Rosie Leaves "The View" -- Voluntarily?

Rosie O'Donnell is leaving ABC's "The View." Her last appearance on the show will be in June.

This is how ABC announced it:

ABC has been unable to come to a contractual agreement with Rosie O'Donnell. As a result, her hosting duties on "The View" will come to an end mid-June.
"They wanted me three years, I wanted one year, and it just didn't work," said O'Donnell on today's show.

Does anybody think that this is the real story? That this is just a contract dispute? If so, please raise your hand.

I thought so.

Keep in mind that this comes after a lot of controversy -- and that, as a rule, networks don't like controversy. It offends people. I don't they minded the whole Donald Trump imbroglio, but when she starts talking about how 9/11 was an inside job, that's getting to be a bit much. Was Rosie's dissing of Rupert Murdoch in public the final straw? There are those who will think so -- and they may be right.

Rosie was never a team player on a show where being a team player is pretty much mandatory. Far too often, Rosie acted as if it was her show, and that the other women at the table existed to be her foils, sounding boards and/or stooges. That can't have been comfortable for Elisabeth Hasselbeck, not to mention how it drove Barbara Walters bananas.

There are a lot of people who are going to be gloating today, in much the same way that, according to British novelist Kingsley Amis (who was teaching at Vanderbilt at the time), there were people down South who celebrated when President Kennedy was assassinated. Donald Trump is probably a happy boy today, to name just the most obvious. Tom DeLay, who, as I wrote in this blog not long ago, was publicly lobbying to get Rosie fired. Bill O'Reilly is probably spraying his pants at this very moment at the thought of Rosie leaving the show. They will all think that they have won.

But is it a good thing that Rosie's leaving? Granted, a lot of her humor wasn't particularly funny, her feuds with various people came off as pretty infantile, her behavior towards Elisabeth Hasselbeck seemed to me to be patronizing at best and churlish bullying at worst, but I can't help thinking that television is going to be poorer without Rosie on "The View" everyday.

What Rosie O'Donnell did on "The View" during her brief tenure was to expand the boundaries of discourse on network television. She allowed large swatches of the American public to hear points of view that they would never get to hear otherwise. Those of us who are roughly Rosie's age can remember when John Lennon and Yoko Ono appeared on the Mike Douglas Show, when people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were given a chance to express their opinions. And then America was free to accept or reject what they had to say.

None of that happens today. Truly contentious thinkers who go against the received opinions of the day are just not allowed on network television. You don't see, for example, Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky on the Tonight Show. You don't even see Jenna Jameson on Letterman when her book was on the New York Times Bestseller list. Discourse has really been stifled in this country, and most of us don't even recognize it.

So I'm hoping that Rosie comes back to TV at some point in a venue and a format that's more suitable for her. In an age where fewer and fewer corporations are controlling more and more of the media, we need such heterodox voices, even when (or should I say especially when) we disagree with them, more than ever.

Tom Moran