T A B L E_.T A L K

B-1 Bob vs. Rush Limbaugh! Will politically disgraced Bob Dornan turn to AM radio to spread his views? Discuss right-wing talk shows in the Media area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Democracy on life support
By Steve Erickson
The cynical Starr hearings were to their Watergate precursors as Jack Kevorkian is to Mother Teresa
(11/25/98)

What kind of woman reads Playboy?
By James Poniewozik
After 45 years, your grandfather's skin magazine is trying to be all things to all groins
(11/24/98)

Boy story?
By Susan Lehman
A former editor charges that the New Yorker's fiction has gone off the deep end of the testosterone scale
(11/19/98)

Starr dust, pundit bust
By Steve Erickson
The independent counsel will crash and burn on Thursday -- and the humiliated pundits will be too afraid to say anything about it until the polls come in
(11/18/98)

Pundits to Saddam: Your evil derrière is OURS!
By James Poniewozik
When Saddam Hussein canceled our regularly scheduled war, Sam "Strangelove" Donaldson and his hotblooded colleagues practically climbed into the F-16s themselves to finish the job
(11/17/98)

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Given nothing but a parody of actual news to report on night after night, Olbermann turned his program into a parody of a news show -- or rather, an imitation of a parody of a news show, often closer to fellow SportsCenter alum Craig Kilborn's "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central than to its straight-news analogue, "Nightline." (He ended some of his broadcasts, for instance, by wadding up his note cards and throwing them at the camera -- the postmodern televisual shorthand for "Fuck it, you and I both know this is showbiz" à la David Letterman and Norm MacDonald.) He even deprecated his own program by incorporating a self-deflating "Nightline" riff into his opening voice-over: "Because it's still your tax dollars in action, we bring you Day 296 of the Clinton-Lewinsky investigation!"

The very premise of "The Big Show" seemed as if MSNBC were subconsciously parodying itself and its hyperventilating approach to the news from Washington. We cover public affairs like a full-contact sport anyway, it seemed to be saying -- except better, because the season never ends and nobody ever wins -- so why not just cut the crap and turn our prime-time news show into a sportscast? And with a weird amalgam of career savvy and idealism, going through 10 varieties of bemusement an hour, Olbermann took the cynical premise and ran with it, in the process showing how much TV news has to learn from sports journalism.

The mistake MSNBC made with Olbermann was to hire someone from outside the world of news, who therefore was enough of a greenhorn to still take newscasting seriously. It would be easy to patronize "The Big Show" as mere news lite -- most of the largely positive reviews Olbermann has received have emphasized his wry asides and rapid-fire pop-culture references (e.g., "The 'Them' Webster Hubbell was referring to was of course Bill and Hillary Clinton and not the giant ants of the 1950s sci-fi movie classic"). But in fact, Olbermann was far more dignified a host than most of his choleric peers at MSNBC and Fox, treating his interview subjects with an almost old-fashioned courtliness. That became painfully clear last week when he took the night off and was replaced by abrasive yapmeister John Gibson of MSNBC's talk-krieg "InterNight." Gibson tromped all over the show's studied coolness like a doberman tearing up the azaleas, orchestrating an "InterNight"-style barkfest among James Warren, John Fund and Arianna Huffington. It was a clash of two cable-news cultures: Olbermann's art of the raised eyebrow against Gibson's jackhammering pleas for attention. It was InterminableNight.

Olbermann's decision to go back to sportscasting came just as, with the congressional elections and the ebbing of the impeachment drive, the political climate and world events conspired to bring onto his show something that he might have considered a long, long year ago to be actual news: for instance, last month's near-war with Iraq. Ironically, with this interruption to the runaway hit sitcom of 1998, Olbermann seemed, if not uncomfortable, at least uncertain about what tone he should strike to deal with real issues of life and death. It's as if months of repetition had made Olbermann more comfortable with the Lewinsky story, from which he could maintain a comfortable, smirking distance.

That might not have translated well to an actual international crisis. But it would have been interesting to find out: After all, what was the first Gulf War if not a highlight reel? What distinguished Olbermann from his colleagues was a sensitivity to semantic bullshit -- that "'demagogue' is not a verb" instinct -- which came straight out of his sportscasting background. He and his colleagues at ESPN took a stale, cliché-ridden field of journalism and subverted it, something that news broadcasting still sorely needs. Olbermann could barely bring himself to utter a cliché or parrot a piece of briefingese with a straight face: During the Iraq crisis, after the umpteenth repetition of the Pentagon's claim that it "tapped directly into Saddam's internal decision-making process," he burst out to NBC's Andrea Mitchell, "It sounds like they've put a bug in his brain." Likewise, Olbermann's pop-culture allusions weren't just funny, they reminded us that there was actually a world beyond the White House lawn and the House judiciary committee, something that the wonky Washington corps of television journalists rarely acknowledges.

Ultimately, Olbermann's broadcasts were proof of how archaic the typical anchored news show is: 50 years into the history of television, all these men and women in power suits are talking to us as if we're wide-eyed innocents trustingly absorbing every word. Smarter broadcasters, like the ESPN sports desk and MTV's programmers, know different. They know we're sitting at home talking back to the TV; that if we don't laugh with them we will assuredly laugh at them. ESPN's sportscasters -- like Beavis and Butt-head or their half-dozen successors on MTV -- gain our empathy because they talk back to the TV on our behalf. The message they send, which Olbermann transplanted to MSNBC, is: "We know what you're thinking." Whereas the message of the outdated news-anchor setup is: "We know what you should think."

Of course, Olbermann's theater of bemusement also simply allowed us to wallow in the non-news of the past year while pretending we were above it all. But he must have known that, had he marched from his Cornell commencement speech into principled unemployment, a hundred John Gibsons would have been ready to take his place. Now that he's jumping to Fox's sports desk, he has diplomatically said that he's not doing it out of disillusionment with the news business. Still, the decision recalls the ambivalence he betrayed when he first signed with MSNBC, telling reporters, "I am now, for better or worse, joining the ranks of newsmen." The question is whether anyone at MSNBC, or anywhere else, will care that it took him only a year under its regime to decide that the experience was, if not worse, at the very least no better.
SALON | Dec. 1, 1998