Passion is running high in politics these days. It’s important to keep it in check. I wrote email to Keith Olbermann today. I thought I would share it here. It touches on matters we all need to keep in mind.
Dear Keith,
I saw John Stewart’s parody of / meta-commentary about your commentaries. He does have a point in there, and I think he tried to say it nicely.
I really enjoy your commentaries and your passion and appreciate all you’ve done. I want you to keep doing commentaries. But I agree with Stewart-there are elements you could do without, and it would strengthen your message. Don’t get so caught up in the pageant of it that you fall to the other side of the line. People need to trust your opinion and to hear your passion.
No matter how good your commentaries, they won’t be heard if people are turned off to the messenger. I’d love to see your audience build. I need your audience to build. The country needs your audience to build. But, as I’ve tried to attract my friends, I’ve noticed there are barriers to that. And Stewart’s message is right on the mark.
Especially in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling. Things are getting worse fast. We can’t have people tuning you out for reasons that do not matter.
And yes, I know the election mattered. But the process matters more. And honor matters more. I want to win, but I’d rather lose with honor than win with dishonor. See my blog post about why I stopped watching The Ed Show, for example. He fell to the other side of the line. And there are a number of comments attached to that post that it’s worth reading. You do not want someone to write such comments about you one day.
I do appreciate, by the way, that you use the “Special Commentary” banner when offering personal opinion. Many don’t notice that this is intended to bracket off “analysis” from “news.” It’s a kind of an old school distinction, the way I was taught when I studied journalism in college. Some say it’s gone out of date. But I like it. Still, even in analysis, there need to be at least a few self-imposed boundaries. We wouldn’t have rules against ad hominem remarks in debate if they didn’t work effectively; the rules are there because we know ad hominem remarks are highly effective, and yet we want to exclude them from productive debate anyway.
I used to write comedy myself, weekly parodies of The Young and the Restless (not that you need to go read them, just offered as a vague form of credential). I had a mere thousand people a week visiting. I did all kinds of writing styles and appreciate the difficulty of trying to keep people routinely entertained. Sometimes I did brainy humor, sometimes humor about people’s physical nature. Discussion groups used to make fun of how certain people looked, so I’d pick up on that and work it into a parody. At some point, someone wrote “fan mail” complaining about the occasional focus on physical appearance. They pointed out that these are not things people can change. They were right. So I stopped. It meant working harder on the other humor, and maybe I lost some readers who were only in it for the physicality, but I was happier with myself.
Comments about people’s body parts or otherwise characterizing them physically may seem to complete a metaphor, but to many people they are cues that your remarks are just name-calling. People don’t want name-calling, not the people who matter. As soon as people see the trappings of name-calling, the business of news-watching is over unless the names can be shown to be both solidly deserved and relevant to the point being made.
As an example, one place where I thought Stewart’s commentary wrong was in citing your remark about Joseph Lieberman being a “Senatorial prostitute.” That was a metaphor that was actually well-founded in reality and where if you explain the analogy, it helps people see what you’re getting at provided you can back up the implicit accusation. I do think that this kind of analogy works better in the Special Commentary than in the news segment because it is more “analysis” than “fact.” I don’t think in the commentary section it’s out of bounds, but I think Stewart’s point is worth considering. I saw that segment and seem to recall it was not part of simple analysis. In the news segment, it would be fine to say he risked becoming that. The metaphor is excellent and important. But the details matter.
Be a man with passion. Like Walter Cronkite, don’t be afraid to show emotion when a man lands on the moon. Be someone who can offer a report on war and not just say body counts but can tell people that it’s not about body counts, it’s about people. Cry or yell when that happens. It’s ok to call people names in an emotional moment sometimes-Michael Dukakis lost his bid for the Presidency, in part, because people didn’t see him get emotional in a debate when asked the question about what he’d do if his wife was raped or murdered. React to things.
But an election is a contemplative exercise. People should approach it thoughtfully and you should set an example. You’re in a conflict of interest situation when talking about how to make choices-who to vote for, what health plan will work, etc. Help people understand that elections are important, but teach them to be logical about choosing. Help them to care about health care and war and civil rights, but teach them that logic, science, education and hard work, not frenzied sword-waving, is what’s going to allow us to solve these very complicated situations.
It’s true that there are minds to be changed based on mere rousing of crowds by name calling. But don’t make that your target audience. Because if you do, you’ll lose the rest of us, the ones I think you aspire to be speaking to. You can’t have both.
I saw your outstanding commentary one day about how you got to the place where if you were going to be condemned for having a liberal bias, whether you did or not, you might as well just have the bias. Nothing wrong with that. I wasn’t watching your show back then but you suggest it was more straight news. I actually like the change and am pleased you speak your mind. Just do it honorably. Don’t let people say that Liberals are about name calling. I don’t even mean that you shouldn’t ever call people names. There are a lot of names that people call Hitler or Bin Laden. But don’t gratuitously call them names. Choose even the names you call with care and with the expectation that you’ll be asked to back it up. The examples John Stewart showed of you having to back up your words looked feeble. Be prepared with better, or say to yourself “maybe this time I won’t.”
I will continue to watch your show. I think it’s an essential thing. It’s right up there with Rachel Maddow, John Stewart, and Stephen Colbert in the bid to make news interesting and relevant. Stewart and Colbert have the comedy angle, and people accept more flexibility there. That leaves only you and Rachel trying to tell the story in all seriousness. Rachel is hard-hitting but does it without the name-calling and I commend her for that. In a way, passion is your signature card, the thing that makes you distinct. And that’s ok. But it’s a form of fire, like Colbert’s “Republican” pitch, and requires a delicacy even in the heat of things. Master it. Don’t let it turn you into Rush Limbaugh or Jerry Springer.
Be passionate, but be the kind of “passionate” that people can be proud of, and proud to recommend.
Thanks for your time and for your hard work on the show.
Sincerely,
Kent Pitman
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/
http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/
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Comments
Rated.
I like this letter a lot. I think a lot of us care about Olbermann, and feel that he speaks for us. We love his passion. We love that he occasionally gets on his high horse and lets fly. But he's become so angry these days that sometimes, it just feels as if he's engaged in a war with the blowhards over at Fox and forgets that what we really need is something to feed our souls, to remind us to believe, to give us hope that we'll get out of this infinite, brotherfucking mess that we're in.
So, by all means. Send him the letter. He's a good guy. Maybe he'll read it and reconsider what direction he wants his show to go in.
And of the point -- you really watched Young and the Restless? Neat thing to learn today.
Celebrities were coming in droves, as were California lawyers to watch the pools (much to the dismay of the local Registrar of Elections who whined to NPR all the day after the election.)
But as Nancy Grace had caused me to end my cable relationship, I didn't know KO. She loved him. So I was excited to watch him, too, that first evening. Once. Couldn't stand the guy. Thought he was the Democratic equivalent to the worst of what Fox routinely throws out. I just want (she whined) news. Let me figure out how I feel about it.
But sadly, what makes me uneasy is the number of people who don't seem able to distinguish between news and opinion, or commentary. I happened to catch KO just last night, by accident. Jon Stewart had dinged him and he was kind of apologizing. It's a start.
Bill Moyers will never be as flashy as Keith.
I do think that Keith, a lot like the Ed guy, could be the sacrificial lambs of the left wing media. To good end. In any movement or mobilization of a group someone has to be seen as radical. A little bit out there. I wonder if he finds it worth it, his seeming recent lunacy, in the long run?
Scylla, thanks for dropping by to read.
Dorinda, yes, I watched Y&R for many years, yes. Do check out the parodies (anotherwayout.com) if you've been a fan a long time. The show had gotten into a lull and I was trying to nudge it back on course by offering other ways they could take the plots. My parodies had a loyal following—larger than I get here, amazingly—and got commendations from a couple of self-appointed award-givers. I actually got mail from some of the actors, so I know it was getting read. But it was in the early days of the web when it was hard to make money on ads, and without money coming in from it, I just couldn't justify the time it was taking from the other things I needed to do in life. So I moved on to other things. After all, I was originally complaining Y&R was in a rut. I didn't want that to also happen to me. I stopped writing but left the site on display, and people still find it from time to time and have fun with it.
I don't think one can be objective in always, but I think the quest for objectivity always matters. I don't think we have to be always objective, but I think it's important that someone be and that we distinguish subjective from objective.
Ameriviking, I'm in total agreement. That's why I don't want him to disqualify himself.
Shortly after I went on the air, I overheard some people talking about my show. They said about how it was full of liberal bias. It wasn't then, and the remark was just someone repeating some party line about how all media is. But I thought--if I'm going to be condemned for doing it whether I do it or not, I might as well just do it and do it well, so I decided to allow some of my feelings in.
That's seriously paraphrased, and it slightly reads between the lines, but I think that's the essence of what I think he said. He said it better, of course. It was part of a recommendation telling Obama (I think, or some prominent democrat) to just speak his mind rather than hold back. He pointed out that it was a gift these people were giving him--the freedom to just be himself. And that he should stop pre-compromising when it would do no good.
That's not to say I want all news organizations to do this. But I think that it can be done in a way that matters. Rachel is much better at walking the line. And I adore her for it. But in holding back, she trades a certain amount of anger for a certain amount of smugness or comedy slant, and I think the different approaches speak to different people.
Now I must go check out your Y&R pieces.
I can only say that even as an occasional viewer I have noticed the same trend you write about in this post. It doesn't look like Keith is self-aware enough to spot it himself, and perhaps he doesn't surround himself with people who will share with him such a simple, but crucial observation. He looks like he is carried away somehow an element that has gotten so personal that he can't see it himself or stop himself.
Hopefully this, or another bearer of the same truth gets to him soon.
Rated.
Wendy, I think people's reasons for being like that are personal and almost irrelevant. It may indeed be his dad. It may be that people write in and say they like it. I've written in and said I like it. But "it" is a nebulous thing and people don't always say precisely what they like or do not. I used to urge people who wrote to me about my parodies to tell me not only what they liked but what they didn't, because it's easy to get praise but hard to get solid constructive criticism. People are sometimes too polite to send that.
I learned parody first by watching the grand masters on Carol Burnette but later by copying the style and sitting with friends who read my stuff and watching every nuance of their faces as they read. “Why didn't they smile at that?” “What's funny about that?” I was full of questions. But on the net everything is silence, and though I never had a TV show, I imagine it's the same. Just a few friends and a lot of wonder about what is going over and what is not.
I did high school theatre intensely and more in college. Worked on maybe 40 plays ... but always for an audience, and every little theatre audience was probably bigger than any audience Keith tapes his show in front of. How hard it must be to get the tone right.
So he's mad. He should be. Things are bad and the people who are doing well are not all very nice people. Many are not nice. And there's is election after election where the voice of hatred gets people to the polls. (I'm told, by no one with credentials but someone who made a good enough case that I tentatively believe it, that that's why the Republicans do the gay thing and the abortion thing—many in the central command, it has been said, don't care, but they know the base will rush to the polls and vote the party line if they can just be made mad.) Meanwhile, Democrats are dispassionate and it gets no one to the polls.
Suppose 30% of Americans are Republicans any more (I'm making up the number for argument, not suggesting that's the right number), but half of them are mad enough to go to the polls. Suppose 60% of Americans are Democrats or Democrat-aligned independents but 25% are willing to go to the polls. Well, that's a recipe for having a tight race in Massachusetts, for example. Not because more people don't support the Democrats. Rather, because the Democrats weren't mad enough. So you can understand what may be Keith's desire to wake people up.
The Health Care thing is infuriating him, of course. He's done some outstanding pieces trying to get people to care about that. And made some serious personal contributions to the cause.
Time for us all to go back and re-watch Network. :)
He's an emotional mess. Left objectivity back in the last century. And then to have him discuss sports, too.
Talk about a mixed metaphor megaphoniac!!!!
Considering his ratings, I'd say he has the ego of a deranged engorged mosquito.
But in the department of slipping into partisan frenzy in the light of the body blows liberals have received this past week, Chris Matthews clearly leads the field. His interview with Howard Dean was delicious for those of us who dismiss them both.
I wish a lot more people on the news had more of a liberal bent.
"I've been all over the dial looking for that 'liberal media' and I give up! Where IS it?"
Definitely react to the outrageous. But at the same time, a news anchor needs to be able to present a professional demeanor on camera.
I agree, Olbermann needs to be Olbermann, but there are times he sashays into theatre of the absurd. At least he doesnt (at least that Ive noticed) portray himself to be the equivalent of a Hannity, pretending to deliver news while really delivering Murdock's message.
I, as others have stated here, am a real fan of Bill Moyers on tv and Thom Hartmann on radio. These are people who know how to get at the root of a story. Rachel does an excellent job too, but I just wish she wouldnt get all cutesy - she really could be the next Edwin R Murrow.
Despite being on the team with the bad guys Alan Colmes is a media personality who does very, very little of the me-versus-you partisanship and still covers politics in a reasonable fashion. Of course they never let him on the air anymore and Fox will never let him get away because then they would be nothing but neocon ... but he is the solution to Keith's um ... recent stupidity
Bingo. You said it. Mainly the right-wing needs to hear this with their media-smear machine on full blast but Olberman is one that gets under my skin with this stuff. I like his show but just like most cable news I don't trust the reporting one bit.