The Keith Olbermann Saga’s Starting to Get Kind of Sad
Read —> The Atlantic Wire
Keith Olbermann: Brad Drake An ‘Asshole,’ O’Reilly A ‘Psycopath’
Keith Olbermann visits Occupy Wall Street
via @GottaLaff
Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi appeared on Current TV’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss the “Occupy Wall Street” protests. “The movement is growing organically,” Taibbi says, “because people know there’s something to protest now.” He adds that Occupy Wall Street could spur reformers and legislators to act because “the public won’t take it anymore.”
(via Rolling Stone)
h/t PPG
“Where is the outrage over these great hypocrisies? Do you expect it to come from a corrupt and corrupted media? For whom access is of greater importance than criticizing the failure of a politcal party or defending those who don’t buy newspapers or can’t leap website paywalls or could not afford cable TV.” - Keith Olbermann rails against the debt deal and the media’s lack of “outrage” over it.
“Mr. Olbermann’s new home, Current, is much smaller than MSNBC, so the channel’s executives expected Mr. Olbermann’s audience to be much smaller than it was at MSNBC. Indeed it was much smaller — but the early ratings for the first week do suggest that some of Mr. O’Donnell’s viewers did choose to watch Mr. Olbermann instead.
“Countdown” on Current averaged 354,000 total viewers in its first week, and 131,000 viewers ages 25 to 54. “The Last Word” on MSNBC averaged 794,000 total viewers, and 203,000 viewers ages 25 to 54, a drop of about 20 percent from Mr. O’Donnell’s second-quarter average.”
“You have an African-American gentleman married to a white woman who is in cahoots with a group that has a lot of racists in it. Is that Stockholm syndrome on his part? What’s going on?”
“As I was saying.”
began Keith Olbermann, who has been off the air since departing MSNBC Jan. 21, on his relocated and modestly retooled Countdown With Keith Olbermann, when it premiered tonight on cable’s tiny Current channel. And indeed, the liberal commentator picked up pretty much where he left off, tearing into the usual conservative targets and then some.
Continue reading… ‘Countdown’ to Keith Olbermann’s return ends - USATODAY
America’s Favorite Talking Hothead - Olbermann’s Rage Is All the Rage - NYTimes
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MSNBC is still a destination for liberal viewers, but there’s some disappointment that network personalities aren’t more challenging to the Obama administration and Democratic orthodoxy, said Jeff Cohen, an Ithaca University journalism professor and liberal activist. He said there hasn’t been enough debate about military action in Afghanistan and Libya.
“I would argue that it was more independent when Olbermann was there,” Cohen said. “His charm, if you can call it that, is that he’s uncontrollable. He’s not a party-line guy.”
MSNBC is facing the same issue that Fox News had during the Bush administration: It’s not as exciting being on defense when the party you support is in power as it is being on the outs and on the attack, said Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center.
“Now it’s, `Let’s not make trouble for these people. They have enough to handle with angry conservatives,’” he said.
[MSNBC’s chief executive Phil] Griffin said that analysis is flat-out wrong. He said there was extensive debate among MSNBC hosts about the extension of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, for example. Network personalities also harshly criticized the Obama administration for not fighting Wisconsin legislation that unions considered harmful, he said.
“We are not a rubber stamp, and it would be wrong for anybody to imply otherwise,” he said.
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The Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who said he had been “banned” from MSNBC for a year, will also be a contributor to the new “Countdown.” (Mr. Griffin sidelined Mr. Moulitsas for spreading innuendo about Joe Scarborough.) While MSNBC “has pretended to be the progressive network,” Mr. Moulitsas said, “they are conservative in terms of who they have on and what they can say.” Referring to Mr. Olbermann’s new show, he said, “I think that Current recognizes that there is a real opportunity here for a network that has a real diversity of opinions and voices.”
Mr. Olbermann, always pleased to pick a fight, clearly wants to foster competition. To Rolling Stone this month, he said “we’re going to take MSNBC’s business away from them,” a comment that Mr. Griffin chalked up to strategic posturing.
“Look,” he said in an interview on Friday, “everybody has a strategy, and that is purely a strategy. I’m talking about reality, and the reality is that we’ve never been stronger.”
”“It was sort of a perfect storm. Democrats don’t support their own in these situations. Republicans love to be on the right side of a scandal like this, because it doesn’t happen that often. And you get the media, and particularly the political media, most of whom are morons. So you give them something that they can actually understand — a penis.” - Keith Olbermann on the Anthony Weiner scandal.
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Several supposed Liberals have demanded that Weiner resign immediately because of the difficult position in which he has placed the minority leader, as if Weiner’s contributions to Progressive causes in this country were insignificant and irrelevant.
Even public opinion polls have, well – what else? – an opinion. Only 30% of New Yorkers in a Marist Poll said he should resign, while nearly two thirds of them said he apologized only because he got caught.
And, of course, odious blackmailers like Andrew Breitbart have said Weiner and other liberals are hypocrites. He in particular added he was holding back additional photographs out of decency. And then he showed those photographs the next day. But Weiner is the hypocrite. This is to be remembered when Breitbart’s fall finally comes – prediction: it will involve handcuffs, and not in the way he might enjoy them.
Now, Minority Leader Pelosi and other leading House Democrats have done what their Republican colleagues would never do: they too have urged Weiner to resign, for what appears to be about the 45th worst sex scandal among politicians in the last five or six years. Senators Jon Ensign and David Vitter make Weiner look like a celibate, and we have yet to hear a Republican demand either of them go.
(…)
But if there is nothing further to the Weiner story, if what we know is all there is, I have actually done what so many fear to do these days, and sat around and thought about something for a week. And now I think I know what I think — not demand, not insist, not preach — Anthony Weiner should do.
For it, I turn improbably back to the man who put the “cant” back in “Cantor,” the House Majority Leader: Let the people decide.
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