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Well, on Countdown tonight already, Keith Olbermann is hinting at more Imus news, but here's what he said this afternoon when Dan Patrick again put him on the hot seat, asking him about it during their hour on ESPN Radio.
Olbermann said he doesn’t think Imus will have a television show anymore—“I can’t speak to the radio show. I don’t think he’s going to have the television show in two weeks’ time.” He said this has been about "much more than just race" for a long time. “This has been about an attitude of hatred on his part towards everybody. Everybody that I know has been a victim of some obscenity of some sort between what Imus has said, what Bernard McGuirk, his producer, has said on the air.” It has been “a disaster waiting to happen, and it happened.”
He said the racial stuff Imus said is just the latest in a series of things, and that he thinks things would have been OK with the two-week suspension, had Imus not come out and started to blame the media today for his situation on this morning's show.
Olbermann said that he himself is “on a tightrope here” talking about Imus. He has had “an opinion” about Imus, and about appearing on the same network with him, for a long time, but has held his fire because “you don’t shoot internally—and I’m still going to hold my fire on it.” He said that Phil Griffin at MSNBC asked Olbermann to wait to “ask for any action” until Imus met with the Rutgers players, and that this was what he planned to do because he thought it was the fair thing to do.
Patrick asked him again whether things wouldn’t be different were Imus on Fox. “I think if he were on Fox, you would be killing him. And I know you don’t want to shoot in-house—but still.” He said he was surprised at Olbermann’s reaction to this so far, given how well he knows him and how he doesn’t back down from taking a stance on these kinds of issues.
Olbermann’s reply: “Well, we all make compromises.” He pointed out that he and Patrick had not thrown ESPN employee Michael Irvin under the bus in the past when “he made a fool out of himself on this show.” He said that if he thought he couldn’t work for the same network Imus works for, he wouldn’t have signed on for another four years, or even rejoined MSNBC four years ago. “These are compromises you have to make and to some degree, you do have to deflect your fire.”
He felt that if the Rutgers team was willing to hold its fire until it heard from Imus, “I am willing to defer to them.” But that if it were up to him to decide what to do, “we’d be looking for new programming morningtimes on MSNBC. On the other hand, I would have felt that way anytime in the last five-ten years, because I’ve heard jokes—I’ve heard gay jokes, I’ve heard racist jokes, I’ve heard ethnic stereotype jokes. I’ve seen people’s careers end because people offstage who don’t make a lot of money—because he brought them onto that television show and that radio show and embarrassed them, and bribed them into saying things about other people’s personal lives.” (I have a feeling here that Olbermann was making an oblique reference to a time—I didn’t see this but heard about it—that Imus brought some MSNBC makeup women onto his show and offered them money to talk trash about Olbermann, and tell Imus whether Olbermann was gay.)
Patrick asked him why big-name politicians and newsmen still have gone on Imus’s show. Olbermann: “There has been a separate set of rules for him, and then, unfortunately, we all act as enablers. Especially the people who work around him, and McGuirk is the worst.” He called McGuirk “a vile person who has done vile things on the air—to me, and to people I know, and more importantly, to people I don’t know. It transcends race and color and gender and sexual orientation. It’s just not remotely in the realm of comedy anymore.”
He said that people are in general more sensitive to offensive statements than they were in the past, even though they can still be found everywhere—and the problem with Imus is that despite this increased sensitivity to such statements, the people he worked with never changed the “rules” by which he worked.
Patrick asked why it took so long, given that Imus made the remark last Wednesday, for management to act, and Olbermann pointed out that most of MSNBC’s management was off the last few days of last week because of the holidays. “Half the people who should have been reacting to this immediately were not physically available to do so.” He also said he felt that they should not have “shot from the hip” and needed time to collect the information they needed before acting. “This man should not have been escorted from the building when he said this. An investigation should take place of what happened, why. His testimony, if you will, should have been taken—and it was.” He said he has “great respect” for how NBC News and MSNBC has handled the situation. “They have been thorough, they have been deliberate, they have tried to come up with a solution that enables the show to continue and his career to continue, and yet satisfies those who are outraged about this.”
Olbermann pointed out that “Sharpton is mistaken about this too…This is a broad-ranging problem that has been going on for a long time.” (Imus, he means.) He called it a “tipping point,” and said others who have said equally bad or worse things on the air have had their own tipping points—from Boak Carter to Father Coughlin to others who “finally dug their hole so deeply they couldn’t dig out.” He said that now it’s really up to the Rutgers team and how they react—but that he didn’t think Imus’s show was going to continue on TV.
If he says that, I’m inclined to believe it.
Am I a little disappointed that he’s not being his usual “bring me the head of this Worst Person in the World” over this? Yes. But at the same time, I know Olbermann has been dogged for years (especially by his rightwing enemies) by his reputation dating from ESPN and earlier as “someone impossible to work with” who “is always telling his management what to do.” And if he is now at a point in his life where he wants to take a wait-and-see attitude, and see what the people who were insulted have to say about all this when they meet with the one who offended them before saying anything else, I certainly understand.
Sometimes not biting the hand that feeds you doesn’t make you a sellout. It just makes you a person who doesn’t want to blow his own chance to speak truth to power by making a big dramatic gesture “on principle.” That, I think, is the place Keith Olbermann is in right now. Whether everyone agrees with it or not.
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