NBC president Phil Griffin banished Keith Olbermann from the air when Politico revealed that the former ESPN personality made three personal contributions to Democratic campaign funds late last week. What ensued was a good old-fashioned hailstorm. DrudgeReport giddily laughed. FOX’s partisan personalities showed tepid support. And just before the weekend was out, NBC brass promptly changed its tune, probably because the 8 o’clock ratings plummet to groundbreaking new lows.
When he returned Tuesday night, Olbermann didn’t apologize. He said he was sorry for “not having known by observation” that he needed to obtain permission from NBC before making political donations “even though any rule like that in any company is probably not legal.” Whether it’s a case of legality, journalistic ethics, or simply poor taste, Olbermann spent the first five minutes and fifty seconds of his final segment trekking through his journey. He ended up “burying the lede.”
Burying the lede is a storytelling tactic journalists use that allows us to start our compositions torturing the reader with three or four paragraphs of non sequiturs before finally getting to the point. In television, that sin is even more painful and often looses viewers. But Olbermann managed to keep my eyes casually wandering back and forth between my laptop and the television screen just long enough for me to hear his most prescient point.
Amid all the sarcastic derisions and his almost impish self-loathing of his final segment, Olbermann said this about his political contributions:
“I gave, and you found out, and you judged me for good or for ill as you felt appropriate. If I had given the money through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, you would have never ever known.”
Olbermann’s last-second revelation comes on the heels of an election cycle utterly dominated by dark money. If the McCain-Feingold Act redrew the map and established boundaries of campaign finance, Citizens United not only crossed the line; it annexed Austria and the Sudetenland. While the Olbermann episode showed us the FEC still holds considerable resources in tracking individual donations, corporations are unhinged. Now that the Court declared the Wal-Marts, Best Buys and Goldman-Sachs of the world are living, breathing things, it makes perfect sense they’d be subject to none of the regulations actual people face.
Republican-leaning political organizations, including Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, spent $167 million to fund “electioneering communications” in 2010, including $6.8 million for attack ads targeting Alexi Giannoulias here in Illinois. Pete Giangreco, a senior campaign consultant for the defeated Giannoulias, believes that his candidate lost the Illinois Senate race because American Crossroads wrote a blank check for Senator-elect Mark Kirk.
“It’s not good for democracy when voices get drowned out by millions of dollars of secret money,” Giangreco said. “This may have been the dirtiest win of Karl Rove’s career.”
Rove’s group batted nearly .640 on Election Day, backing 23 winning candidates. And now, liberals want to copy Rove’s cheat sheet. David Brock, head of the cantankerous liberal finger-pointers Media Matters for America, told the Washington Post that he wants to start a progressivized version of Crossroads.
Elections have always been a contest of who can raise more money. But that money came from real people with families and front-lawns and frozen food in the kitchen; not from corporate cadres of suits with skinny ties and corner offices. So yes, Olbermann made his point that MSNBC has a stupid rule that they enforced even more stupidly. But it was his last lines that finally said something important. Next time we’d be better off if he spent all those six minutes and six seconds talking about this instead of indulging his ego.
Jason Seher is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected].
