A couple of comments on Keith Olbermann

I've spent the morning assembling takes on the sudden exit of Keith Olbermann from his signature Countdown show, and Lawrence O'Donnell's coincident ascendancy (I said he was "the future of MSNBC"; sorry to be right).

Click here to see Keith's farewell, and here to sign AMERICAblog's petition "standing with Keith."

There are obvious congruences — Comcast moves in (takes over) on Monday; Olbermann is gone the Friday before. But we need to be careful; this is clearly a negotiated deal and not a firing. So I've collected a few comments from just a few sources, to illustrate and tease out these disparate threads.

First, from a Daily Kos diarist who says he practices plaintiff-side employment law in California.

Keith Olbermann was not "axed." (You can say that of Countdown, though.) His departure from MSNBC was apparently negotiated this week. His attorneys and NBC's attorneys negotiated a settlement agreement, probably a buyout of his contract. That doesn't mean that Keith wanted it; it does mean that he reconciled himself to it. If NBC wanted to breach his contract and fire him without cause, they would owe him a bundle. Instead, they negotiated an end to it -- and probably they paid dearly for aspects of it. We should respect that. I strongly suspect that, unless they have pictures of him committing horrifying acts with a goat, Keith considers the deal to have been worth it.

Here's what happens: a company has a contract with someone and they no longer want that person. They can't fire him for cause. So, instead, they negotiate a payoff -- one for which his attorneys will presumably get a cut, so it may be that much higher. They also make it dependent on certain agreements. Those agreements may make it hard for us to get the truth -- and may make it impossible for Keith to tell us the truth, so there's no point in pressuring him to do so.

These agreements will often have clauses involving "trade secrets," "non-disparagement," "waivers," and "confidentiality," among many others. (In California, a non-compete agreement would be unenforceable as against public policy, although I'm not an entertainment industry lawyer and I don't doubt that they might have figured out some workaround. I am ... a member of the New York bar, but didn't practice employment law there, so I don't know what the relevant law would be.) [Update: but ademfladem apparently does know.]

He then discusses the implications of those four parameters — trade secrets, non-disparagement, waivers, and confidentiality — in a case like Olbermann's. The whole thread contains interesting additions, and the link to diarist "fladem" at the end of the above quote contains additional information regarding New York.

It appears that Keith most likely negotiated his exit at the highest price he could extract, knowing that he'd have to give up (1) revealing trade secrets (for example, what he might know as an insider about the Comcast deal); (2) disparagement, meaning neither side can say bad things about the other; and (3) the terms or circumstances of the deal they struck (all the goodies the supermarket tabloids would love to get their hands on).

It may just be that we'll never know if the obvious is also true.

I also want to excerpt Juan Cole's take, since he says best what most are, or should be, thinking:

Whether Comcast is the villain of the piece directly, things like the Comcast merger with MSNBC are responsible for there being very few voices on American television (and despite the proliferation of channels) like Olbermann’s. And for there being relatively little news on the “news” programs. Time Warner, General Electric and Comcast (partners in NBC), Viacom, Disney, and Ruper[t] Murdoch’s Newscorp own almost all television news. In other words, six big corporations determine what you will hear about the world if you get your news from television. There are fewer and fewer t.v. news outlets that do not belong to one of these six, a process called media consolidation [pdf].

For reasons of profit-seeking, when Disney acquired ABC, it looted the company’s news divisions. Profits are not to be had in hard news, but rather in tabloid news. It used to be that human interest stories would be ‘des[s]ert,’ but they have become the main meal.

Ironically, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw was one of Olbermann’s biggest critics, afraid that the latter’s flamboyant and polarizing style would tarnish the reputation of regular NBC newsmen for objectivity.

What Brokaw seems not to have noticed is that NBC and MSNBC did, like most television news, a miserable job of covering the Iraq issue in 2002-2003–mainly buying White House propaganda. The powerful bias toward the point of view of the rich and powerful and well-connected in Washington demonstrated by all the major tv news outlets in 2002-2003 makes Olbermann look like a staid centrist. ... We’ll miss Keith. But it isn’t about him. It is about the ever-narrowing character of public comment in the US, about the few having most of everything. It is about media consolidation.

And a semi-final note from me: it feels like the lights are going out, all over the world (so to speak).

My final note? I think we need to take a very close look at, and an exegesis if you will, of the Thurber story Keith read as his last MSNBC act. Its title — "The Scotty Who Knew Too Much".

All for now.

GP