Quote of the Day

"Just walking around with a $10 million chandelier isn't going to do anybody a lot of good, and it's not going to do any good to the chandelier. And then it turned out we didn't have a lot to put the house on, to put the chandelier in, or a building permit, and I should have known that."

-- Keith Olbermann explaining his acrimonious departure from Current TV to David Letterman last night

In case you're not picking up on the analogy, Olbermann is the ten million dollar chandelier. And this kind of thing is exactly why anyone thinking of hiring him should probably spare him or herself the trouble and just swallow a pitcher full of broken safety glass now.

As a broadcaster, Keith Olbermann is excellent -- one of the best the business has ever offered up. As a human being, he's insufferable: arrogant, petty, bitter, hypercritical and thoroughly out of his fucking mind. You hire Keith and you sign on for all of his DSM-IV-level phobias and psychological ticks, the ones which constantly need to be catered to and salved in equal parts. There's certainly an argument to be made that brilliance comes at a price -- and it's absolutely no secret that there are a plurality of idiots working in television news -- but Olbermann has proven time and time again that he can't work with anyone. He's said before that he doesn't simply burn bridges -- he burns rivers. Well, it's entirely possible that after this debacle, no one with a news operation he or she would rather not see turned into a daily melodrama will extend either to Olbermann. He'll simply never be satisfied.

Current Main Event

It's tough to take anything Hamilton Nolan says seriously simply because every time I see his byline in Gawker I'm immediately reminded that he looks like the product of about six generations of brothers and sisters having sex with each other.

Still, his take this morning on the bitter feud brewing between -- wait for it -- Keith Olbermann and (insert employer here) Current TV is pretty dead-on, at least insofar as it offers a warning to anyone else inexplicably considering bringing the toxic cloud that is Olbermann into his or her workplace.

Once again, Keith is engaged in a very public fight with his bosses and once again it's everyone's fault but Keith's. At this point, hiring Olbermann is like dating me: Yeah, it's got its occasional moments of brilliance and bliss, but there's just too much well-documented history for you to want to seriously consider it. As they say, 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong.

Gawker: "Keith Olbermann: Not Worth It" by Hamilton Nolan/1.5.12

Steve-D'oh

This is pretty damn hilarious.

Anyone who's read my little book, Dead Star Twilight, is familiar with the name Steve Hyvonen. He's a guy I used to work with years ago at the NBC owned and operated station in Miami and who I wound up being under again immediately after 9/11 -- that's because he was an executive producer of dayside news programming at MSNBC at the time. In the book, I describe him as a pretty harmless and likable goof -- certainly not a bad guy by any means but likewise no ferociously uncompromising journalistic iconoclast. Hyvonen always perfectly represented the kind of tediously average, whiter-than-white-bread influence that seems to assert itself more these days in local news than just about any other. He was never the type to make waves and he seemed content at all times to just do whatever that management guidebook he'd once read dictated and be back home to his suburban wife and 2.3 kids by supper; think Bill Lumbergh by way of Ned Beatty's Otis character from Superman. He certainly wasn't the kind of guy worth getting worked up over for any reason at all.

Which is why it's all kinds of amusing to find out -- and I missed this the first time around -- that last year Hyvonen made Keith Olbermann's "Worst Persons in the World" list at one point. That fact alone is worth pointing and laughing at; the fact that the inclusion was apparently made at the behest of a few people at MS who are still aware of Hyvonen's time at the network and have, shall we say, less than fond memories of him, is even more entertaining. What Hyvonen did to earn Olbermann's ire, by the way, tells you everything you need to know about his thinking. Once again, I have no problem at all with the guy -- but it's still a hoot.

Incidentally, the reason I stumbled across this has to do with my plans for Dead Star Twilight for the upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11. A full announcement will be coming within the next few days.

"First, You've Got To Get Mad"

This is the best thing this Olbermann has ever done. It's damn-near perfect.

Circulate it far and wide.

Welcome Back Fodder

While there's no arguing that his broadcasting heft has been sorely missed by progressives, the AV Club sums up the problem with Keith Olbermann's "new" show on Current TV:

"The kind of bosses who so antagonize the Keith Olbermanns of the world inevitably get around to complaining that such men are their own worst enemies. I take no pleasure in saying that the bosses are ever right about anything, but even a stopped clock nails it twice a day, you know? For much of the past decade, Olbermann's MSNBC show was a real corrective to much of what passed for TV news. He wasn't exactly an investigative powerhouse, just one more voice recycling the news images of the day and offering his opinions and attitude, but he was smart, funny, and humane, he knew how to use words, and he was the first to offer certain necessary opinions that were in short supply at the time, at least on a prime time TV news show. But during the last few years, Olbermann's shtick ossified; the patty cake with the guests grew more and more predictable, the serious editorializing became self-congratulatory and hectoring, and the feuds seemed self-generated and hollow, as if hitting idjits with a stick was just his way of staying awake against the odds. At some point, his fans might have entertained the question, what would it be like if Keith Olbermann stayed in the same place for more than five years? The answer, it turned out, wasn't pretty.

The great hope for Olbermann's taking his act across the street to a different network was that it might shake him out of his complacency and get him to try something new; maybe at least try out some new guests, who knows, even join forces with some of the video guerrillas whose documentary work is all over Current TV and provide a forum where viewers might get to see some actual reporting. In his inevitable, blessedly brief 'Special Comment', which seemed meant to double as a Charles Foster Kane-style statement of purpose, Olbermann vowed to provide 'a newscast of contextualization, that is, to be presented with a viewpoint: that the weakest citizen of this country is more important than its strongest corporation.' That doesn't sound half bad on the face of it, but if it just means having Michael and Markos and the boys over to run Fox News clips abd (sic) chortle about how awful they are, it's just going to mean extending his rut."

(h/t Alert Reader Michael J. West)

Quote of the Day

"I'm difficult for management. That's why I have the reputation because nobody challenges management. I stand up to people. I do not believe that simply because I signed a contract that that gives people the right to make (unilateral) decisions. As part of the process by which you hire me, you hire me. You just don't hire an hour of me to do a performance."

-- Keith Olbermann, in an interview in the Hollywood Reporter

Meet the FOKer

You know, this might just work.

Quote of the Day

"Nothing is more vital to a free America than a free media... and nothing is more vital to my concept of a free media than news that is produced independently of corporate interference."

-- Keith Olbermann on his new gig as host of an hour-long prime time show on Al Gore's Current TV

Olbermann will also apparently be the network's "chief news officer" -- whatever the hell that is. He goes on to say that his new show will be "for all intents and purposes an improved and we hope amplified and stronger version of the show that I just did at my previous network."

Olbermann, more amplified?

God help us.

To say that this is a bold move for Olbermann is a bit of an understatement; to his credit, he really is putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to his advocacy of an independent press and his desire for creative control at any cost. Obviously, he could've gone just about anywhere; he may be a pain in the ass, but he's a talented pain in the ass and one with tremendous name recognition. By lending his substantial heft to Current TV he's guaranteed to be its marquee player and potentially put it on the map as a network.

Of course the negative way of looking at it is that Olbermann's ego is so vast that he'd rather be the genetically engineered giant SyFy-style mega-fish in the tiny pond than be forced to submit to anyone's will. That this is less the case of someone wanting to be an iconoclast than it is someone wanting free reign to be an asshole. And you can bet that Olbermann's many cable detractors -- and you know who I'm talking about -- will take exactly that tone, saying that their former foe has been vanquished to the cultural netherworld because he's a raging blowhard and from here on out he's to be considered a non-entity.

Either way, though, the Huffington Post goes corporate and Olbermann goes independent, all in the span of a day and a half.

Welcome to Bizarro world.

Goodbye and Good Luck

I'll make this quick because it's my last full day with Inara and I'd rather spend my time with her than think about anything involving TV news or politics.

Keith Olbermann is out at MSNBC because he's an uncontrollable, incorrigible, monumental pain in the ass; he typically refuses to be appreciative of or beholden to his bosses or the network's interests in general and somebody at the top finally realized he just wasn't worth all the trouble, particularly not with the Comcast deal now unforgivably rubber-stamped and the most "vampire squid"-like media monolith in history about to become a reality. The Comcast people are cleaning house at NBC as it is; it wouldn't surprise me if they made it clear to Phil Griffin that Olbermann needed to be off campus by nine o'clock Monday morning and that his local draft board would be informed that he was eligible for military service. No, I don't think there was some kind of secretive corporate cabal working against him behind the scenes; I leave that sort of conspiratorial ruminating to the Glenn Greenwalds of the world. It's probably more that he's a thorn in the side of just about everyone and, as I said, from a cost-benefit perspective, his bullshit just wasn't worth it anymore.

I'm not saying that all of this isn't a shame, because it certainly is. Olbermann's is an unapologetically progressive voice that shouldn't be silenced. His narcissistic drama queening is surpassed only by his intelligence, wit and sheer balls, and they'll be missed, at least until he finds some other outlet for them (although off the top of my head I can't imagine what that might be). While it's true that he helped to put a machine in place at MSNBC prime time that can probably now function without him, it won't function as well as it would have with him. Love him or hate him, he's a singular personality and despite the fact that he's a self-centered asshole -- as many true talents are -- what he brought to the table shouldn't have been easily dismissed. Or, in Olbermann's case -- after years of tumult and mutual acrimony with the NBC News mothership -- not so easily.

Whatever their differences, NBC and Olbermann should've been willing to compromise for the sake of a mutually beneficial relationship. But as anyone who's ever tried to make it work with a whack-job or a control freak knows, sometimes you just can't.

Quote of the Day

"We learn that the right doesn't even recognize the irony of its claim of being unfairly blamed for the violence of others, when it has spent the last several years doing exactly that to Muslims -- particularly American Muslims. We also learn that the right can simultaneously insist no political party or inclination can be blamed for Tucson -- while it itself blames the Democratic party and the left, for Tucson. We learn that the right does not understand that if you -- if we -- foment a political environment in which politics are to be settled by violence, or the threat of violence, or in a rhetorical tide of violent imagery, it no longer matters what those politics specifically are, or if the hearer even understands your politics or agrees with your politics -- he may hear only the permission to be violent. And ultimately we learn... this template of what the right would do in an actual open-and-shut slam dunk case in which a partisan of the right attempted to kill one of the left. The right would blame that victim, blame him or her for not having brought enough security. Or for not having brought a gun."

-- Keith Olbermann on much of the American right's response in the wake of the Arizona shooting and the call for more responsible political discourse

Quote of the Day

"Jon, I told you so! I mean, I might disagree with you but I'd never think you were crazy or hateful... One side sticks to the facts, and the other side is close to playing with its poop."

-- Keith Olbermann, who Jon Stewart implied was as guilty of amping up the lunacy as his right-wing counterparts, chiding Stewart after Hutt-like Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes referred to him as "crazy" and called NPR managers "Nazis"

(By the way, yes I'm very much aware that Phil Griffin over at MSNBC once again suffered a brain aneurysm and suspended one of his hosts -- this time Joe Scarborough -- and I'll have something to say about it later this weekend. Although I could easily just re-rack the Olbermann piece from a couple of weeks ago.)

A Fox on Both Your Houses

So this is kind of entertaining.

Last night I got an e-mail that was cc'd to about 50 or so indiscriminate addresses; it seemed to be trying to find its way into the hands of, among others, Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, Matt Drudge, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, O'Reilly's little Renfield-like producer Jesse Watters, Dana Milbank at the Post, and, yes, Keith Olbermann. What it contained was a link to a blog post currently running over at Newsbusters -- the right-wing media watchdog site created by professional uptight pencil-dick Brent Bozell -- which claimed that a Huffington Post contributor had inadvertently pulled back the curtain on MSNBC's prime time operation and admitted the ugly truth about it.

Can you figure out where this is going?

Yeah -- that Huffington Post contributor was me.

The post was written by Jack Coleman, whom I've never met and who may be a decent-enough guy for all I know, and it essentially used one line from the piece I put together on Olbermann's suspension last week to make a point I guess he felt needed to be made -- one which, not surprisingly, confirms what I have to assume are his own firmly-held biases.

Here's what he wrote:

"Wow, how'd that one slip through?

Writing about Keith Olbermann's 'indefinite suspension'/extended weekend away from MSNBC, Huffington Post blogger Chez Pazienza provided a rare moment of illumination at the left-wing site when he wrote this in a post titled 'Playing for Keith' --

'NBC's dilemma has always been how to draw the line between the outspoken free-for-all on MS and the supposedly dignified proceedings at NBC News proper. Maybe this will be the event that finally forces the NBC suits to fess up and admit what everybody already knows: MSNBC prime time isn't a news block; it's opinion. (emphasis added) And there's nothing really wrong with that.'"

Coleman goes on to make the claim -- and I feel like he really has to reach for it -- that the above quote somehow refutes Rachel Maddow's entire argument that MSNBC is, at its core, a news operation which traffics in facts (as opposed to Fox News, which she says is almost strictly a tool for partisan propaganda). Apparently, my willingness to state pretty categorically that MSNBC's prime time eschews traditional objective newscasting in favor of editorializing -- and that this fact should be fairly obvious to anyone with a set of ears and two brain cells to rub together -- makes me akin to Joshua's trumpet, bringing down the walls of Jericho.

This of course is horseshit.

I won't dare say I was misquoted or that my comment was taken out of context because each of those is a tired conceit, but thankfully I don't really have to bother going that route; any idiot can see the point I was making. Just because something or someone traffics largely in opinion doesn't mean that the opinions being expressed aren't based on actual facts. Maddow's argument in response to Olbermann's suspension was a good one -- that the system of checks and balances in place at NBC News was designed to ensure that those who worked for the network adhered to the highest journalistic standards. Yes, a new generation and a new paradigm now bends and even breaks those rules -- and that's a good thing -- but the fact that they exist at all proves that NBC ostensibly gives a crap about being fair. I have no doubt that Fox News also has some set of standards in place, and that perhaps at one time it even mattered. But if the network brass used to be able to make the argument that, yes, Fox's prime time could occasionally be an editorial Thunderdome but its daytime programming was always straight down the middle -- "fair and balanced," as it were -- that time has long since passed; Fox's blatant and oppressive partisan bias infects so much of what it does on a daily, hourly basis that it's simply impossible to take seriously as a responsible news network anymore.

While Keith Olbermann managed to get himself in trouble for making private campaign contributions to a couple of political candidates he happens to agree with -- Fox News employs as contributors and gives a public forum day after day after day to the political candidates and prospective political candidates it happens to agree with. It not only funds the campaigns of those running for office under the Republican and Tea Party banner (to say nothing of helping to foment the Tea Party movement by promoting and sponsoring its rallies); it reaps a financial reward of its own -- via ratings-based ad revenue -- from putting these people on the air, creating an Ouroboros in which politics and the media are interchangeable head and tail.

MSNBC is a news operation that features a well-defined block of advocacy and opinion, which means that news is still at the core of what it does.

Fox is a non-stop engine of advocacy and opinion that occasionally sprinkles in some actual news, which means that bias is always at the core of what it does.

Both have their share of booming partisan voices, but there is a damn huge difference.

You Don't Say

If you pay really careful attention, you'll notice that I occasionally soften the language of the pieces that appear here before submitting them to the Huffington Post. I have no issue being a profanity-spouting firebrand on this site, my internet home, but when it comes to HuffPo I generally try to temper my thoughts a little simply because of the amount of exposure the columns there tend to get and generate. The overall tone of the material doesn't change; I just go out of my way to be at least a little more dignified.

There have been a couple of times, however, that the blogging gods at HuffPo have actually asked me to edit something I've submitted -- or have asked for my permission to allow them to edit it themselves. Generally, I go along with it because, once again, as long as the point of the piece remains intact I couldn't really care less whether there are one or two fewer, as Jim Kirk would say, "colorful metaphors."

But with that in mind -- and we all know how I have no desire to bite the hand that feeds me some decent press -- I invite you to take a look at the way yesterday's little column on Keith Olbermann currently appears in the Huffington Post. It's, well, interesting, to see what changes needed to be made in order for it to be approved for publication. It was submitted without the Maddow coda, so you can discount that right off the bat. But some of the other edits -- which for the most part I agreed to, by the way -- they're pretty noticeable.

Remember, what's the one rule of writing for the Huffington Post?

Playing for Keith

By now you're almost certainly aware that on Friday, MSNBC announced that it was suspending Keith Olbermann indefinitely and without pay because he made three donations to Democratic candidates during the lead-up to the mid-terms. The reaction to the move has been swift and, shall we say, pointed; it seems that the only thing both the left and right can agree on right now is that Olbermann should be able to give money to whomever he wants and not have to worry about losing his job over it.

I don't really have much to add to this that hasn't been said far more articulately by just about everyone besides, maybe, Howie Kurtz (who predictably took the bullshit professorial, "well, he violated the first rule of being an objective journalist" route). The fact is that I'm willing to actually consider all kinds of conspiratorial notions on this one because I just can't make heads-or-tails of it as a rational decision. Maybe Bernie Sanders is right and NBC's corporate overlords pressured management to crack down on Olbermann because they don't like his message, as ludicrous as that seems because while Olbermann may be liberal and spend much of his time on-air railing against corporate interests, he ironically makes a shit-ton of money for the ones who run NBC; maybe MSNBC president Phil Griffin just got fed up with his unruly talent megalomanically running roughshod over him and decided to sit on that zoo fraternity of his and show it who's boss. Honestly, who knows?

The bottom line here, though, is that this highlights the disadvantage that MSNBC has always been at when it comes to allowing its hosts to express a political viewpoint, whether on-air or behind the scenes: MS is the only cable entity that has to answer to the traditional -- and laughably antiquated -- standards and practices of a network news mothership. Fox News was created as a right-wing mouthpiece; CNN basically made its own rules; only MSNBC had a set of intractable standards plastered into the walls of the place from the very beginning. NBC's dilemma has always been how to draw the line between the outspoken free-for-all on MS and the supposedly dignified proceedings at NBC News proper. Maybe this will be the event that finally forces the NBC suits to fess up and admit what everybody already knows: MSNBC's prime time isn't a news block; it's opinion. And there's nothing really wrong with that. Olbermann doesn't just wear his political leanings on his sleeve -- he occasionally shouts them in your face. The demands at NBC for notions like objectivity and fairness simply don't apply to Keith Olbermann, and it's ridiculous to pretend that they do.

At some point, these traditional media outlets will finally wise the hell up and realize that we're well past the point where it was unforgivable to express an opinion; where every journalist was supposed to robotically, dispassionately relay information; where it had to be "just the facts, ma'am." Fox News obviously realized this a long time ago; the place is almost literally a 24/7 factory for generating money for the Republican party and its candidates. MSNBC, if it has any brains at all and doesn't simply feel like trying to stare down its main marquee player just to prove that its penis is bigger, will put Olbermann back on the air as soon as it can -- and admit that it made a mistake by taking him off in the first place.

Because if you know anything at all about Keith, his occasionally tyrannical ego and penchant for behaving irrationally could easily lead to MS not having a star to put back on.

By the way, to her credit, Rachel Maddow presents, as usual, a very measured and thoughtful argument for how and why MSNBC's standards separate it from the political machine that is Fox News:

Epic Rail

Watch this -- all twenty minutes of it.

Quote of the Day

"That woman is an idiot."

-- Keith Olbermann on Sarah Palin

Dummy Load

The good part of this Keith Olbermann comment begins at around the 7:55 mark:

"Town halls, death panels, oligarhies, a multi-racial president accused of hating half his own ancestry, neuroses about communist artwork, the idea that fascism and socialism are not mutually exclusive, grass roots protests bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations, scared seniors terrified enough to turn to insurance companies for protection against reformers who want to increase their coverage and cut their rates, Birchers, Birthers, Deathers, the voices in Michele Bachmann's head, the Republican rebuttal given to the president of the United States given by a guy who thought he could become 'Lord' Boustany by paying a couple of English con men. And now to top off this pile of stupidity, Congressman Wrong Way Wilson, who when a president publicly and ostentatiously gave credit for part of his health care reform proposal to the very Republican he swamped in the election last year -- Wrong Way Wilson followed that bipartisan gesture by shouting, "You lie!" as soon as he heard the truth. It is this week evident that the greatest threat to this nation is not terrorism, nor the economy, nor H1N1, nor even bad health care. It is rank, willful stupidity."

And it only gets better from there.

The Art of Noise

After taking a day to sleep on Glenn Beck's completely-off-the-rails rant about the communist symbolism hidden in our architecture from a couple of nights ago, I think I've come to a conclusion that I'm willing to stick by: Beck's the greatest performance artist of the 21st century.

Seriously, the man makes Andy Kaufman look like Carrot Top.

There's simply no way that someone who truly believed the paranoid ravings Glenn Beck claims to -- who flaunted his clinical insanity that brazenly -- would be allowed to walk the streets a free man, let alone be given a show on a major cable news network (even Fox). He's faking it. It's an act. It just can't be anything else.

By the way, if this is true -- then Beck's a goddamned genius. I'm talking brilliant beyond words. Anybody who can push the envelope as far as he does and create a ruse this impenetrable deserves some sort of Nobel Prize for Culture Jamming. What Beck's doing could be historic in the annals of subversion. He's punking the planet.

The problem of course is that so many idiots believe every word coming out of his mouth.

Which, if my theory is correct, is the real punchline of the joke.

I hope I am right -- because if not, we really are watching a Howard Beale-style nervous breakdown unfold live on national television.

Either way, Olbermann's take-down of Beck last night was hilarious -- especially the Blazing Saddles clip.



Although, to be honest, Beck's wild-eyed lesson in how to spot the commie infestation all around us brought to mind a couple of scenes from a different movie.

Their Money or Your Life

Bill Kill 2: The Reckoning

Does Olbermann have his own agenda -- one that deserves to be taken into consideration when listening to his opinions on Bill O'Reilly's role in the murder of Dr. George Tiller? Yes, as a matter of fact.

Regardless, are those opinions for the most part right? Absolutely.