Unorthodox and Sometimes Polarizing, the Incredibly Popular Rosie O'Donnell Will Exit Stage Left

By Jeanine Plant, AlterNet. Posted May 8, 2007.

"I'm fat and I'm gay," Rosie O'Donnell confessed, smiling sardonically at the camera, on a recent broadcast of ABC Daytime's gabfest, "The View." Deliberately thumbing her nose at the manners and morals of mainstream television is workaday for O'Donnell, so presumably her unabashed honesty didn't ruffle any viewer's sense of decorum. Rather, O'Donnell's voice -- unorthodox and uncouth -- has resuscitated the flagging program in its 10th year on the air. Her remarkably blunt disclosures and infamous feuds helped increase the show's viewership by over a half-million a day, according to the Associated Press.

But just last week, she announced that she will be exiting the show in June. Having initially only signed for a year, she didn't agree to the terms of a new contract. According to the New York Times, ABC had wanted her to commit to three more years with the show, but O'Donnell wanted more money than they were willing to pay.

Come September, when the new season starts, viewers will lose one of the most beloved and most progressive television personalities in mainstream media. Now that she will be leaving, it's instructive to take stock: How do we square her intransigent views -- which can be offensive and polarizing to many, and seem out of step with the larger culture -- with her overwhelming popularity?

Certainly O'Donnell's popularity can't be reduced to her politics. Her unapologetic lesbianism probably offends (while also educating) whole swaths of more traditionally-minded viewers, just as her dietary habits, which consist of eating Oreo cookies in bed, Ring Dings, and Dunkin Donuts, are probably frowned upon by upper-middle-class audience members, who pride themselves on their sense of healthful propriety.

Even those who don't find her coarse and agree with many of her political views sometimes recoil at her misinformation and divisiveness. When she trumpeted 9/11 conspiracy theories recently, suggesting it was an inside job, critics, including AlterNet's Joshua Holland, suggested she helped fuel embarrassing right-wing stereotypes about liberals: "that they're extremists, that they're defined by their fringe and led by out-of-touch Hollywood elites."

So what is it about this social misfit that so attracts the public? For starters, she seems to forge genuine connections with her guests -- unlike the more aloof Barbara Walters -- in part because of her discernible imperfections. At the height of the cell-phone tabloid scandal incriminating Alec Baldwin as a bad father, for instance, he requested to speak on "The View" because he had a history with O'Donnell and knew her to be sympathetic to public embarrassment. When Courtney Love, who has been called a negligent mother in the past, was touting her new book last fall, she bypassed the other panelists to give O'Donnell a hug, as if to gird herself against a potentially chilly reception from the other judgmental hosts.

She's also funny, of course, which is an indisputably likeable quality. But sometimes Joy Behar, her fellow comic panelist, is funnier, always quick with a one-liner; and sometimes O'Donnell can, in fact, be a downer. During the Anna Nicole Smith media frenzy, for example, O'Donnell self-righteously brought up the disparity in media coverage between the B-list starlet's death and the deaths of soldiers in Iraq. And she raised the forbidden topic again during the whole Imus debacle, because -- to the dismay of some feminists -- she didn't quite get what all of the commotion was about. It's precisely because of these impieties, which challenge the niceties of vacuous conversation, I'd argue, that she has so many fans.

That O'Donnell consistently raises uncomfortable truths to an ever-growing audience shows just how hungry the public is for a woman willing to tell them. Bill Maher, for instance, is a somewhat similar public figure in that he's equally funny and politically incorrect, but many of his jokes smack of misogyny. Which gets to the heart of O'Donnell's polarizing nature -- that she is a woman who dares to have an opinion.

Jennifer Pozner, executive director of Women in Media and News, made a similar point in a recent article for The American Prospect Online about why right-wing pundits hate O'Donnell so much. "Certain media men" may not understand O'Donnell's popularity and even resent it because of their belief "that women who watch daytime television are mostly stupid, concerned only with the latest fashions, celebrity gossip, and sex tips, while men are interested in the 'hard news' of politics, economics, labor, science, and world events."

O'Donnell indeed raises the level of daytime discourse not simply by discussing the news of the day, but by bringing a passionate, serious and progressive perspective to the issues and by addressing subjects that don't usually get the airtime they deserve. She has been the driving force behind shows devoted to autism and depression. On the same day that she announced her departure, she vowed to help get 9/11-first-responders, many of whom have intractable respiratory illnesses, the care they need from the government next year.

Throughout the Alberto Gonzales scandal, she has repeatedly called for his resignation and the impeachment of George W. Bush, going so far as to cite Elizabeth Holtzman's The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens. She's identified herself as a feminist on different occasions, and is a formidable adversary to Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the fake-blond, fake-tanned, conservative young mother on the show. She even recently called Hasselbeck out on her advocating Bush's use of torture in the war on terror.

And O'Donnell's staunchly liberal stances can occasionally border on radicalism. When O'Donnell and her other panelists were discussing the British sailors being held by Iran, she echoed Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by saying: "In America we are fed propaganda, and if you want to know what's happening in the world, go outside the U.S. media, because it's owned by four corporations. One of them is this one (ABC)." In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, she in effect threw up her hands, saying she was not surprised it happened because the National Rifle Association is "the most powerful lobby in Washington." Whether or not that's true is beside the point; what's important is that she got behind defeating the NRA after Columbine.

Sometimes her passion comes off as shrill, such as when she accused Kelly Ripa of homophobia. And sometimes her desire for a quick laugh leads her astray, such as when she offended Chinese Americans with her mockery of their language.

Yet in the eyes of some progressives, surely, she manages to redeem such blunders with the rest of her do-gooding. In the eyes of the Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, she gets away with her leftist dissent by being such a hot commodity. Either way, O'Donnell's whirlwind of a year sends a strong message. That she attracted the ire of Tom Delay, managed to stir up controversy with the Donald Trumps of the world, and often gets the conservative media machine in a tizzy bespeaks her power. That such a progressive force is in such high demand and so threatening to conservative men is a happy reminder that the sea change we saw last November is real and not going away, even though she is.

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Jeanine Plant is a New York-based freelance writer.

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