In the making of good theatre, it's common to rely heavily on “willful suspension of disbelief,” the practice of the audience to know that what is on stage is false and yet to will themselves to suspend their own disbelief for the sake of the story.

MSNBC seemed on Friday to be exercising a bizarro variant of this concept, which I'll call “willful suspension of belief.” It did this for the sake of a story it wanted to tell. But I don't think it was a good story, nor do I think it was a good idea to tell it. In this article, I'll explain why.

Before I go into what's troubling me here, let's set the stage with what I understand to be the basic facts:

There are a number of points to make here , so I'll just dive right in:

Was there a violation of ethics? No. Olbermann's contributions appear to have been entirely legal and proper. The “offense” was making them without his employer's permission. That's not a breach of ethics. That's the exercise of employer paternalism. I don't know about you, but I don't see that as a firing offense. Sure, it's a violation of rules, but if there were a rule that said no running in the hallway and Keith had run, that would have been a violation, too. The rule violated was little more than that. He forgot to say “Mother, May I?” So he was sent back to where he came from.

Was there the possibility that this would color people's judgment of MSNBC's objectivity? It seems unlikely. Big players like Olbermann and Maddow on MSNBC quite obviously and transparently have a point of view. They prefer a progressive agenda. I doubt there's anyone who can have failed to notice this, and so there cannot be anyone whose mind is changed by this. Hence any suggestion they might make about “keeping up appearances” is just nonsense. The appearance both before this revelation and afterward is the same.

What about transparency? Shouldn't all donations be transparent? I guess it depends on who you ask. Questions of should are subjective judgments we each make, so all I can do is answer for myself and tell you that I don't think so. In a post yesterday titled On the Privacy of Political Contributions, I explained in detail why I think personal donations by human beings should be private and why I think corporate donations should be public.

But $2,400 is a lot of money, isn't it? Keith Olbermann might be a powerful guy, but he's still bound by the same personal contribution rules that you or I is. He could afford more, and if it were legal, he might have given more. But he gave the amount the law allows. It may seem like a lot, but it's dwarfed by the one million dollars given by News Corporation (the Rupert Murdoch company that owns Fox News) to the Republican Governors Association, an organization whose mission is to assist in the election and re-election of Republican governors nationwide. Olbermann is nowhere close to controlling any elections outcomes by the mere fact of his donation, which is why I argued in my article yesterday that disclosure ought not be needed.

Okay, you say, but he is a journalist. Doesn't that somehow matter? Maybe they should be held to higher standards? I don't think so. He's already held to the high standard of making only individual contributions. Disclosing the fact doesn't prove he's ethical. If I tell you I donated $50 to some politician, does that prove I didn't also donate some other amount I'm not telling you about? If you suspect him of wrongdoing, you still have to investigate. And if you don't suspect him, why are you making him jump through hoops? As long as his contributions are not out of line, his privacy still matters as much as anyone else's. We can't make the price of journalism be the loss of human rights.

But money corrupts, right? Don't we have to be careful? Sure. But we already were. That's why the ceiling on donations is set so low. Small amounts of money mostly don't corrupt. And there will be many of them, so they'll just be lost in a sea of contributions, making sure no individual's voice outshouts another's. $2,400 may be a lot of money to you or me, but to a politician who has to collect millions in order to run for office, any one contribution doesn't give the person making it a stranglehold on the politician. And, anyway, the directionality is wrong. I'd worry more if Olbermann were receiving a benefit. It's harder to be corrupted by money you give than by money you receive.

Well, he could still get drunk with power at being able to give out money, right? Again I'll go back to the amount. It's too small. The notion that Olbermann will find himself drunk with power by the effect of giving a candidate a couple thousand dollars seems far-fetched. I'm imagining a phone call where he asks, “Hey, Senator. I know you were going to vote to strike down ‘Obamacare,’ but perhaps you remember I donated $2,400 to your campaign last year. Maybe you'd reconsider—just for me?” I'm then imagine gales of laughter. No, I don't see the risk.

But what about the public's need to know? The public doesn't have a need to know in this case. The amount of money that human people are allowed to contribute is too small for it to matter. The right phrase here is not “need to know” but rather “insatiable thirst for mindless gossip.”

Still, he didn't tell his employer. That's a lie of omission, right? Can we really trust someone like that? You might construe that he lied. But it wasn't a lie. And even if it were, I'd regard it as a “white lie,” that is, an “ethical lie.” As I argued in my post yesterday, it's information that it ought to be illegal for any employer to ask for. It reminds me of “Don't ask, don't tell,” where people are put in the position of lying to avoid answering a question that they should never be asked. And so it's no small irony that Keith, who has been one of the outspoken champions of one's right to have a private life that was no one's business because it hurt no one, should trip over his employer's desire to do the same thing to him. His act was a private act. No one should be asking and he should not be told he should must answer. Don't ask, don't tell.

Still, he entered into his contract voluntarily. And he was well-compensated for it. I absolutely don't think the money he's paid is relevant. If an employer is allowed the right to control donations, an employer can game the election system. That must not happen. And, importantly, it sets a very bad precedent. What's to say you or I would not be next? Suppose you worked for a multi-national company but wanted to contribute to a candidate who favored more protectionist policies and found you had signed a contract saying you'd get your employer's approval before donating? What if you wanted to support a candidate who favored unions, but your employer didn't approve it? It's issues like these which show why this must not allowed to happen.

But he didn't keep it private. Politico found out. Of course. To make a campaign donation at all, one must disclose certain personal information. But that information is not intended to “out” oneself to one's employer. Rather, it's to allow the candidate to be audited to make sure money is coming from legitimate sources. It's true that Politico was able to find it. However, there is lots of information a nosey reporter can find that I think has no business being made public. What if they found video from a security camera that could see how he voted in an election? Would they feel it appropriate to print that? I think that's not appropriate either. Even a public figure is entitled to private acts. Voting is a private act.

But what about disclaimers? What if he had those people he'd donated to appear on his show? Surely then he should tell us. I also don't even want a disclosure in that case. It's not the same as a media company disclosing that a guest on their show received a large donation from them, perhaps bigger than humans are allowed. In the case of a big donation, bigger than humans are allowed, disclosure is important. But if the amount was within the modest bounds dictated by law, there's simply no reason to mention it at all. No guest is coming onto Keith's show simply because they got a $2,400 donation. It's too little. They are probably appearing because they get free national TV coverage. That's worth a lot, and being on the show is perhaps a donation of a sort, but that's true whether or not Keith gave them money. And anyway, it's really Keith's employer, MSNBC, that is paying for that gift of air time. It seems unfair that they don't have to ask permission for their much bigger public gift, but he does for his small private one.

But what about Juan Williams? Didn't he have a similar situation and weren't people all over him? Actually, some people defended him for reasons very similar to what I've cited here. After all, broadly construed, his remarks were political, and some have said his firing amounts to a censoring of his political position. I wasn't swayed by that claim, but I do acknowledge the concern as legitimate and the question as complex. Certainly we must never summarily dismiss concerns about the chilling of free speech.

Aha! Now we're finally getting somewhere. So you're saying Juan Williams shouldn't have lost his job? After considerable thought, I think the Williams firing was reasonable. It was based on a public act made in a professional setting, and its impact was forseeably something that might matter to NPR. It's more akin to Ronald McDonald appearing on camera and saying how much he was enjoying his meal at Burger King or endorsing a particular politician. That's not the same as the guy who plays Ronald McDonald perhaps being called out for having giving a donation privately to a political candidate who opposes funding for children's hospitals. Appearing on camera is a public act, making a campaign donation is not. Keith's error (if it even was one) was to privately exercise what should be the right of any citizen, and he did so in a manner utterly consistent with his public message. Williams' error (and I allege it was one) was to do something that was an aspect of his paid, public persona but was in contradiction of policy of one of the two competing employers that he had. Just even having a job at both places seemed to me to be an error for which he should have expected eventual repercussions. I would not have advised him to do that.

Didn't Rachel Maddow say on Friday after Keith's suspension that this was all good and proper, that it showed that MSNBC had rules and standards when Fox News doesn't? I think MSNBC does have better rules and standards than Fox, but I'm not sure this is the best example. Sure, there is adherence to rules, but stupid ones. This shows mostly that MSNBC is as capable of pointless bureaucracy as anyone else. And this wasn't about their adherence to ethics rules, this was about adherence to some stupid rule about a parent's permission to exercise one's ordinary rights to participate in a democracy. By leaning on how reasonable their own practices are, they open the gateway for other organizations to do the same with their employees—people who perhaps can't survive on suspension without pay. People who can be intimidated into funding or not funding the campaigns their employer wants them to.

Hey, was there more to say about “willful suspension of belief?” Ah, yes. Thanks for reminding me. By the way, you've been a great interviewer, but I'll take it from here.

Sure go for it. And as for the great interview, what can I say? To quote Christine O'Donnell somewhat out of context, “I'm you.”

It seems to me this at this point just a piece of theatre calculated by MSNBC management to give the appearance of high ethical standards, when really it's not about that at all. I said above that I thought MSNBC was engaging in “willful suspension of belief” for the sake of a story. The “belief” that was suspended was in their anchor, Keith Olbermann, a man who appears to have done nothing wrong and who they should be backing 100%. The “story” I was referring to, the one for which they did all this, was this narrative that this incident is about journalistic ethics—about how theirs are better than the people at Fox News.

In fact, I think MSNBC does have better ethics than Fox News does. I just think this incident is not showing that. Fortunately for Keith, the script for this story probably calls for him to come back in a couple of days “by popular demand.” And then the curtain will be drawn, leaving everyone to live happily ever after—except that if the situation ever occurs again, a bad precedent will have been set.

We need to fix that bad precedent now before it grows out of control and strikes one of us because if such overstepping by an employer ever happens to someone like you or me in the future, we probably won't have 200,000 people eagerly lining up to sign petitions to get us back.

I gave money to various candidates during this last election. I assert that this is none of anyone's business. I did have to do some identity disclosure when I did the donations, so I guess it could be figured out. The information would be stunningly boring. Still, my point is that I don't think it's proper even to try to dig up such information.