At some point in the nightmare of the Bush years, we tuned in one night to MSNBC and listened to Countdown and Keith Olbermann, and knew this show spoke to us.
Here was a man talking about the very things that Rob and I discussed over breakfast. He railed against Bush’s invasion of Iraq and told us why he was against it. He exposed the hypocrisy in Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina, dissed John Yoo’s validation for waterboarding and torture at Gitmo, poked fun at Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and the other brain-dead humans at Fox News. He was Keith, this guy whom we invited into our home every night, night after night, and his show became the point in our evenings when we broke away from our own work to find out what was going on in the world.
We used to watch the evening news with Brian Williams. He fell by the wayside. Within a few months, Countdown was it, the voice of what we intuited about where things were headed in the U.S., in the world. Keith was the voice of integrity, the only voice in cable or network news that told it like it was, laid it out, A to Z. Yes, sometimes he was vitriolic, he was brutal. But so what? The other side plays that way 24/7. In some strange sense, Keith Olbermann became the voice for a segment of the American public that still believes in the Bill of Rights and in conducting political business in a humane and genuine way.
During the health care spectacle in Congress, Keith talked about the free clinics coming to various American cities, and asked for donations. His request raised millions for that clinics. When Governor Brewer of Arizona denied insurance coverage to 99 individuals in her state who need transplants, Keith invited some of these patients onto his show and asked for donations to a transplant organization. That raised money, too. When his parents were dying, he shared these details with us as well and always managed to tie in the personal stuff with the larger global issues. This guy, Keith, became a man who wasn’t just talking to us, but was sitting in our living rooms with us, part of the family nightly ritual.
Keith never mentioned the word synchronicity, but he highlighted coincidences, he recognized them, and sometimes they were related to sports.
Tonight (January 22, 2011), after Rob and I got home from an Otmar Lieber concert, I went onto Huffington Post and discovered Olbermann had just done his last show. I felt sickened, depressed, until I remembered that just a few days ago, the FCC had approved Comcast’s buyout of MSNBC. When I’d heard about the merger, my first thought was that Keith would be the first on the chopping block. I hoped I was just being pessimistic. The irony here is that Keith’s show was MSNBC’s top show, with 1.1 million viewers. What kind of business model is that, Comcast? Well, it isn’t a business model. It’s politics.
So let’s look at Comcast. From a CBS news site, we learn that “taking over NBC will transform the company into a media powerhouse. NBC Universal owns the NBC and Telemundo broadcast networks; 26 local TV stations; popular cable channels including CNBC, Bravo and Oxygen; the Universal Pictures movie studio and theme parks; and a roughly 30 stake in Hulu.com, which distributes NBC and other broadcast programming online.” The merger, according to this article, is one of the largest in a generation. Comcast worked hard for this merger. It spent nearly $100 million, hired a hundred lobbyists who were former government employees, and made campaign contributions to three-fourths of all members of the 111th congress.
What did all this money achieve? According to Joe Torres, Free press senior advisor, government and external affairs, it achieved a great deal for them. “The new Comcast-NBC will have the market power and every incentive to favor its own content over its competitors’, destroying the emerging online video market and stifling cable competition. This new behemoth will control one out of every five TV viewing hours. While the FCC placed several conditions on the merger that are beneficial to the public, there’s no way to sugarcoat the harmful impact this deal will cause the public by giving Comcast unprecedented power over our media landscape.”
In practical terms, what’s this merger mean? Well, in addition to banishing Olbermann, one of the true progressive voices in the media, Josh Silver, writing in the Huffington Post, noted, “Culmination of the deal, combined with the FCC’s recent, loophole-ridden “Net Neutrality” rules, sets the table for Comcast to turn the Internet into cable television, where it has the ability to speed up its content, slow down or block its competitors such as Netflix, and hike the rates for its programming and services. We’ll all end up paying more — whether you’re a Comcast subscriber or not.” Even worse, as Silver noted, “The merger further squeezes what’s left of independent, diverse voices from the television dial, laying waste to President Barack Obama’s promise to reign in runaway media consolidation.”
So that’s where it all stands right now. We can certainly expect the other internet providers to follow Comcast’s lead.
Keith Olbermann will undoubtedly land on his feet and it would be great to see him on HBO, where his 1.1 million viewers would follow him any day of the week.