Keith Olbermann is such a whiner. Someone said something mean and unsubstantiated about him on the internets, so he quits. You know, I miss the old Daily Kos, too. Not the one Olbermann went to to find encouragement during the late Bush years, but the one with a tight-knit community in the early Bush years. But, you know what? Those days are gone. Daily Kos is a big chaotic mess. It’s overrun with factions and trolls and it’s no longer true that the diaries are better than the front-page. Other than in my own cross-posted diaries, I haven’t read a comment thread in a diary at Daily Kos in a long time. It’s just jousting and noise with no real conversations taking place.
So, Olbermann noticed this, too. So he quit. He’s another one who should toughen up.
My clue about how different the place was involved me actually being on the rec list. By the time that happened–when the talent pool had thinned down that far–well…it doesn’t mean much anymore. Though every once in a while I wrote something noteworthy. Just not lately.
I don’t really care about Olbermann either way, and I’ve been what you call a whiner there since the day after Election Day. I don’t pretend that my whining matters, though. I don’t dislike the president–it’s his fan club I can’t stand–but the sanctimoniousness from both sides really bores me, though.
For some reason I’ve never seen that here, even though obviously you’ve made your position clear. I like that I don’t agree with everything you write and yet it isn’t an “omg end of the world” convulsion of insecurity like DKos can be. I also think this is the only blog I’ve donated too.
I haven’t cross-posted my silly shit here for a long time. I’m not sure BooTrib would find my act very interesting, but that’s ok too.
you started whining the day after election day? So, you are basically the original unherdable cat.
Well, maybe not right after. I think the Lieberman make-nice was the first straw, and the Daschle-follies continued it.
But it wasn’t really personal with me, and it’s still not. I realize it is for others on both sides of the argument, though, so I probably shouldn’t sneer half as much as I do.
I’m still just being a poser, I guess.
I stopped posting there years ago, for many of the reasons you mention. Outside of my day-job, I don’t read there either. Unlike Olberman, though, I didn’t announce it. Not that it would have mattered to anyone if I did.
He’s a pompous blowhard. He was reading some book from an armchair for like 10 minutes when I randomly stopped at his show the other day. I don’t know what the hell that was about.
Also, let me back up and say, yes, I applaud the president for getting a 20 billion dollar claims fund set up. That is significant, and shows leadership. Something like that didn’t necessarily have to happen, and Obama apparently made it happen. I shudder to think of how a bush administration would have handled something like this.
My shit’s very very emotional right now because large portions of the gulf coast are being destroyed for generations and BP is being allowed to run a potemkin clean-up operation. 20 bill may go far to assist people hurt economically by the spill. I don’t claim to know. If so, great! It’s a drop in the bucket when it comes to restoring the coastal environment, in large part because once the oil is onshore, it’s there for good, clownish rhetoric about “every drop” notwithstanding. And who knows what’s happening in the deep water.
Nice to hear you give the man some begrudging credit for a change.
In the end, the oil spill is one of the things I’ve been more lenient with him on. All I really wanted him to do was stop trusting the businessmen. After a year and a half of doing so, he seems to have finally gotten that in the case of the oil spill
Friendly reminder to the president: Corporations are as a rule either stupid or evil or both. That doesn’t mean you insult them all day long, but when dealing with them have that in the back of your mind. Breaking their power is the key to bringing prosperity to the citizenry as a whole.
Friendly reminder to the president: Corporations are as a rule either stupid or evil or both.
Argh. This kind of thing is oversimplified to the point of being dangerous. And it irritates me to no end.
Corporations are not “evil” and corporations are not “stupid”. Corporations are amoral entities created with the sole purpose of maximizing the amount of money they take in. That’s all they are. Some of the guys in charge of corporations may, in fact, be evil or stupid. But mostly they’re guys who are greedy assholes who get their jobs (and keep them) by being the greediest and assholiest greedy assholes in the company.
Corporations are not mustache twirling villains straight out of a Captain Planet cartoon – there is a reason for every thing they do. Usually fairly complex chains of reasoning that essentially boil down to a simple “this will make us more money in the short term than that will”. To chalk up corporate actions to “corporations are evil” is like saying that the US is at risk from Muslim extremists because “they hate us for our freedoms”. It’s not just wrong it’s dangerously wrong.
There’s this myth about corporations that has been running around as long as I’ve been alive. That the people who used to run corporations were “good people” and they “took care of their community”. That corporations used to be these patrician entities that looked out for their workers and their communities. It’s bunk – the same Golden Age claptrap that makes the 1950’s television sitcom “Leave it to Beaver” the standard for what American family life is “supposed” to be like. Successful corporations from the dawn of the idea of corporations have been about maximizing their return on investment for their owners.
The only way to make corporations act “appropriately” is to make it too expensive for them to act otherwise. We had that for a few decades in there – where corporations were heavily fined for acting like sociopaths – to the point where it made good business sense for the corporation to “act appropriately”. That’s part of where the myth of the “good corporation” comes from – for decades they were essentially forced to be “good citizens”. But the Republicans have been very, very good at dismantling the regulation regime that forces good behavior on corporations, so of course they’ve been running amok. It’s like the old tale about the scorpion and the frog – it’s in their nature to run amok and look out for no one but themselves.
Exactly.
They are stupid, because they never look at the sustainability long term of their customer and resource bases. And they are evil because they discount the human costs in favor of enrichment. If that is not the definition of stupid, and a good working definition of evil I don’t know what is. Thank you for agreeing with me.
Also you are preaching to the choir about corporations and good people. Obama is the one that needs to hear that.
Corporations depend on grants of limited liability from governments to shield them from personal accountability. This is the basis for government’s claim to be able to regulate corporate behavior that has negative consequences.
The choice that needs to be put in front of them is (1) stringent regulation or (2) loss of the privilege of limited liability and corporate personhood.
Corporations do not need limited liability to operate.
I don’t get your point. There’s a reason for what all evil entities do, if you think evil entities exist. Are you saying you don’t believe that? If there is such a thing, “amoral entities created with the sole purpose of maximizing the amount of money they take in” seems like a reasonable definition of it.
So what I’d say is that evil corporations are not exceptions, but part of the very definition of their existence. By that same definition they can’t be expected to act in the interest of anyone but themselves — and, as we’re seeing almost daily, not even always in the interest of the corporation but in the personal interest of the greedy (and almost always, stupid) individuals at the top of the heap. Some are bright enough to see that being arrogant and destructive is not in their best interest, but that possibility does not lessen the absolute need for strong oversight and regulation by government.
Immortality is what makes it impossible to compare corporations with individuals. There are basically good people and bad ones. They eventually depart but corporations live on. Even the ones started by creative and decent people eventually fall into the hands of generic corporate incompetents and proto-crooks. Which is why we need laws, not trust. To my mind that starts with a radical overhaul of corporate personhood and executive impunity.
I never said he was a disaster or a failure! Lord knows he’s a genuine messiah of governance compared to whatever the decadent right will cough up. I just think there are situations in which being a cautious technocrat doesn’t come close to getting the job done. Plus I think we’re all terribly exasperated by the fact that rightwing governance has been utterly exploded and discredited by anyone with eyes to see, the historic crises it has brought upon us demands radical action, yet the President is continually forced to compromise and negotiate with republicans and corporate democrats who are unalterably wedded to the status quo.
I hope they fight real hard to end the filibuster.
Every Friday, at the end of the program, he reads a James Thurber short story. He read a lot of them to his father when his father was dying. You like Thurber or you don’t.
And, in response to a comment below, yes, Olbermann’s guests can be annoying sometimes, but they’re head and shoulders above who John King has on over at CNN (I happened to watch his show for the first time last night).
I think Keith was for a while the only legitimate lefty critic of the Bush administration on the big news channels, and he was legitimately important. But at a certain point that seemed to go to his head.
Like his show sometimes, but most of the time it’s too much. I can’t take his style; his whole show is whining lol.
Also, the commenters are, hmmm, moronic? I remember one time I disagreed with Elizabeth Warren and documented my disagreements. The response?
Awful.
That’s… not what I remember about the early years. DINOs were always an enemy that you made nice with only long enough to thwart the Republicans.
The old DKOS is gone for good, unfortunately.
I really don’t think there is any difference in writing in a thread at DKOS than writing in a thread at the NYT. Neither is going to have any impact on the front page. The diaries are tolerated at Dkos – even a rec listed diary doesn’t get 5% of the traffic a main page article gets.
Maybe KO realized that it wasn’t worth the effort.
I definitely miss the old Daily Kos. But, I also miss the old “lefty” blogosphere overall. There’s three or four sites that I go to every day as opposed to the eight or nine that I use to go to. What can I say; I like unity.
The “mean comment” questioned Olbermann’s integrity saying that he tweeted criticism of Obama’s speech before it was over (asserting that he panned it because it was from Obama not because of its content), not acknowledging that White House provides many members of the media advance copies of the speech as written.
So Olbermann goes the way of David Sirota and other aspiring celebrities in progressive opinion-shaping. And it happens when fawning turns to flaming.
The problem with dKos is its size and the large number of comments and flame wars a single diary can generate. But there are significant contributions that the site makes. The front page articles tend to be very good–in particular Plutonium Page’s coverage of nuclear proliferation and disarmament issues, darksyde’s coverage of science, and devilstower’s coverage of economics. The liveblogging of the BP oil spill has been unflagging and informative as to what exactly BP is doing at the wellhead. In the diaries, Bruce McFadden has had excellent diaries on rail transportation, Setrak has updated the news from Pakistan’s campaign in the Northwest Territories based on Pakistani news sources, and JekyllandHyde produces a weekly summary of political cartoons. All of those are worth reading.
The comments are equal mixtures of reasonable comments, folks trolling for controversy or personal fights (and not in the sense of trolls as plants or ringers), and folks who say things for effect and not logic.
The biggest problem for readers at dKos is picking and choosing the diaries and authors to read and figuring out which comment threads to skip.
The difference between dKos and most other blogs in the lefty blogosphere is the difference between a city of many neighborhoods and a village. In cities, it is much easier to be rude.
The lefty blogosphere is an environment, not a movement. It is the lefty political niche of the blogosphere environment. Don’t expect it to be more than what it is.
The amusing part is that KO has actually pulled a DailyKos himself. His show has degraded to the same nonsensical blowhard politics that he used to decry so much. It’s nice that he doesn’t make stuff up, like they do on FOX, but overall I wouldn’t say I’ve seen much “journalism” on his show in a while.
I recall when he revisited his “The Nexus of Politics and Terror” piece, basically giving an I-told-you-so. He replayed the clip of his original story and I found myself watching, wondering where the hell THAT guy went. We haven’t seen a real piece like that from him in years, while Rachel Maddow is doing on scene reporting from the Gulf. Talk about the student exceeding the master…
The downside is that he has serious talent, and has the ability to do some real good…but he fucking blows it. He’s so concerned with the game, and himself, to worry about anything else. I recall seeing his ad on MSNBC talking about why he has guests that seem to agree with him. I wish I could find it, but he says something about asking guests questions to see if he’s right, and that the point of his show is “not about giving off heat, but throwing off light.”
Wtf does that even mean? And how does choosing your guests based on the goal of having them validate your opinion count as casting light on anything?
I said “Check, Please.” to KO a long time ago. It’s a shame he doesn’t realize that the reason he walked away from DK is the same reason many like myself walked away from him.
One of the things we must remain aware of in evaluating Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and now Lawrence O’Donnell is that they are not free agents. They have bosses who require certain things, and one of those things is ratings. So it is very important to analyze their content in the context of the shows on other networks that they are up against.
The second thing is that they are required to show the standard journalistic “balance” by having on conservatives and Republicans. Ed Schultz is burdened with Ron Christie, Michael Medved, and Tom Tancredo. Rachel Maddow has been more wide-ranging in the conservatives and Republicans she has on her show, including the famous Rand Paul interview. I haven’t seen Olbermann recently but I early on got the impression that conservatives and Republicans tend to avoid going on his show, something akin to a boycott. After Rand Paul, Rachel Maddow might have the same problem getting high-profile conservative or Republican guests.
That’s a red herring.
To your first point, to say that conceeds that no show based on hard news and shews away from overheated bloavating can get ratings. I should really hope that we aren’t at that point – so far Rachel has done very well to balance actual journalism with entertainment. She’s sort of “gone off” a couple times in the last few days, and I’m hoping it’s not becoming a trend. I’d hate to see her do what KO did, and make her insightful and intelligent editorials less special by doing it all the time.
Your second point would be to say that they do not have editorial control over their own shows. That’s a claim that KO has repeatedly said is not the case. I never got the impression that they were “burdened with” the Republican guests they got…but rather that it was a product of the second thing you mention, that no high level GOPers are willing to go on it anymore. A good journalist should try to look at both sides of a story, but there’s a big difference between “balance” (what a journalist would do) and “parity” (what most pundit shows do). I suspect that KO and Rachel try for balance, but get stuck with crappy guests because they’re the only ones willing to go on camera. KO moreso, obviously…but I think you’re right, Rachel may start getting less high ranking GOPers as time goes on.
One thing that I’d like to note is that Rachel Maddow also, to her credit, calls out the “media” on their framing of particular stories. It’s great to see someone actually try and reform the industry, especially an industry as needing of reform as the press. It’s a shame KO never does this, since his extra clout in media circles could help it have an impact.
Even in asserting editorial control, they have to know what the limits their bosses will tolerate are. They all have control–up to a point. And they have obligations to have certain types of guests on, often Villagers who spout the conventional wisdom within the beltway.
Sadly, we are rapidly approaching that point. Not all of the bloviating is overheated; that on PBS is downright understated and frosty.
On your last point, KO might have clout in media circles precisely because he does not call out the media frame of a story.
KO doesn’t whine; he bellows. I used to be a fan. KO was outraged when I was outraged but, most of the time, he was mocking and entertaining. Then, about a year or so ago, he got stuck in a permanent state of outrage and became annoying. I found that watching Countdown made me angrier than I already was. For my mental and emotional health, I had to stop watching.
I think what happened was his ratings spiked higher for his Special Comments. Some exec said, hey, they like you when you’re angry; he was encouraged to expand his Howard Beale routine and became a caricature.
the mean comment was so ridiculous- one tweet that he commented on Obama’s speech before speech was given??!!!, as a reason for quitting it was bizarre. a large % of comments over there are trolls anyway and comment threads are full of inflamnatory throwaway lines. I always check it, however. Have had some good diaries on Deepwater Horizon/ Macondo by fishgrease and eric lewis’s oil corral, an interesting idea that’s generated interesting threads
“I haven’t read a comment thread in a diary at Daily Kos in a long time.”
So, Boo, he saw the same problems you did, and he left, but he’s the one who needs to toughen up? I don’t get it.
I think he was using that one moronic comment as an example of why hanging out there is no longer worth the bother. The problem with the place is the problem with blogs in general: either they stay too small to thrive or they get too big, get media attention, draw in trolls and crackpots and become little more than random bulletin boards. Compared to the comments sections of joints like Huffington, DKos still comes up looking not so bad.
Kos creates an interesting model of one path for a blog: let yourself grow way too big to have a coherent community, rack up the big ad bucks and use them for highly useful stuff like sponsoring election polling, fund raising, and a few good (paid?) front-page specialists. Maybe somebody someday will come up with a solution to having some interacting community while wanting the influence of a mass movement.
I’m a great believer in the idea that there are many niches in the ecology of the blogosphere in general and the lefty blogosphere in particular. And that diversity strengthens the blogosphere. Except when people are offended by diversity.
Democrats and progressives decide where to post and comment, and there is a lot of cross-seeding of ideas and information in the network of blogs.
I don’t think that saying one doesn’t hang out at dKos is a moronic comment. Even though I have seen some BooMan diaries there in the past year. Blogs change. People’s interests change.
But you are right about what happens when a blog becomes significant enough or networked enough to bring media attention.