Olbermann defends himself re Imus; says Imus staff harassed women, others at MSNBC [View All]

[Berry Cool]

Can you stand one more (?) Imus thread? Oh well. If you're reading it, you can.

On yesterday's Dan Patrick Show on ESPN Radio, Keith Olbermann took the opportunity to defend himself from negative comments made about him by "Mike and the Mad Dog," the afternoon team on WFAN (the radio station from which Don Imus's show formerly aired) and Olbermann's role in the situation at MSNBC and Imus's firing there.

First, Olbermann knocked down the false argument that it was Imus's "First Amendment right" to say anything he wants on the radio (it isn't). Because the First Amendment has nothing to do with what you say on television or radio. (One wonders why this has to be pounded into people's heads so many times.)

Then he addressed Mike and the Mad Dog's criticizing him for not being open about his role in the Imus firing until Imus was out the door. Olbermann said he didn't wait that long to criticize Imus.

"No, I didn't. In terms of doing it publicly--yeah, I did. You do what you can do in that situation and not more. That's one thing I've learned about this business after many years in it. Many of the things that went wrong at ESPN were because I didn't understand that. Try to resolve the problem internally, give it a certain period of time, believe the assurances of your management--and if you can't, then go public if you feel you have to.

"You do not have to throw your own career under the bus to try to correct a situation. I've done that before. I made a mistake doing it. It was not fair to myself, and more importantly, it was not fair to the people who were the victims of the situation that I found myself in and they, more importantly, found themselves in.

"Again, I did not hear these criticisms specifically, so I cannot rebut it point by point--and if it's gotten passed down to me like a game of 'telephone,' forgive the inexactitude. But these things were problems, as somebody who worked at a network and there was another show on the network that was always on the edge--and always, to my opinion, over the edge--and I went to my management in 1998, the first time I was around--I said 'Are you sure we want to be putting this on?' Or, is there no curb, is there nothing to stop some of this stuff that was excessive even then--not necessarily racial, but in other ways--homophobic, or sexist, or just mean-spirited and personal. And I was assured, there were always conferences, and he was always going to dial it back.

"And then--came the time when we made a deal to bring the show to Secaucus, to the MSNBC headquarters--and that's when it became a real problem. There were people who were harassed--and I use the term broadly, as opposed to a specific set of sexual harassment things, although that was part of it. There were people who were harassed, women who were harassed there, by the whole staff of the Imus show, who went in and complained to the previous management at MSNBC. And the response to that was 'OK, we're moving your desks.' (laughs) So they had to move, rather than somebody wanting to touch Don Imus or the people there and say 'You can't do this anymore.' 'Cause there was no controlling him.

"And this problem accelerated over the years, and I, quite frankly, went in to management more than a year ago and said 'There's a breaking point coming, there's a tipping point coming here. It seems to be getting worse. They seem to be getting worse in terms of their behavior off the air and on the air, and we need to do something about that.'"

Patrick again brought up what he has said repeatedly to Olbermann, namely, that Olbermann would have been skewering Imus on air had his show been on Fox rather than on MSNBC, and Olbermann again acknowledged that. "As I've said many times, there is a practicality about this business, and a compromise that you have to make. There is not carte blanche--even though he (Imus) never held himself to these sorts of standards--there is not carte blanche in terms of dealing with other people with whom you work. You can't simply turn and fire off a gun in somebody's face. Although, again, they did that all the time on that show.

"They threw me under the bus a hundred times, at least. They threw people without any kind of 'chops' there, without any kind of weight, under the bus a thousand times. And I was more concerned with that than I was with the former. But there are practicalities. If you go to your boss and say 'Look, we have to do something about this' and they say 'Give us a little bit more time. We will. Please don't go public with this. We understand'--

"Even last Monday, when you and I first talked about this, the management at MSNBC and NBC--the guys I work for--said 'We understand if you feel like you have to say something. We think this is going to be resolved in a way that you will be satisfied with it. Please, if you feel like you can contain yourself and what you want to say until later, it would probably help defuse the situation and let this thing play out in a profitable'--and I mean that not monetarily, but 'in a productive way.' 'If you can stay out of this for the time being, it would be a help.' And so I deferred to them.

"Was I guilty of maybe not making as big a stink about this as I should have? Yeah. But you don't have free rein to shoot internally. Really, I feel like you don't, and I know, more importantly, and possibly the deciding factor and my primary defense about this is, if I had started to make Don Imus the Worst Person in the World when I first wanted to, which would have been--when did we start Worst Person in the World?--July of 2005--I would probably have done it within the first month at some point, for something he did.

"If I had done that, there would have been a constant battle. I would have been happy to join that battle with him (but) there would have been a constant battle involving the people who work for me--my producers, my staff--who have no business being trotted out. And they would have been mentioned by name on Imus's show. They would have been mentioned by name, there would have been problems involving them internally, there would have been complaints about them. I didn't think I had a right to do that. And I thought had a responsibility to my employers to go along with them, and after the management change about a year ago, I figured there was probably--something was going to happen. And finally, something did. Imus took care of it himself."

Even if I wasn't a fan of his, which I admittedly am, I would feel for Olbermann in this situation. Who hasn't been in a situation like this at work on a smaller scale? It's like Keith can't win for losing. He got a reputation in the past for conflicts with management and not "knowing his place." After many years, he finally comes to realize that falling on his sword for the sake of a principle is hurting him more than it's hurting anyone else. So he changes his tune and tries to be a "good employee" at MSNBC while still making his opinions known in a more subtle way about what he thinks is the untenable behavior of one of his "coworkers." And what does he get for it? He gets called a wimp, a wuss and a person who hates "free speech."

Another thing that Olbermann never said--but which I think he also could have raised as a point in his defense--is that he is not a member of the group of individuals at which Imus's insult that broke the camel's back was raised. He is a white male, not an African American woman, not even an African American man. If he grandstanded too strongly against Imus, he ran the significant risk of being perceived as having stuck his nose in a place where it didn't belong. When NBC and MSNBC had its meetings with employees to determine how they felt about the situation, I don't think Olbermann was on the invitation list. Black female employees, however, were on the list, because their perceptions and feelings were considered most important, given the specific statement that proved to be the tipping point. It even made sense for Al Roker to express his opinions on his blog because again, as a black man, his opinion carried a kind of moral weight that Olbermann's couldn't. Olbermann ran the risk of being told "Stay out of this. You're a white man and this is not your issue." Then again, if he said nothing at all, he ran the risk of being told "Oh, so you don't think this is important, do you, because you're white?"

I'm glad he's said what he's said now, because it only makes all the clearer that the problem with Imus wasn't just that:

--he "said this one racist thing."
--he "said this one racist and sexist thing."
--he "said something racist and sexist about fine upstanding young basketball players who did not deserve it."

Yes, he may have been fired because he "said something racist and sexist about fine upstanding young basketball players who did not deserve it," and someone caught it and exposed it endlessly on the Internet, and two men known for loving to strut the stage about racism issues picked up on it and set their teeth into it like a dog on a bone, and the resulting publicity created an advertiser pullout that made his firing inevitable.

But that isn't why so many people are HAPPY Imus got fired.

They are happy he got fired because he and his staff said many things that were racist, sexist, homophobic, mean, petty, personal and hateful; they said them about the powerless as well as the powerful; and they didn't just say them, they backed them up with their behavior. At least in the case of the people they worked with at MSNBC, whose lives they were making miserable.

MSNBC/NBC say they dumped Imus's show because they listened to their staff. I say, the only reason they really began "listening to their staff" in the first place is because the advertisers began jumping ship--it's clear from what Olbermann said that they had received complaints from unhappy employees for years and done nothing productive about it. "We're moving your desks"? Please!

But regardless of why Imus is gone, there are many people who were either happy or not sorry to see him go. And who would be happy to see others like him follow in his wake. I count myself as one of them.