MSNBC VP: Olbermann is Like an Abusive Boyfriend

by Shaker JMonkey, a dad and a feminist who lives with his partner in Oregon. He did vote for Obama, but it was a close thing—he could just as easily have voted for Clinton.

Phil Griffin, senior vice-president in charge of MSNBC, is in a bit of a bind, according to a profile of Keith Olbermann in the most recent New Yorker.

At MSNBC, Phil Griffin was worried, and with good reason. The average "Countdown" viewer is fifty-nine years old, and forty-five per cent of the viewers are women, presumably Democratic—a fair description of a Hillary Clinton supporter. Griffin believed that Olbermann was beginning to alienate his core audience, and asked him to ease up a bit on Clinton, and possibly even make some conciliatory gesture to the Clinton camp. Olbermann was offended by the suggestion.

So, let's review the situation. Roughly half of Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton, Countdown is a show aimed at people of a Democratic persuasion, and your host, Keith Olbermann, has made eliminationist jokes about Clinton, dismissed the idea that media coverage of Clinton was sexist, going so far as to label someone who thought differently (Katie Couric) as "The Worst Person in the World," and dedicated "special commentary" segments to Clinton's RFK remark and to her alleged use of Republican themes to attack Obama.

So, how does Griffin respond? Well, apparently, he doesn't think the program needs to change one bit because Hillary Clinton supporters are just like a battered wives who have no safe place to go.

At least, that's how I interpret the following quote from the New Yorker article (emphasis mine):

But, just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network's Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. "It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he's funny and he's clever and he's witty, and he's all these great things," Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. "And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It's true. But I do think they're going to come back. There's nowhere else to go."

How many problems are there with this quote?

1. Griffin implicitly identifies all Clinton supporters as women. Clearly, wrong. I'm not even going to bother finding a link.

2. He casually uses the metaphor of a battered spouse / partner / girlfriend to illustrate his point. If these are the terms you're using to describe a hefty chunk of your audience, I think it goes without saying that his network has a problem. But beyond what it illustrates about his attitude toward Clinton supporters and women in general, his use of this metaphor trivializes violence against women. As a national news executive, one would hope (vainly, it seems) he would understand that comparing his ratings problems to the widespread problem of domestic abuse is way out of bounds.

3. He casts Keith Olbermann as an abuser. Did this guy even have a rudimentary course in public relations? I mean, rule No. 1 is "Don't call your client as a wife beater."

4. It's belittling. The whole quote paints the viewer (specifically, women viewers, mind you) as helpless, love-sick puppy dogs.

5. Ultimately, the abuse is OK. Olbermann doesn't have to do a damn thing because the viewer (read: women) will come crawling back. In a Fox-dominated world, there's no place else to go, right?

Personally, I can think of a number of different places one could go at 8pm on a weeknight (watch a DVD, read a book, frisky business with a lover). Shockingly, NONE of them involves watching Countdown on MSNBC!