Because Amy and I were loyal Olbermann viewers for some time, I feel the need to add a bit of detail to last week’s posting. We didn’t just randomly decide to quit watching his show. Indeed, in the end we made the decision because he left us with no other choice.
David Letterman used to have peculiar attacks of semi-brain-freeze. He’d get something stuck in his head, decide it was funny, and then keep repeating it over and over. This annoying tic was cleverly lampooned in a skit on Saturday Night Live in which Norm McDonald (as Letterman) repeats, “Hey, ya got any gum?” ad infinitum.
From time to time, Countdown resorted to a similar substitute for substance. There can be no doubt in the minds of loyal viewers that we share the planet with an actor who resembles the Italian prime minister, at least on a pixelated web video in which he thrusts his pelvis against a meter maid. And can a tranquilized bear be counted upon to fall out of a tree directly onto a trampoline? Apparently so.
We’ve even seen whole segments run over again lock, stock and barrel. At least part of why we’re all sick of the tranked trampoline bear is that it’s a key feature of the Animal Wing of the Countdown Hall of Fame, a segment we’ve been treated to so many times that “treat” has become more than a little ironic. I can only assume that the show’s producers do this because they have no actual news to report. Or maybe Keith just needs a coffee break in the middle of the show, and the stock footage lasts long enough for him to get in a few sips.
But the beginning of the end was a re-running of the story about the automatic weapons festival, an event that marked a new low point in Countdown’s history. The story was only two days old when viewers were treated to a second helping. This wasn’t a quick clip, either. It was a whole, long segment. It was only vaguely interesting, and by no means relevant or useful to most viewers. In other words, it wasn’t news.
However, the most serious problem with this piece was dishonesty.
One of the most hateful things about Fox News (and there are many to choose from) is the network’s reliance of a simple-minded, “us versus them” world-view. For Fox partisans the United States is divided into two groups: good Americans and pointy-headed, Democrat-voting, tree-hugging, gay-marrying, terrorist-loving liberals.
Unfortunately, this Foxgeist has an evil twin. From the opposite-yet-equally-wrong viewpoint, the “us versus them” becomes a battle between good Americans and low-brow, Republican-voting, pointy-hood-wearing, shotgun-toting, televangelist-tithing conservatives. Remove the “good American” parts, combine the two equations, and one begins to see why we’re in such a state of unrest about our national image. Living with this “liberal or conservative” false dichotomy is like being next in the “cake or death?” line just as they run out of cake.
Thus I was extremely disappointed when Countdown ran the gun story and fresh out of vocabulary to describe my reaction to the rerun. “Look at the quaint provincials!” this story seemed to say. “Don’t these NRA-cap-wearing hicks have anything better to do than blowing up old cars and shooting used appliances with machine guns? No wonder they all voted for Bush. They’re as dumb as he is.” Now that’s entertainment. Hey, let’s watch it again.
I’m a bit thick when it comes to noticing things like bias, but when it’s rubbed so liberally in my face even I take note. It left me wondering when Keith was going to balance the scales a bit. Let’s see some idiots in New York City moronically living the liberal stereotype. Shortly after the gun story ran (and then re-ran) on Countdown, the Assignment America segment on the CBS Evening News threatened viewers with the possibility of a story about commune-dwelling hippies who may actually have to get jobs now that the market for handmade hammocks is bottoming out. Tackle something like that. Reassure your viewers in the fly-over states that Countdown isn’t a big, partisan joke with us as the unfairly-stereotyped butts. If you have to do this sort of thing at all (and that’s a big if), at least spread the love around.
But no. The longer we watched the farther Olbermann slid into his new role as the Bill O’Reilly of the left wing. At first his “Special Comments” were an entertaining break from endless conversations between the host and his gang of pet pundits. But the more he did it, the more inescapable became the feeling that at any moment he was going to demand that we all go to our windows and start screaming “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
And therein lies the heart of Countdown’s departure from our “to record” list. Clearly Olbermann has deluded himself into believing that he’s some kind of Edward R. Murrow for the 21st Century. And equally clearly, the network is using him as a Howard Beal for brainless liberals who need rabble-rousing mouthpieces as badly as their conservative counterparts require the likes of O’Reilly and Limbaugh.
I recognize that desire in myself. From time to time I’ve wondered what it would be like to pick up a newspaper and read a story about how three Klansmen who went missing years ago were dug out of an unmarked grave. What would it be like to learn that the racist bastards were killed by leftist locals and that nobody would ever be prosecuted for the crime?
For that reason, Olbermann had to go. Well, that and the extra 20 minutes I now have to read a book.
No comments:
Post a Comment