The Olbermann factor

The MSNBC maverick gives Salon the countdown on his anti-Bush orations, battling with Bill O'Reilly, and the nauseating truth about cable news.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: Politics, News, MSNBC, Fox News, Keith Olbermann, Alex Koppelman

Photo: MSNBC

Keith Olbermann

Sept. 11, 2006 | MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has been building ratings for his nightly show, "Countdown," and has become a darling of the liberal half of the Internet, by tacking to the left while most of cable's chattering class veers right. His 3-year-old show continues to add viewers, especially the young ones that advertisers crave; the numbers for such conservative warhorses as Bill O'Reilly, with whom Olbermann has pursued a long-running feud, are down, as are the ratings for the Fox News Channel generally.

Olbermann closes each broadcast with a personal, often acerbic, commentary. In the past two weeks, as the Bush administration launched its pre-election anti-terror public relations blitz, Olbermann upped the ante and cemented his hero status in Left Blogistan with two especially acid speeches. On Aug. 30, he blistered Donald Rumsfeld with a breathtaking on-air screed that called the defense secretary a quack, explicitly compared him to Neville Chamberlain, and implicitly accused him of fascism and McCarthyism. President Bush himself for an "awful," "cynical" and "un-American" equation of dissent and disloyalty. Olbermann, who usually ends his commentaries with a quote that pays tribute to Edward R. Murrow -- "Good night and good luck" -- instead closed with a different, and much angrier, echo of the McCarthy era. He asked the president, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

Now in his second tour with MSNBC, Olbermann first came to prominence as one of the anchors of ESPN's "SportsCenter." He's since been a host for the Fox Sports Network, a radio reporter and (full disclosure) a columnist for Salon. His latest book, "The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders," will be released Sept. 15.

You're obviously rather upset with the statements that President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other officials have been making recently about the war on terror.

It, in many respects, is accomplishing -- as I said on the air the other night -- that which the terrorists are supposed to be looking to do, which is to divide us, make us fearful, change our way of life. I believe Mr. Bush said they hate us for our liberty, and the government seems to be intent on reducing many of those freedoms and liberties. It's been building; this is not the first time I've said anything about this, about the administration or about its conduct. Pretty much this has been constant since this newscast went on the air. As they have wandered further from reality and our history and what I think all of us -- liberals and conservatives and everybody else -- were taught as far as our way of life. The further they wander away, the harder you have to reach out to try and grab them and pull them back.

Why did you decide to start making your commentaries so harsh?

I didn't, actually. These are just the first ones -- well, I wouldn't say the first ones -- that got prominent play. I did one a year ago that was necessitated by the administration's reaction to Katrina, in particular the Homeland Security secretary's rather Freudian slip, when he said, "Louisiana is a city that is largely under water," which I thought summarized their whole problem with it. I think that was five or six minutes long.

There is a public platform afforded to you. If you spend your entire time on it trying to bend the ordinary rules of news to encourage people to ask what's really going on, if you do that nonstop, it necessarily becomes an act. You really should have that weapon close to you, but you should keep it holstered as much as possible. If you don't have it, or you don't ever use it, you might as well be a trained monkey doing the news, which unfortunately is the case in a lot of places.

My skepticism -- I think that's the right word, as opposed to "cynicism" -- toward the administration has been evident from -- I think the day it started was May 1 of 2003, the flight-suit story. I can remember interviewing several people that day and saying, "Isn't this a little premature? Isn't this a little theatrical? Isn't this a little staged?" and being assured that my opinion was ridiculous and alone and this was George Bush's historic moment, all the rest of that.

I'm not saying I come out and beat anybody over the head on a regular basis, but when it's merited -- it sounds almost like a tautology, almost too simple to be true -- when it's merited, this is the sort of stuff people on television ought to be doing, and it doesn't matter who's running the country. The country belongs to the people, not to the government that happens to be in charge at the moment. We should remind ourselves of that fact periodically.

But don't these kinds of commentaries pay off in ratings? Doesn't controversy mean more viewers?

I don't think you can draw a direct cause-and-effect relationship with the commentaries. I think the kind of skeptical, "Wait a minute, they're talking about the long war on terror. On the other hand, our principal ally in the region just made a deal with the warlords surrounding where bin Laden is believed to be hiding out. Aren't those two things contradictory?" -- that approach has been true of this newscast since the Jessica Lynch story. I think, I'm pretty sure, we were the first television outlet in this country to question the official story of the Jessica Lynch rescue, and I remember taking a huge amount of heat for that, because that was a great comic-book kind of war story.

I think over a long period of time this clearly has affected the ratings. We have gone from a distant third place to having won in the demographic that everybody looks for, the 25- to 54-year-olds; we defeated the CNN show at 8 o'clock in the first two quarters. And I think on a year-to-year basis, the numbers are extraordinarily up compared to the other networks that are on at 8 o'clock. I think we're up about 9 percent in that demographic, and CNN is down 30 and Fox is off 23 percent. I don't think you can say, "Hey, we did this commentary and the ratings doubled the next night." It doesn't usually work that way. But overall we've had a very steady climb, a climb from third place in the ratings to essentially second place in the ratings, and I think you can attribute it to the approach, if not the specifics, of the commentaries.

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