBC for me (…) The agent on the phone also told me that Comcast had nothing to do with this decision, but that because MSNBC is a national cable network, it was no longer available in a non digital format. Oddly enough, CNN and Fox are still in the same place.

Act 4: If you can’t beat them, buy them out:

General Electric and the cable giant Comcast have moved closer to a deal giving control of NBC Universal to Comcast (…) After a series of meetings last week, the two companies reached a tentative agreement on Friday over the main points of a deal, these people said. Comcast would own about 51 percent of NBC Universal, contributing several billions of dollars in cash and its own stable of cable networks to the new venture (...) Other potential bidders have surfaced, including the News Corporation.

Does this mean bye, bye to Keith Olbermann? Bye, bye to Rachel Maddow? Bye, bye to liberal media? Sorry folks, but this wave of media consolidations spells b-a-d * n-e-w-s ! Once MSNBC is gone, that leaves only us, the netroots community, to keep the liberal flame from flickering out.