Salon conducted
an interview with Keith Olbermann about various aspects of his show, his popularity with bloggers, and his "feud" with Bill O'Reilly. He strikes me as being a very common sense sort of man, with not only a firm grasp of right and wrong, but also a firm sense of how to keep his show fresh and interesting.
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.
More excerpts below the fold:
He later goes on to say (in regards to controversy fueling ratings) that he has had to ask the corporate guys to calm down, again referencing the gun analogy: "No. I know you like this and I know you think this is going to do real well for you in the ratings, but just don't pull the gun out of the holster every 35 seconds."
If I were Bill O'Reilly (thank the gods I'm not!), I'd be feeling pretty bruised right about now. Olbermann is so casually dismissive of him, it's as if O'Reilly is a nonentity.
I just wait for his overreactions and respond to them now. It's really, it's almost a passive feud from my end. Also, the level of the fight from him has dropped off appreciably. His stuff is getting very old, and we've had to raise the bar a little bit higher because his answers get a little lower. So we devote less and less time to him. I wouldn't say a truce, but I don't think there's very much fight left in him at this point.
Ouch.
Olbermann denies a conscious choice to reach out to liberal bloggers, saying that he has gathered that they have felt "underserved" in the media. Rather than seeing himself as a liberal, he sees himself as an American.
You know, every once in a while you should bring the flag out and say, "What does our country stand for?" The first thing that I think of is the statement that I disagree with your beliefs, but I will fight to the death for your right to express them. When the secretary of defense and the president of the United States make statements that indicate those statements are no longer operative, then you have to say something. It's no longer liberal versus conservative at that point. It's American versus truly un-American. So I'm not courting anybody with these things, I'm saying these things because I think they need to be said. I think they need to be underlined and underscored in the public discourse.
The Clinton/Lweinsky saga is what made Olbermann leave his first news show for ABC (source).
In the Salon interview he says it was "trivial in terms of public dialogue, and a blatant misuse of public airwaves, and there was a sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind throughout 1998 that there were more important things that we should be discussing."
...but the last week or so before the Lewinsky story took over, I can remember interviewing Dr. Richard Haass, who's just late of the Bush administration, and a fellow named Jim Dunnigan, a couple times each at least, about Middle Eastern-based terrorism and goals to bring that to the United States. That's what we should have been talking about in 1998, and instead, a political party decided to take trivia and turn it into the only issue of public discourse.
[There are embedded links in the article for Dr. Richard Haass and Jim Dunnigan]
Imagine if Keith Olbermann had been allowed to delve into Middle Eastern terrorism then. Would public awareness have risen? Would it have made a crack in the nonstop coverage of the Lewinsky scandal and perhaps made it more difficult for BushCo to gut Clinton's terrorist policies?
Unfortunately, we'll never know. But I know I'm not alone in feeling very grateful that we have Keith Olbermann now, and his vision and strength are undimmed.
Note: Salon requires non-members to view a short ad (very short, when I accessed it). Well worth the brief wait.