News spread rapidly in my circles that MSNBC had decided not to renew Joan Walsh's contract as an in-house commentator. There had never been any question of her biases when it comes to progressive v. libertarian stances and her presence was more than offset by recent corporate decisions to give airtime to intellectually dishonest spokespersons of the other side. Such is the climate in board rooms everywhere that reactions to their activities can cancel plans, coax overreactions of apology and lead to the dismissal of perfectly qualified personnel.
Jumping to any conclusion with "j'accuse!" certainty is not the intent here. Not like how 'the president with an asterisk lies for breakfast, lunch and dinner and the spaces in between,' or 'the current administration is calculated to break representative democracy as we have known it' which gets said here with far fewer hedges, so the accidental reader from Derptown should consider not wasting time seeing if that email address even works.
The savvy reader knows full well the where from which I am coming.
Television is a business and many things are at play - especially that thing called 'Q' which is the 'it' one either has or doesn't and a concept so ephemeral as to defy analysis beyond educated guesswork. That having been said, there have been few presences on that network more accepting that hers is opinion worthy of defense and retraction if need be. The kind of person you might want to be your editor, and in fact that is one role she has played over the years.
There was a time when I considered her to be mine, which speaks more to egocentricity than accuracy. You see, I had been a reader of Salon for several years when a call went out for participation in an experiment in social networking called Open Salon.
Just by accident, The Paxton Pundit was wrapping up 9 years of weekly essays hosted by the ISP which had brought modem technology to the near wilderness of New Mexico which we called home, then the Wildblue satellite service which stopped hosting web pages altogether; we were all directed to cloud based sites such as Blogger.
I latched on to Open Salon as my choice to call home in 2008 and shortly thereafter used my real name interchangeably. I referred to Joan Walsh as "my editor" nowhere but around the house, but it served to rein in the now-typical social networking traits of deceit and conceit. Opinions were clearly labelled and facts referenced. I was account number in the low 200's among a group which expanded to possibly the upper 400's during this "beta" phase and though not much more than pen pals, it became a treasure trove of feedback from folks who had earned my respect.
Thanks to them, not only could I continue my work as an essayist but post photographs and home recordings and return to read a dozen comments on a good day. The same fellow who claqued on and on about the lack of peer-reviewed science on climate change (quaint now, I know) could also effuse about that tree or cat and be welcomed for either. Beta days ended with Salon's decision to make this experiment a feature for one and all and it soon gave beta-salonistas a taste of what many find so worthless about currently popular, nay addictive web pursuits. The site itself lost Joan's regular input as Open Salon duties were handed off and she rose to editorship of Big Salon, as we called it.
I shudder to think if I ever coaxed her to respond "right on, Stacey" to a post about that fat phony who currently haunts the White House. I'm told nothing you ever have written for the Internet ever goes away and heard rumors lately of some 10 year old web activity of hers which somebody with a rod up his or her butt had found simply despicable.
Who knows what lack of "Q" leads a profitable media outlet to release what I and many others have come to look for in Joan's learned and well reasoned round table behavior. CNN has snapped her up in a heartbeat and that made Christmas a little less like the eve of destruction for her, I will safely conjecture. Still, business is business, and though for now she is welcome to make unpaid appearances on MSNBC, one just never knows about corporate management.
If she is one of the twelve or so accidental readers who finds this post, THANK YOU JOAN. (#not-for-nothing all-caps.) Best wishes for a happy new year to you and yours.
Same to you, savvy reader.
