Keith Olbermann hopes to talk more freely on new Current TV show

(I haven't had a good read on Olbermann in a while, honestly. At one point he can seem visionary, and the very next, he can be as petty as any one of his frequent verbal targets he accuses of same. But this "reveal"--which also is one of my biggest issues--puts some stock in his credibility that he has been lacking since the 2008 election.Corporate media ownership has neutered factual news reporting--period. The corporate mainstream media is a propaganda machine first, revenue generating machine next, and occasional source for news as a distant third. Olbermann's previous employer, MSNBC is owned by NBC which is owned by General Electric, which owns several defense contractor firms. See how direct that is? If Olbermann is really planning on breaking out of his former corporate restraints and delivering true unbiased journalism, more power to him. Of course...his new boss...is Al Gore...heh...;-)--jef)

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RAW Story

By Eric W. Dolan - Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

  

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said in an interview with Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air that he hopes he will be able to talk more freely on his new show at Current TV.
The liberal host of MSNBC's Countdown gave his last broadcast for the cable news network he called home for eight years in January. The following month, Olbermann accepted a job as Chief News Officer of Current Media, the parent company of Current TV, where he will start his hour long new show, also called Countdown, on June 20.

"This is not specific to NBC or MSNBC, but I just saw an environment growing in which there were more and more conflicts of interest within these large national corporations -- or even multinational corporations -- where no matter what you said, you had the potential to affect some other part of the big company's business."

"The more that that's true, the less they want you to say. And even if there is no explicit attempt to censor or to proscribe or otherwise to interfere, there becomes an issue of the larger the corporation, the more fear in the part of the people involved in its production."

"My hope was to go and get an environment where there wouldn't be any of that and I think I've found it."  ~ Keith Olbermann

Olbermann believes that he should not have been suspended from MSNBC for making political contributions to three Democratic candidates because he was an opinion journalist. He said it was not a conflict of interest for a nearly universally liberal opinion journalist like himself to donate to liberal candidates.

The Current TV cable channel went on the air in August 2005 and is led by former Vice President Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt.

During the interview, Olbermann also explained why he does not vote and how the Bush administration responded to his show at MSNBC.

Listen to the Fresh Air interview, courtesy of NPR, below:

Keith Olbermann out at MSNBC; Out of TV 6-9 months

(Love him or hate, he was a big force in political news. Just as many will mourn as rejoice.--jef)

***

Keith Olbermann out at MSNBC
By Nathan Diebenow
Friday, January 21st, 2011

The liberal host of MSNBC's "Countdown" has completed his last broadcast for the cable news network he called home for the past eight years.

“Good night, and good luck,” Keith Olbermann said as he threw his script behind him for the last time at the end of his show.

The phrase is one he borrowed from the late veteran radio and television journalist Edward R. Murrow.

MSNBC released a short statement, saying that the two parties had not apparently reached agreement on Olbermann's contact.

"MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract," the statement said.

It continued, "The last broadcast of 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors."

No further explanation was given.

Olbermann thanked a number of people in his sign-off, but failed to mention any MSNBC executives.

An MSNBC spokesperson told The Washington Post Friday night that the NBC-Universal/Comcast merger this week played no role in Olbermann's departure. MSNBC's president would not comment.

A second statement from MSNBC concerning line-up changes gave no mention of Olbermann either.

On Monday, Lawrence O’Donnell is on at 8 p.m., Rachel Maddow remains at 9 p.m. followed by Ed Schultz at 10 p.m. Cenk Uygur will host temporarily at 6 p.m.

Following Olbermann Friday night, Maddow did not cover her co-worker's departure.

Oddly enough, halfway through her show, MSNBC featured an ad promoting Olbermann's show, according to The Guardian.

Maddow, appearing as a guest on RealTime with Bill Maher  live after her show, addressed Olbermann's departure. Details, though, were sparse.

"Yeah, it's been a big day at MSNBC. At least it's been in 15 minutes," she said.

Maher did not buy Maddow's explanation that Olbermann and the new company had cuts ties by "mutual decision."

"That's always bullshit," Maher said.

"I know very little," Maddow replied, immediately describing Olbermann's exit as “very gracious and nice.”

In an early report, CNN's Anderson Cooper said on his Twitter feed that Olbermann was fired. Raw Story initially reported that Olbermann had quit. However, MSNBC used neither phrase.

Olbermann and management have had a rocky relationship over the years; recently, the host was suspended for two days last November for contributing to Democratic election campaigns against company policy.

In 2008, Olbermann and MSNBC agreed to a four-year contract extension worth $30 million. This past week, the FCC and the Justice Department approved the merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal.

Sam Stein, Huffington Post's political reporter, said via Twitter that Comcast's merger had less to do with Olbermann's exit than with Jeff Zucker leaving his post as president and CEO of NBC Universal.

"Zucker was Olbermann's protector there," Stein said.

Mediaite also cast the Olbermann/MSNBC split in terms of office politics.

"Countdown," the network's top-rated program, attracted 1.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen. However, Olbermann failed to match the ratings of FoxNews' most popular anchor Bill O'Reilly.

Media mogul Russell Simmons reacted on his blog to Olbermann's November suspension by stating that the network would end up suffering.

"Without Olbermann, MSNBC can’t survive – and the voice of progress will fall to the dark ages, when one unholy church dictated a fictional version of the truth," he said.

Simmons concluded, "Re-instate Keith Olbermann now. I will personally pay his campaign contributions."

Word is that CNN would not hire Olbermann because of the network's strict non-partisan editorial perspective.

Olbermann has yet to reveal his plans.

####

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast Jan. 21, 2011.

***

The Disappearance of Keith Olbermann

by Robert Parry

Keith Olbermann’s abrupt departure from MSNBC should be another wake-up call to American progressives about the fragile foothold that liberal-oriented fare now has for only a few hours on one corporate cable network.

Though Olbermann hosted MSNBC’s top-rated news show, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” he disappeared from the network with only the briefest of good-byes. Certainly, the callous treatment of Olbermann by the MSNBC brass would never be replicated by Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing Fox News toward its media stars.

At Fox News, the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have far greater leeway to pitch right-wing ideas and even to organize pro-Republican political events. Last November, Olbermann was suspended for two days for making donations to three Democratic candidates, including Arizona’s Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was wounded in the Jan. 8 shooting in Tucson.

Now, with Olbermann’s permanent departure on Friday, the remainder of MSNBC’s liberal evening line-up, which also includes Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell (who will fill Olbermann’s 8 p.m. slot), must face the reality that any sustained friction with management could mean the bum’s rush for them, too.

The liberal hosts also must remember that MSNBC experimented with liberal-oriented programming only after all other programming strategies, including trying to out-Fox Fox, had failed – and only after it became clear that President George W. Bush’s popularity was slipping.

In nearly eight years at “Countdown,” Olbermann was the brave soul who charted the course for other mainstream media types to be even mildly critical of Bush. Olbermann modeled his style after legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow, who stood up to excesses by communist-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, even borrowing Murrow’s close: “Good night, good luck.”

But MSNBC’s parent company, General Electric, never seemed comfortable with Olbermann’s role as critic of the Bush administration, nor with the sniping between Olbermann and his Fox News rival, O’Reilly, who retaliated by attacking corporate GE on his widely watched show.

In 2009, the New York Times reported that GE responded to this pressure by having GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt strike a deal with Murdoch that sought to muzzle Olbermann’s criticism of O’Reilly, in exchange for O’Reilly muting his attacks on GE.

Olbermann later disputed that there ever was a truce and the back-and-forth soon resumed. But it was a reminder that GE, a charter member of the military-industrial complex and a major international conglomerate, had bigger corporate interests at play than the ratings for MSNBC’s evening programming.

So, too, will Comcast, the cable giant that is assuming a majority stake in NBC Universal, which controls MSNBC. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that sources at MSNBC quashed speculation that Olbermann’s departure was connected to the Comcast takeover, which was approved by federal regulators this week.

Media Orphans

The troubling message to progressives is that they remain essentially orphans when it comes to having their political interests addressed by any corporate news outlet. While the Right has built its own vast media infrastructure – reaching from newspapers, magazines and books to radio, TV and the Internet – the Left generally has treated media as a low priority.

Though some on the Left saw hope in the MSNBC evening line-up, the larger reality was that even inside the world of NBC News, the other content ranged from the pro-Establishment centrism of anchor Brian Williams to the center-right views of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to CNBC’s mix of free-market extremism and corporate boosterism.

While gratified to be given a few hours each night on MSNBC, the Left surely had nothing to compare with Murdoch’s News Corporation and its longstanding commitment to a right-wing perspective on Fox News and News Corp.'s many other print and electronic outlets.

As I wrote in an article last November, “Olbermann and the other liberal hosts are essentially on borrowed time, much the way Phil Donahue was before getting axed in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, when MSNBC wanted to position itself as a ‘patriotic’ war booster.

“Unlike News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who stands solidly behind the right-wing propaganda on Fox News, the corporate owners of MSNBC have no similar commitment to the work of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.

"For the suits at headquarters, it’s just a balancing act between the ratings that those shows get and the trouble they cause as Republicans reclaim control of Washington.”

Those corporate priorities also were underscored in the pre-Iraq invasion days when MSNBC dumped Donahue, then the network’s biggest draw. But Donahue had allowed on some guests critical of Bush’s planned war.

After the invasion in March 2003, MSNBC’s coverage was barely discernable from that of Fox News, with both networks superimposing American flags on scenes from Iraq and producing pro-war promotional segments showing heroic images of U.S. soldiers being welcomed by happy Iraqis (with no scenes of the war’s carnage).

The ongoing significance of America’s media imbalance is that it gives the Right enormous capabilities to control the national debate, not only during election campaigns but year-round. Republicans can deploy what intelligence operatives call “agit-propaganda,” stirring controversies that rile up the public and redound to the GOP’s advantage.

These techniques have proved so effective that not even gifted political speakers, whether the savvy Bill Clinton or the eloquent Barack Obama, have had any consistent success in countering the angry cacophony that the Right can orchestrate.

One week, the Right's theme is “Obamacare’s death panels”; another week, it’s “the “Ground Zero Mosque.” The Democrats are left scrambling to respond – and their responses, in turn, become fodder for critical commentary, as too wimpy or too defensive or too something.

The mainstream media and progressives often join in this criticism, wondering why Obama let himself get blind-sided or why he wasn’t tougher or why he can’t control the message. For the Right and the Republicans, it’s a win-win-win, as the right-wing base is energized, more public doubts are raised about the President, and the Left is further demoralized.

Like Clinton before him, Obama has reacted to this political/media landscape by shifting rightward toward the “center,” further alienating his liberal base. Many on the Left respond by denouncing Obama as a sell-out and deciding to either sit out elections or vote for a third party.

This dynamic has been instrumental to the Right’s political victories over the past three decades even as those policies – from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush – have worsened the lives of middle- and working-class Americans.

The sudden disappearance of Keith Olbermann from television is another ominous omen that this dynamic will continue.

***

Olbermann Split Came After Years of Tension
By BILL CARTER and BRIAN STELTER - NYTimes
 
MSNBC never had any doubt about what it was getting when it made Keith Olbermann the face of the network in 2003: a highly talented broadcaster, a distinctive and outspoken voice and a mercurial personality with a track record of attacking his superiors and making early exits.


Even his own boss, Phil Griffin, offered this assessment in 2008, when Mr. Olbermann was being heavily criticized by supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton because he was urging her to drop out of the race to become the Democratic presidential candidate.

For Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, Mr. Griffin said in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, “It was, like, you meet a guy and fall in love with him.” But, he said, “then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal.”

Still, the news of his abrupt departure from “Countdown” — delivered by Mr. Olbermann on Friday night — came as a shock to his many fans, some of whom accused Comcast, the incoming owner of MSNBC’s parent, NBC Universal, of forcing out the host for political reasons.


Many people inside the television industry are astonished that a cable network’s highest-rated host, whose forceful personality and liberal advocacy had lifted MSNBC from irrelevance to competitiveness and profitability, would be ushered out the door with no fanfare, no promoted farewell show and only a perfunctory thanks for his efforts.

But underlying the decision, which one executive involved said was not a termination but a “negotiated separation,” were years of behind-the-scenes tension, conflicts and near terminations.

Mr. Griffin, along with Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, had long protected and defended Mr. Olbermann, even when insiders like the NBC anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw publicly took Mr. Olbermann to task. Mr. Brokaw said Mr. Olbermann had “gone too far” in campaign coverage that openly took Democratic positions.

Inside the offices of MSNBC, staff members grew more restive about Mr. Olbermann’s temperament. Some days Mr. Olbermann threatened not to come to work at all and a substitute anchor had to be notified to be on standby.

Mr. Olbermann was within one move of being fired in November after he was suspended for making donations to Democratic Congressional candidates. He threatened to make an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to protest the suspension; Mr. Zucker was prepared to fire him on the spot if he did, according to a senior NBC Universal executive who declined to be identified in discussing confidential deliberations.

The pattern of great promise followed by eventual disaffection was established early in Mr. Olbermann’s career. As a young sports reporter for UPI Television, he was fired for telling his boss “this is the minor leagues here.” In the early 1980s, he had a short, stormy tenure at CNN.


He achieved national prominence on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” in the early 1990s, but left after a difficult time that included a reprimand for making an appearance on “The Daily Show” without permission. He labeled his departure from ESPN in 1997 a “nuclear war.”

Mr. Olbermann popped up on MSNBC for the first time in 1998, hosting a news show that evolved, against his wishes, into a nightly examination of the Clinton sex scandal. He left and joined the Fox Sports Network. That stint ended in acrimony as well. Rupert Murdoch, head of the News Corporation, which ran the sports network, later said, “I fired him; he’s crazy.”

He joined MSNBC in 2003 as a fill-in host. Less than two months later, Mr. Olbermann won the job full time. He transformed the show into “Countdown,” and he — and MSNBC — were off and running.

He managed to expand his audience steadily. Starting from a base of a couple hundred thousand viewers, he jumped more than 50 percent from 2006 to 2007, reaching 726,000. From there he built the show until it surpassed one million viewers a night, still well behind Fox News but ahead of CNN.

In a New Yorker interview, Mr. Griffin of MSNBC recalled those early appearances: “First day he was in TV, I knew right away that Keith had something that I’d never seen. He was made for this. I mean, the guy is crazy, but he is made for this.” (In the same interview, Mr. Olbermann could not help commenting: “Phil thinks he’s my boss.”)

Even some of those at MSNBC who acknowledged being spurned or insulted by Mr. Olbermann said they remained in awe of his productivity and the effect he had on the network. Several considered him in essence a five-day-a-week editorial writer, who had to perform his editorial live on television.

It was an “incredible energy expenditure,” one longtime acquaintance of his said, suggesting that there was no reason to think Mr. Olbermann would stay in his chair indefinitely.

Mr. Olbermann himself alluded to the stresses of the job when he said on Friday night, “There were many occasions, particularly in the last two and a half years, where all that surrounded the show, but never the show itself, was just too much for me.”

In an interview, Mr. Griffin acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann was a “brand definer” for MSNBC — not just because of the success of “Countdown” but because his show was used to develop other hosts for the network as well.

Rachel Maddow started as a frequent “Countdown” guest, as did Lawrence O’Donnell, who began as a fill-in host for Mr. Olbermann and will inherit his 8 p.m. time slot on Monday. Mr. Griffin called Mr. Olbermann “the tent pole at the center” of the network’s sensibility.

At the same time, stories about Mr. Olbermann’s thin skin circulated widely in the newsroom. One such story, which was recalled independently by two hosts, dates to early December, when Mr. O’Donnell, then carving out some success as the 10 p.m. host on MSNBC, collegially proposed via e-mail that Mr. Olbermann come on his show to talk about President Obama’s tax-cut compromise.

Mr. O’Donnell had written this post on Twitter: “Liberal critics of the Obama deal say exactly what Pat Buchanan said of George H. W. Bush: he’s weak.” The message speculated that Mr. Obama’s critics would do to him what Mr. Buchanan “did to H.W. Bush: destroy him and help elect a president from the other party.”

Mr. Olbermann apparently interpreted the message as a personal attack; he declined to appear on Mr. O’Donnell’s show. “I saw what you wrote on Twitter,” he snapped at Mr. O’Donnell.

In the last several months, the relationship began moving toward its denouement: Mr. Olbermann hired new agents from the big firm ICM in September, parting from Jean Sage, the agent who had steered his career through all its previous rocky shoals. Several NBC executives said the move was made to facilitate an eventual settlement of the two years left on Mr. Olbermann’s contract.

Mr. Olbermann’s future is up in the air, mainly because he agreed to a deal that would keep him off television for six to nine months, according to several executives involved in his exit. He is also apparently forbidden to discuss his departure.

One NBC executive involved in the decision to settle Mr. Olbermann’s contract said that he was allowed to work in radio or on the Internet and would presumably be free to return to television in time for the 2012 election cycle.

As for MSNBC, Mr. Griffin expressed confidence in the network’s new lineup: Mr. O’Donnell at 8, Ms. Maddow at 9 and Ed Schultz at 10. It was not clear exactly how long that plan had been in place, however. The anchors did not find out that their shows were shifting until the public announcement on Friday night.

Mr. Griffin said: “I believe the changes that have been made fit who we are. We’re going to be as creative as ever. We’ll be there.”

But they will be there without Mr. Olbermann, the tent pole that the network built itself around.

One NBC News executive said on Sunday: “Give us a bit of credit for getting eight years out of him. That’s the longest he’s been anywhere.”

Ted Koppel: Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news

By Ted Koppel - Sunday, November 14, 2010;

To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.

Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.

And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men's jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.

Perhaps it doesn't matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.

To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the "public interest, convenience and necessity," as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses. The three major broadcast networks pointed to their news divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence that they were fulfilling the FCC's mandate. News was, in a manner of speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.

On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.

Until, that is, CBS News unveiled its 60 Minutes news magazine in 1968. When, after three years or so, "60 Minutes" turned a profit (something no television news program had previously achieved), a light went on, and the news divisions of all three networks came to be seen as profit centers, with all the expectations that entailed.

I recall a Washington meeting many years later at which Michael Eisner, then the chief executive of Disney, ABC's parent company, took questions from a group of ABC News correspondents and compared our status in the corporate structure to that of the Disney artists who create the company's world-famous cartoons. (He clearly and sincerely intended the analogy to flatter us.) Even they, Eisner pointed out, were expected to make budget cuts; we would have to do the same.

I mentioned several names to Eisner and asked if he recognized any. He did not. They were, I said, ABC correspondents and cameramen who had been killed or wounded while on assignment. While appreciating the enormous talent of the corporation's cartoonists, I pointed out that working on a television crew, covering wars, revolutions and natural disasters, was different. The suggestion was not well received.

The parent companies of all three networks would ultimately find a common way of dealing with the risk and expense inherent in operating news bureaus around the world: They would eliminate them. Peter Jennings and I, who joined ABC News within a year of each other in the early 1960s, were profoundly influenced by our years as foreign correspondents. When we became the anchors and managing editors of our respective programs, we tried to make sure foreign news remained a major ingredient. It was a struggle.

Peter called me one afternoon in the mid-'90s to ask whether we at Nightline had been receiving the same inquiries that he and his producers were getting at World News Tonight. We had, indeed, been getting calls from company bean-counters wanting to know how many times our program had used a given overseas bureau in the preceding year. This data in hand, the accountants constructed the simplest of equations: Divide the cost of running a bureau by the number of television segments it produced. The cost, inevitably, was deemed too high to justify leaving the bureau as it was. Trims led to cuts and, in most cases, to elimination.

The networks say they still maintain bureaus around the world, but whereas in the 1960s I was one of 20 to 30 correspondents working out of fully staffed offices in more than a dozen major capitals, for the most part, a "bureau" now is just a local fixer who speaks English and can facilitate the work of a visiting producer or a correspondent in from London.

Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening, separate but together, while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of compromise among those who disagreed.

It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn't know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.

The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.

Broadcast news has been outflanked and will soon be overtaken by scores of other media options. The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been. But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.

As you may know, Olbermann returned to his MSNBC program after just two days of enforced absence. (Given cable television's short attention span, two days may well have seemed like an "indefinite suspension.") He was gracious about the whole thing, acknowledging at least the historical merit of the rule he had broken: "It's not a stupid rule," he said. "It needs to be adapted to the realities of 21st-century journalism."

There is, after all, not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules. Technology and the market are offering a tantalizing array of channels, each designed to fill a particular niche - sports, weather, cooking, religion - and an infinite variety of news, prepared and seasoned to reflect our taste, just the way we like it. As someone used to say in a bygone era, "That's the way it is."

Keith Olbermann SUSPENDED From MSNBC Indefinitely Without Pay

11- 5-10 HuffPo

MSNBC has suspended star anchor Keith Olbermann following the news that he had donated to three Democratic candidates this election cycle.

"I became aware of Keith's political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay," MSNBC president Phil Griffin said in a statement.

Politico reported Friday that Olbermann had donated $2,400 each to Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, and to Kentucky Senate contender Jack Conway. While NBC News policy does not prohibit employees from donating to political candidates, it requires them to obtain prior approval from NBC News executives before doing so.

In a statement earlier Friday, Olbermann defended his donation, saying, "I did not privately or publicly encourage anyone else to donate to these campaigns nor to any others in this election or any previous ones, nor have I previously donated to any political campaign at any level."

Griffin's statement underscores that it was Olbermann's failure to obtain approval, and not the actual political donations, that prompted the suspension.

The move is doubly significant in that it represents a major development in the relationship between Griffin and Olbermann, who once told the New Yorker, "Phil thinks he's my boss."

"Keith doesn't run the show," Griffin told New York Magazine recently. "I do a lot of things he doesn't like. I do a lot of things he does."

In recent months, Griffin has taken several bold steps to declare his authority over the network and its sometimes unruly talent: he sent a stern memo warning hosts to not publicly fight with each other, he suspended David Shuster indefinitely for filming a CNN pilot, suspended Donny Deutsch, banned Markos Moulitsas from the network, and reprimanded Ed Schultz for threatening to "torch" the network.

The New York Times' Brian Stelter and Bill Carter report that, according to one NBC executive, Friday's suspension is "not a step toward firing" Olbermann, though a source also told the New York Observer that there was "no time frame" for Olbermann's potential return.

Rep. Ed Markey Demands BP Release Data on Well Integrity and Sea Floor Leaks

By Heather Thursday Jul 15, 2010

Keith Olbermann talked to Rep. Ed Markey about his attempts to get BP to release their data on the Deepwater Horizon well spill.

Markey To BP: Stop Stonewalling On Well Data:

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) demanded Wednesday that BP release information on the integrity of the wellbore and sea floor leaks, after efforts to carry out pressure tests on the new containment cap system for BP's Macondo well were delayed due to a lack of seismic data.

"Everyone is hoping for a successful outcome for this capping system, and for the relief wells," said Rep. Markey in a statement Wednesday. "But given BP's bad track record on all of its efforts thus far, all information about the risks of these tactics must be provided to Congress and to the public."

Markey first requested the information in a letter sent to BP on June 23. He still has received no response as to how BP plans to close off the well using the new cap system.

Expert suspects BP has ulterior motive behind oil well cap

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Since a blowout preventer cap was placed over BP's damaged oil well in the Gulf of Mexico last weekend, there have been repeated delays in the so-called "well integrity tests" to determine whether the cap can be effective in holding back the oil.

On Tuesday, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen delayed the tests for 24 hours out of fears that they would lead to "irreversible leakage" if it was found that the well bore had been damaged below the sea floor. After a White House review, BP was told on Wednesday that it could proceed with the test, but a leak in a line leading from the cap then forced an additional one-day delay for repairs.

Oil industry expert Bob Cavnar isn't buying the official story. He told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the repeated missteps cast doubt on BP's explanation for why the cap was necessary in the first place.

"I don't understand this whole operation," Cavnar stated. "Sunday was the first time I heard the words 'well integrity test.' There's never been any discussion about this in their public disclosure or in anything else that I've seen. ... So I'm completely confused as to why they're taking this risk of damaging the well further. ... They didn't have all these steps worked out."

"They shouldn't be doing this at all," he suggested. "They should be continuing with the relief well to get this thing killed."

Cavnar believes that BP's true goal is to make it harder to measure the flow of oil from the damaged well, because under the Clean Water Act, it will be liable for civil penalties of up to $4300 for every barrel spilled.

"While they have every incentive to get the well killed, BP also has every incentive to not capture 100% of the well flow until they do," Cavnar wrote last week at Huffington Post. "As soon as they do capture all the flow, then a real, measurable number will be in front of the public, and that's the last thing BP wants, since that number will then be used to extrapolate environmental damage, hence per barrel fines that will likely run to the tens of billions anyway."

"The whole [original] reason for this cap was to allow two more outlets to produce to four ships so they could capture between sixty and eighty thousand barrels a day," Cavnar told Olbermann "This whole business of shutting in -- and shutting down the relief well -- just doesn't make any sense to me at this point. ... My guess is that they're hoping to be able to shut down at least some of the production from the well so once they open it back up to the surface ... it will be producing at a rate less than what it was 'open flow.' So it'll be harder to measure what the total flow was from the well when it was completely uncontrolled."

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast July 14, 2010.

Keith Olbermann Checks Out Of Daily Kos After Criticism From Left

(Some of the 'lefties' in the Obama camp are as bad or worse than the 'fundies' who were in Bush's camp--these people who cannot allow, much less even contemplate, or basically understand any criticism of their Icon, their leader who can do no wrong while he does "everything he can." 

I watched Obama's speech and had the same reaction that Olbermann and Maddow (and nearly every other observer) had: Obama's speech sucked. But the Daily Kos bloggers flipped the fuck out on Olbermann--and anyone else who lamented Obama's soulless speech declaring "war" on the oil spill and a golly gosh gung ho! 

Sometimes, Olbermann is too much of a cheerleader for the Democrats than I care for. So when he does see through the bullshit and calls it, why do his cohorts flip out? Are they really that thrilled with the job Obama has done regarding the oil spill? or has done on thejob as president overall? in which he has extended Bush's wars, extended Bush's patriot act, continued Bush's policy of extradition and indefinite detention, and continued Bush's philosophy of giving the corporations what they want so they don't throw their campaign funds behind his rival in the next election. That's all politics is--getting re-elected. It has nothing to do with serving the people or making any sort of difference. 

It's very disappointing to many who voted for Obama that he isn't the transcendent dynamic leader they hoped they were voting for, and rather that the change he promised is proving to be nothing more than the typical product of the Chicago political machine, giving lip service to issues that affect the people, though always knowing what side his bread is buttered on. --jef)

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Olbermann Bails on Daily Kos because of his Criticism of Obama's Speech
by Steve Krakauer | 9:06 am, June 17th, 2010

After taking heat from some of his liberal fans on Twitter over his strong criticism of Pres. Barack Obama’s Oval Office speech Tuesday, Keith Olbermann stopped into another of his new media stomping grounds to find more of the same.

Now he’s leaving The Daily Kos after reading a “diary trashing first me and my colleague Rachel.”

Olbermann wrote a blog post, presumably his last for awhile, headlined “Check, Please”, as a response to the diary he found and one particular comment that insinuated his criticism came because attacking the President was good for ratings (a pretty strange notion when discussing MSNBC). “It can’t be verified because it’s nonsense, and it wasn’t checked because nobody bothered,” wrote Olbermann. “Unfortunately there’s been a lot of this here lately.”

According to Olbermann, this is symptomatic of a larger issue at the liberal site that he has been a part of for years now, and he’s ready to go his separate way:

You don’t agree with me, fine. You don’t want to watch because you don’t agree with me, fine. But to accuse me, after five years of risking what I have to present the truth as I see it, of staging something for effect, is deeply offensive to me and is an indication of what has happened here.

You want Cheerleaders? Hire the Buffalo Jills. You want diaries with conspiracy theories, go nuts. If you want this site the way it was even a year ago, let me know and I’ll be back.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald tweets, “Not saying this isn’t thin-skinned – it is – but what he’s reacting to is very common.”

It’s interesting to see Olbermann react strongly to the commenters who, almost universally, have been supporter of his show and his network. As he sticks with his ‘non-Obama-cheerleader’ position, it’s now clear there are some in this country far farther left than he is. It is a testament to the polarized American public that Olbermann would be on the outs with the Daily Kos and his liberal Twitter followers.