The Morning After: Letterman Apologizes. Is It Over?
Last night on Late Show, David Letterman took to his desk and delivered a second—or depending on your view of his sincerity last week, first, or first-and-a-halfth—apology to the family of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for a joke he made last week about Palin's daughter getting "knocked up" at a Yankee game. Sober and snark-free, Letterman reiterated that he meant to refer to Palin's 18-year-old (and once pregnant-out-of-wedlock) daughter Bristol, and not 14-year-old Willow (who was actually at the game). But, he added, "The joke in and of itself can't be defended," took the blame for making it and for its reception and apologized, in so many words. It was a straight-talking, decent speech, and it should end the week's brouhaha.
The operative word being should.
I'm not referring to how Sarah Palin and her family took the apology. As I write, there's been no reaction. Last week, Palin pretty much said Letterman was lying to claim that he meant Bristol—she called Matt Lauer "naive" for buying the explanation—and seemed intent to press and maintain outrage. Update: This morning, Palin accepted Dave's apology thus:
Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who "joke" about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve. Letterman certainly has the right to "joke" about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction. And this is all thanks to our U.S. military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's right to free speech--in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect.
But really this controversy doesn't belong to Palin and Letterman anymore, and both of them only have so much power to end it. That distinction belongs to the army of cable-news and online commenters using it as a proxy for every dispute under the sun, and they are too well invested in keeping it going. Yea, verily, it has been written down in The Holy Book of Partisan Grievance, and it shall be cited henceforth in culture wars to come.
You know how that works. A controversy like this comes up, and suddenly there's a mad dash to the history books to cherrypick decontextualized examples and catch the other side in an act of hypocritical defense of / outrage against humor. Well, what about when Jay Leno made essentially the same joke last year!, Letterman's defenders cried. But what about Imus!, Palin's partisans countered. CBS fired Imus for his remarks! Well, what about all the jokes people made about Chelsea Clinton? Yes, but what about the ones about the Bush daughters? You're a hypocrite! No, you are!
On and on it goes, the grievance and counter-grievance, the gotcha and counter-gotcha. And thus the discussion over a freaking tacky late-night joke becomes like adjudicating an ethnic conflict in the Balkans, where yesterday's atrocity is rationalized by a massacre during World War I, which in turn was righteous payback for some atrocity in 1484, which in turn... Good Lord.
Now, look, I'm not exactly impartial in this one. I think Letterman's joke was tasteless but not beyond the pale, and the Palins had a legitimate gripe about it. (His "slutty flight attendant" joke about Palin, meanwhile, was the time-honored tack of ripping on a politician's physical vulnerabilities—John Edwards' hair, Bill Clinton's pudge—with the added twist that always attaches to female pols, who are either too sexy or too unsexy.)
But I'll go back to what I wrote back when Imus was drummed off the air: that context, and often intangible factors, matter—in this case, that unlike Imus, Letterman does not in fact have a vast history of making the kind of joke he was accused of. And I believe that knowing this, Palin pressed the outrage anyway, willfully insisting that Letterman was referring to Willow—there was too much advantage to the "he thinks rape is funny" narrative—and tying it into the them-vs.-us politics she took on national tour last fall.
So we'll see where it goes. In the meantime, there's still a protest scheduled outside Letterman's Ed Sullivan Theater in New York today. Anyone think it'll be canceled? By the way, after Letterman's remarks, the band played him off with "Fooled Around and Fell in Love," a song choice that's already caused umbrage online. Maybe they can call for Paul Shaffer's head too.
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Link to TV Guide story: Letterman's Palin Joke Costs CBS an Advertiser, Spawns Campaign For His Firing. http://www.tvguide.com/News/Lettermans-Palin-Joke-1006900.aspx
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I think that was posted pre-apology, sometime yesterday afternoon, so maybe the apology will help deflate some of this nonsense...
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My take on this is that we can't go around attacking comedians for making jokes in poor taste. Yeah, that sucks for Willow that someone made a joke that might have vaguely referenced her. It sucks to be a kid of a celebrity/politician. I remember a massive amount of negative attention on Chelsea Clinton back in the day, when she was an awkward teenager and there was massive discussion and jokemaking of how ugly and awkward-looking she was. I found that pretty upsetting back then (as an awkward teenage girl myself at the time, I really felt for her), but this offhand joke doesn't even come close to that level. It really seems like a stupid, contrived controversy and a way for Palin to grab the spotlight. I think that she tends to handle and react to the media in a very unconstructive way. It was a stupid joke, but he wasn't seriously implying that Willow ACTUALLY had gotten knocked up. It was not a "sexual insult against a child", but a joke in poor taste compounded by a lack of realization of who was actually there. Apologies have been made, time to move on - hopefully Willow will learn to develop a thick skin as her mother continues to actively thrust her family into the public eye with such scandalous and inflammatory accusations. -
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In the broader context, I felt awful for the Bush daughters as well, having to go through college - a time for personal growth, experimentation, etc - with the media documenting every slip-up and transgression. Its a tough line, I imagine, for folks in the media to draw - what's news, what should be left private (especially considering how much competition there is for scoops and headlines and stories), and the line seems to have clearly been drawn to include "slightly or potentially scandalous" as Most Newsworthy.
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I also think you're right that the two of them may actually have limited power to really end it now. But they (I blame Palin mostly, but for fairness's sake, "they") created a monster and got a bunch of other folks all riled up to start with, of course it takes on a life of its own.
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I also think that this second apology was a direct response to the pulling of ads. -
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I liked Sarah Palin during the election. I thought the coverage of her during the election was phenomenally unfair and that caused me to be a little protective of her for a while, but this controversy is preposterous. Her stoking of this controversy has pretty much eliminated the good will I had for her. She is becoming the right wing loon that the media portrayed her as. I wish she would go back to Alaska and continue governing well and doing the actual job of governor.
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As for Letterman, it was a bad joke. I don't mean tasteless, although I agree it was, I mean it wasn't even close to funny. The joke is a humor vacuum. It's anti-humor. And how could he not check if Palin brought one of her non-Bristol daughters to the game. It's a baseball game at the newest, most-expensive baseball stadium in the world! It would be kind of mean for her to go and not bring any of her kids. He really should have checked who was at the game with her. Enough with the Bristol jokes anyway.
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The issue I have with Sarah Palin jokes generally is that, from Letterman in particular, they always seem fueled by an intense personal disdain for the woman. I think it's a rule for everyday life that if you really don't like someone, it's hard to make fun of them without coming across as petty and mean-spirited. Letterman should just stop with Palin jokes. Although he can't now, because it would like fear, but that's a whole other topic. -
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[...] such as James Poniewozik of TIME magazine, Michael Russnowof the Huffington Post, and others continue to play political [...]
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[...] I hope some can accept those of us who accept the [...]
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[...] I hope some can accept those of us who accept the [...]
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If I were writing a parody of what I thought Palin's reaction to the apology would be it would have turned out exactly as she reacted. She's so damn amusing.
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[...] A blog entry at Time elaborates on the unwillingness of people — in the face of a moral victory — to accept that victory: [...]
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"Over? Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"
*
Bluto Blutarsky -
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@James,
Well put; I'm in 100% agreement . . . even if you "continue to play political games and see in it more than a man expressing regret and contrition," as the American Catholic asserts. So now, in addition to being Time's TV and mass communications guy, you're apparently also being vilified for your political gamesmanship . . . you Machiavelli you
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@Rorschach: Agreed. I love how she brought the military into it. If she'd had a little more time, perhaps she could have tied in 9/11 and socialism.
As to whether Bristol is fair game, I hear some people say she is because her mother pulled her into the spotlight. I think that's unfair--Bristol had little choice in the matter. But she has since chosen to make herself a public figure as a spokesperson for abstinence. When you agree to appear on the cover of People magazine, you open yourself up to all sorts of treatment in the media, even the kind you don't like. Like it or not, she is legally an adult and, now, legally a public figure--she has to take the good with the bad, and her mother can't have it both ways.
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That said, I do think the joke was over the line and unnecessarily risky for Dave.
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Sarah Palin is a media whore who will milk this for all its worth.
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Does this remind anyone else even a little of the Donald Trump-Rosie O'Donnell thing from a few years back? Donald was going around to all the talk shows ostensibly promoting the new season of the Apprentice but he spent almost all his time talking about how fat and ugly O'Donnell was? I sort of see Palin in the Trump role, that she's on these shows to talk about the new pipeline but is spending most of it accusing Letterman of making a rape joke about her daughter.
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(While we're at it...I was all whipped into outrage too when I heard that "Letterman made a rape joke about Palin's 14-yo," and then I actually heard the joke. Is that baseball player accused of rape or promiscuity? If it was a Kobe joke, it might sound different, but if that guy isn't associated with rape, how did it turn into a rape joke?) -
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@onesidemakesyougrowsmaller: Palin is categorizing this as a "rape" joke simply because Willow, the daughter she's being all defensive about, is under 18, and could not legally consent to sex with an adult - if it had ACTUALLY happened, it would have constituted statutory rape... I think its a stretch, considering that Letterman has insisted he was referring to Bristol, who IS 18, and not Willow. Even if you buy that Letterman was referring to Willow, he was obviously not making a joke about somebody being coerced into sex.
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@shara says: Well, if that's the case, and if I were the ballplayer, I'd be mad at Palin for making me out to be a pedophile. It's doubtful anyone would have gotten that out of the original joke if Palin weren't there to say it. Where's the outrage from him?
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Here's what I like. Letterman makes a tasteless joke, semi-apologizes, and then makes what seems to be a full-blown apology, snark-free. What he did was stupid. But he took responsibility for it. Even if he was pressured to do so by ads being yanked or anything else, he did it. And not a week or a month later, either.
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Sarah Palin turned this into another victimization of Sarah Palin and Her Family. I think that during the campaign she got beat up in the press, yes, but I don't think the MSM manufactured anything about her. They asked her tough questions and she folded. But then she complains that Katie Couric edited the CBS interview to make Palin look bad. (Still not sure how CBS supposedly did that, unless Palin is arguing they used CGI and put words in Palin's mouth, but okay.)
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But this whole "rape" scenario is just bizarre, a clumsy attempt to use the word "rape" to create backlash and outrage. Problem is, the backlash seems to have largely fallen on Governor Palin.
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I'm glad she accepted the apology, although I thought the reference to the military was blatantly self-serving ("Look! I love America! The REAL America!"). Sadly, I agree with James Poniewozik--neither Palin nor Letterman can stop this now. Would that they could. -
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[...] Controversy” WLOS TV - “Apology not enough for anti-Letterman protesters” Time - “The Morning After: Letterman Is It Over?” NY Daily News - “Why we couldn’t tune out the Sarah Palin-David Letterman feud” [...]
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[...] apology twice // Conan told 20 Bristol Palin jokes John McCain: “Time to move on” // Controversy goes beyond Palin/Letterman Artie Lange says “Go f–k yourself” to HBO exec, claims Conan banned him HBO [...]
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[...] A death--at least, one that's long-expected, from natural causes, with no foul play involved--is not strictly breaking news. It is news that has broken. Which offers some lattitude as to how much airtime to give it. Now, it's not a new thing for cable news to go wall-to-wall on a big death. It did on Farrah Fawcett and, God knows, Michael Jackson in quick succession. I'm sure somebody out there has a detailed accounting to exactly how many minutes Fox devoted to, say, the death and funeral of Ronald Reagan. Once precedent is established, if you don't give as much or more to Kennedy, you run the risk of viewers invoking, as I've called it before, The Holy Book of Partisan Grievance. [...]
- poniewozik Lisa De M: WH crashers on Today tomorrow. NBC: no $ for intvu. (of course, a show on NBCU's Bravo has no $ value!) http://bit.ly/7hustM - 10 hours ago
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