The Madness of Keith Olbermann
By Charles Lemos on June 16, 2008 at 11:10 AM in Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Media Bias, Misogyny, New Yorker, Obamedia, Sexism
Well at least, we now know that he suffers from a neurological disease. He also suffers from CDS, Clinton Deranged Syndrome, another affliction that seems highly contagious these days. Perhaps it was only an epidemic but my sense is that it is a virus with no known cure. Pity, because the Clinton health care plan covers pre-existing conditions while Obama’s does not. And it may be fatal to one’s journalistic career. So Keith Olbermann has made his sick bed, now let him lay in it.
The New Yorker this week profiles the not-so-special political commentator, Keith Olbermann. A few money quotes:
Olbermann, who is six feet three and a half, once bumped his head while leaping into a subway car; it permanently upset his equilibrium, which makes driving a trial. (He says he loses depth perception at speeds greater than fifteen miles per hour.)
I am sorry to hear that his equilibrium was upset by his own impetuous actions. But frankly, his perception is not any better sitting down and staying still. In fact, it may be worse. Equilibrium is not a word I have ever associated with Keith Olbermann. Slanted and off-balanced are. Now at least, we know why. As for trying, Olbermann tries our patience five nights a week and offends our sensibilities with every word he utters.
Olbermann’s tenure at ESPN was characteristically contentious. One of his co-anchors, Suzy Kolber, has said that Olbermann was sometimes so overbearing that she would lock herself in the bathroom and cry. Another colleague, Mike Soltys, has said that when Olbermann left the network, in 1997, “he didn’t burn bridges here—he napalmed them.”
Overbearing is apt and his misogyny is nothing new. If I were to cry, it would be over the fact that he is killing American journalism by pretending to be Edward R. Murrow, whom he is not. And in terms of the death of the US Democratic Party, Olbermann is simply Agent Orange, a defoliant that has stripped bare what was once a vibrant political party, now likely headed for death because of the toxicity of pundits like Mr. Olbermann.
Once again, Olbermann left a job unhappily, returning to sportscasting at Fox Sports. He was subsequently fired, and the remainder of his contract was paid off. (“I fired him,” Rupert Murdoch said recently. “He’s crazy.”)
It won’t be the last time he is fired. We are working on repeating on yet another pink slip for Mr. Olbermann.
The Olbermann-O’Reilly feud, which is wholly Olbermann’s creation, began with a wisecrack in 2003, the first year of “Countdown.” It evolved after Olbermann instituted a farcical segment called “The Worst Person in the World,” in which O’Reilly, depicted as a pompous buffoon, was regularly cited. O’Reilly, the biggest draw of the highest-rated cable-news network, could only lose by engaging with Olbermann, but he could not resist. Refusing to mention Olbermann by name, he sponsored a petition drive to have him replaced, and eventually began to aim on-air broadsides against NBC’s parent company, General Electric, and its chairman, Jeffrey Immelt. “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt,” O’Reilly asserted in April, citing G.E.’s business relationship with Iran. (The company began phasing out its contracts there in 2005.) This only encouraged Olbermann, who subjected Bill-O (as Olbermann calls him) to near-daily barrages of acid caricature. Instead of using video clips of O’Reilly for his routines, Olbermann began voicing O’Reilly’s words himself, in a demonic mimicry of the Ted Baxter character on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Demonic is a good adjective to describe Mr. Olbermann. Asinine and pedantic are others.
Olbermann’s success, like O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. “People want to identify,” Griffin says. “They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify, or you see where you fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long.”
In the end, all Keith Olbermann will have his DailyKos audience, hardly the most progressive element in the United States and inherently anti-democratic. Honestly, who encourages voters to disrupt the democratic process by encouraging Democrats to cross over and vote for Mitt Romney in the Michigan Republican Primary? Only the lunacy of the DailyKos. It is not a tactic I can ever support. It goes against the entire concept of democracy and strikes at one of the core values of Western Civilization, the rights of conscience inalienable.
Some might find Olbermann’s frequent invocation of Murrow, and, especially, his appropriation of Murrow’s sign-off, wildly presumptuous.
That and utterly delusional.
Asked about the prospect of an Olbermann reign at “CBS Evening News,” Sandy Socolow, Walter Cronkite’s final executive producer, responded emphatically. “Oh, no, no, no, he’s not a newsman,” Socolow said. “He’s not a reporter. I’ve never seen anything that he’s done that was original, in terms of the information. It’s all derivative. I like him, I agree with his perspective, and I think he’s very, very good on television. But he’s not a newsman.” Socolow added, “Ten years ago, if he had done at CBS what he does every day on the air at MSNBC, he would have been fired by the end of the day.”
Ditto.
As Russert put it to me shortly before his death, “Keith and I have each carved out our roles in this vast information spectrum.” He continued, “What cable emphasizes, more and more, is opinion, or even advocacy. Whether it’s Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann or Lou Dobbs, that’s what that particular platform or venue does. It’s not what I do. What I do is different. I try very, very hard not to come up and say to people, ‘This is what I believe,’ or ‘This is good,’ or ‘This is bad.’ But, rather, ‘This is what I’m learning in my reporting,’ or ‘This is what my analysis shows based on my reporting.’ And as long as I can do that I’m very, very comfortable. And nobody has asked me to do anything but that.”
Yes, it is opinion but it is being packaged as news and fact. That is not only disingenuous but immoral. And it has poisoned political discourse in the United States, radicalizing elements on both sides. As Fox News caters to the right, MSNBC caters to the left. Vice President Cheney requires that his hotel rooms have Fox on when he enters the room. How’s that for fair and balanced news sourcing? Look at the By The Fault blogroll, there are news sources from over 50 countries offering a wide perspective of news and events.
In cable news, the dominant personality puts an identifying stamp on the entire organization. The stamp at MSNBC is indisputably that of Keith Olbermann.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Olbermann says that he began the campaign season determined to remain neutral on the Democratic race, although he was plainly friendly with the Clintons. (During an interview with Bill Clinton in 2006, Olbermann handed the former President a personal donation to the Clinton Foundation.) Olbermann liked Obama, but he believed, at first, that he would not make a strong candidate. As the tide began to turn Obama’s way, Olbermann began to grow impatient with Clinton surrogates’ attacks on Obama, and, seemingly, with the persistence of the candidate herself. As Obama neared apparent assurance of the nomination, Olbermann began to raise questions about Clinton’s arithmetic on the popular vote, about her wanting to change the rules regarding the Florida and Michigan primaries, about why she didn’t just do the right thing and get out.
But attacks on Clinton, including overtly misogynistic comments on MSNBC, raised not but an eyebrow. Hypocrisy is hard to swallow.
Brokaw says he sometimes feels that he has been cast in the role of hall monitor at NBC News; if so, his charges have kept him busy. The day after the New Hampshire primary, Matthews asserted that Hillary Clinton owed her election as senator to public sympathy for her in light of her husband’s sexual peccadilloes. “It was completely out of line,” Brokaw says. “And Keith took it to another level” with his “shut the hell up” commentary.
If Brokaw is the hall monitor, then Olbermann is certainly the playground bully. But where’s the principal or at the very least an adult?
In March, after Geraldine Ferraro said that Obama would not be where he is if he were not a black man, Olbermann issued a Special Comment that was aimed expressly at Clinton’s advisers (and their countenancing of Ferraro’s “cheap, ignorant, vile racism”) but that struck Clinton nonetheless. “Voluntarily or inadvertently,” Olbermann said, addressing Clinton directly, “you are still awash in this filth.”
That moment would have marked the nadir of Olbermann’s career as a pundit but for the fact of what was still yet to come.
At MSNBC, Phil Griffin was worried, and with good reason. The average “Countdown” viewer is fifty-nine years old, and forty-five per cent of the viewers are women, presumably Democratic—a fair description of a Hillary Clinton supporter. Griffin believed that Olbermann was beginning to alienate his core audience, and asked him to ease up a bit on Clinton, and possibly even make some conciliatory gesture to the Clinton camp. Olbermann was offended by the suggestion. “I can’t do that!” he says, recalling that conversation. “Me doing a commentary against my own opinion is pandering. Black and white. And I’m not going to do it. Would I pull back a little bit, or think long and hard about whether or not I want to knowingly alienate part of the audience? Yeah. And I did. I mean, I held fire on Senator Clinton for quite a while after she began to really scare me, with some of these tactics.”
You are hardly believable any more. You are caricature, a parody of singular nothingness. An empty suit like your would be messiah.
For another not-so-complimentary view, check out
From my blog, By The Fault.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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