Yesterday, a friend of mine and I were discussing via e-mail various products at ThinkGeek. Presents for parents, etc., nothing serious. She wants to get the mini-airplane for her father, I suggest the mini-tank for her mother in the event her father wanders into a no-fly zone, that sort of thing.

At one point, she e-mails me the link to the HTTPanties, a collection of panties that have HTTP error or status codes on them, humorously placed for the obvious double entendre. My reply: "No 402? I thought that'd be the most common one."

402, for the record, is "Payment required".

It was a joke. I expected my reply either to be "LOL" or a punch in the eye, since it was a fairly tasteless and mostly sexist joke.

Fortunately, I got the good response.

I made a tasteless joke. The audience found it funny, so we all moved on. The inference wasn't that I believed that all (or most) women were prostitutes, I saw an easy line, I took it without a second thought. The girl in question knows me well enough (by hearing what I say and seeing what I do) to know I'm not sexist, but also not one to skip an easy punchline, even when I should.

I don't know Keith Olbermann, nor do I think people who only watch his show know him.

However, there's a dichotomy that exists within most people. Humor goes places that reality doesn't. We talk about what we can and we joke about what we can't. I think in television, especially, it has the potential to go much further than it would in real life. In the television world, you don't have to look a person who is offended in the eye as they stare at you while you awkwardly chuckle at the punchline. All you can do is move on (or, worse, compound it with a follow-up punchline) and issue the apology the next day.

Nowadays, the issue is even more cloudy. We catch people in 30-second snippets, if that. We find one fault and use it to make more borderline content seem worse. Then we start taking bland statements out of context, sticking them next to one bad example and a bunch of borderline ones... it's not an accurate representation of who people are.

I've freely admitted before, I do not watch the MSM. I simply don't have the time (or, on most days, the stomach) for it. I've seen Olbermann's "Special Comments" on Digg often enough that I think I mostly agree with him. But I remembered that video you posted. I thought, if I perhaps completely missed who his on-screen persona was, maybe the WMC would be able to educate me. I checked out the website and they haven't made any major posts about him (do a search for Chris Matthews, on the other hand...). The only specific instance was one which he later apologized for, saying it came out completely wrong (which it obviously did).

So now we're faced with a dilemma. Is Keith Olberman a raging sexist or someone with a bad sense of humor? He's chosen a woman as his successor, featured her frequently, promoted her relentlessly... Unless there's a clip of him saying "Normally, I don't trust women, but Rachel's a lesbian and lesbians are hot," I think we can say he does not have a general antipathy towards women. He may have a general antipathy towards Clinton, but that's not unique and it's not sexism. There were plenty of perfectly valid reasons to dislike Clinton (or, more blandly, to prefer Obama) without requiring all of them to be declared "sexist".

I think I could very easily summarize my viewpoint like this:

When someone makes an insensitive joke, they could be sexist, but it doesn't mean that they are.

When someone is harsher on the female candidate than the black one, they could be sexist, but it doesn't mean that they are.

When someone continually insists on talking about how pretty his correspondents are, asking them to come closer to the camera or saying how they are "God's gift to men", yeah, that's sexist. (Man, I really can't stand Chris Matthews right now)

To answer your question directly, I think there is a disparity between who people think he is (or how he comes across on television) and who he actually is. I think, if you take the worst attempt at humor anyone's made and replay it constantly, you will think someone is sexist. And, in this past primary, if you mentioned any aspect that has ever been more often attributed to one gender than another in the context of Hillary, everything you ever said went under the most gigantic microscope you could imagine.

I don't think Olbermann is sexist. I think he's on a network with Matthews and that'll make anyone look bad, but I think a two-year old comment about Paris Hilton and statements against Clinton aren't enough to stick him with that label.

I dawdled for a moment, thinking of a reply, but bailed.  Funny how you read my mind.  

Maddow seems to pose a special problem for their fragile hold on reality.

Now if we can just get David Schuster his own show, as well.  (Schuster and Keith and Maddow being the three best people on cable news.)  

Don't talk to me about progressive, you're the one supporting Hillary.

...was not taking a machete to the Scaife interview. She should have cut off the family jewels and made him a necklace out of them.