And so that oh, so playful spirit of today’s American politics — that madcap, happy tone of American politics that makes you smile as you monitor right and left talk radio, ideological cable talk shows and politically anchored weblogs — continues with this latest twist: buying the name of someone with whom you don’t agree so you own rights to their domain name.
First Tucker Carlson bought the domain name of the man many on the right love to hate, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann — a ideological cable talk show host who they consider unfair, shrill, and extreme (when they’re not listening to the fair, balanced and thoughtful talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck). As The Politico chronicled here, Carlson’s lively The Daily Caller site bought www.keitholbermann.com. And if you go there, it now takes you to the Daily Caller, with a few Olbermann posts from time to time.
So now Salon, finding that www.tuckercarlson.com is taken, bought www.tuckercarlson.net:
As you may have heard, Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller bought KeithOlbermann.com. That URL now takes you to a Keith Olbermann-focused version of the Daily Caller site. (Or, uh, the regular Daily Caller site, which is currently going with at least 7 Olbermann stories above the fold.) It did this purely to annoy Olbermann. No matter what you think of the “Countdown” host, this is childish, petty and boorish behavior for a formerly respected journalist like Carlson. And that is why we here at Salon are proud to announce our purchase of TuckerCarlson.net.
Tragically, Carlson has already reserved TuckerCarlson.com. But TuckerCarlson.net was there for the taking, and so we took it. At the moment, we’re just pointing it at War Room. But what should we do with it?
Actually, for those of us who don’t like this trend we DO have a suggestion about what both The Daily Caller and Salon should do with those hijacked names domain sites.
In the case of Salon, they have posted some of Carlson’s most famous (or if infamous, depending on your personal political slant) hits. Go to the link and you’ll see that Carlson is not always exactly a smile and a nerdy bow tie.
A playful, funny trend?
Not really.
It is yet another symptom of how American politics has gotten so intensely personal. It’s trench warfare, folks: being fought out hand-to-hand between parties, candidates, talk show hosts, websites, even blogs that go after other blogs or blog writers.
It’s not enough that politics itself now revolves largely around personalities so that actual issues and problem solving become almost an afterthought. But now political commentary and political warfare revolves around those who write about politics and political warfare. A personal name is a personal name. Co-opting it, whether by someone on the right or left, may be funny to some but it won’t be to others particularly if the 21st century penchant for lowering the bars until they are buried in the South Pole takes over on people’s names as domain names.
In other words: OK: both The Daily Caller and Salon have gotten these domain names and are handling them with responsibly and with a degree of political wit.
But just wait until the copycats joint this trend.
Olbermann’s name should be for Olbermann.
Carlson’s names should be for Carlson.
If The Daily Caller or Salon wants to poke fun at them, then they should do it WITHIN their sites (something like www.thedailycaller/keitholbermann) or set up other domain names that don’t get people there by false pretenses.
The point is: Olbermann, Carlson, and anyone reading this site should not have someone registering their names whether .com or .net or .biz or whatever. Strip it away and the basic motivation — with the varying degrees of playfulness — is political spite.
And we have enough of that in our politics already — more of it than the oil that has spewing out into the Gulf of Mexico.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.