This morning while I was in the shower, where I often do my best thinking, I realized that the right wing news channels and crazy right wing personalities have no better friend than Keith Olbermann. He gives them more publicity and attention every day which almost certainly increases their audience. Keith Olbermann’s job seems to be to tell those of us who don’t watch those shows what they say, so in effect, we end up watching their shows, just not directly.
Well I don’t want to watch those shows, and I don’t want to draw attention to those people.
I have a very challenging and fearful dog, and it’s taught me a lot about dog training some of which applies to human behavior. Sometimes when people are just starting to understand and train their dog they get caught up in the “scolding game.” When their dog misbehaves they start scolding the dog which the dog thinks is a fun game and thus the undesirable behavior is reinforced. Add to that the fact that new dog owner’s rarely reinforce actual good behaviors and you have a problem.
Keith Olbermann is playing the scolding game with the right wing crazies and they clearly love it! He’s giving them everything they want and doing them the favor of getting their message out to Democrats and people who tend toward the left who otherwise wouldn’t hear it.
This morning, I even began to wonder if Keith Olbermann was actually on their side. I couldn’t imagine anything he could do to help them more. Every night they are featured prominently on his show.
In dog training, the right answer is positive training. You start rewarding your dog for good things and after a bit of time, he only wants to do good things. You even go out of your way to create situations where he will do good things. You start off simple with “the sit game” and you see how when you make sitting a game your dog learns the command very quickly. You don’t ever stop playing the game, whenever you want your dog to sit, it’s a game. It gets a little more complex from there, the human has to change the way they think about things, but everything else is this same basic idea.
Now the analogy isn’t perfect because dogs aren’t “bad” or “crazy” (unless we make them so.) But maybe humans aren’t bad either. What if we were to start rewarding right wing crazies for good behavior instead of rewarding the bad behavior? It doesn’t take a genius to realize their behavior would improve, at least a little.
Then what if we forgot about the crazies and started rewarding people who were really doing good things and gave them all that publicity?
I guess the hard part is that there aren’t a lot of people in politics doing good things. I can’t think of any, unfortunately. But there are people doing good things that could really use the recognition and would be more fun to watch. Keith Olbermann is making things worse, not better.