"Is Keith Olbermann changing TV News?"

There is an excellent article in the latest New Yorker by Peter Boyer about Keith. Peter Boyer calls Keith "one angry man."  Is he?  Is Keith really changing TV news?  We shall see below........

What was TV news before Keith?  I'll tell you in one word: boring.  Boring as hell.  The same faces day in and day out, reporting the news of the day with the stony faces that they all have.  After the "Republican Revolution" in the 90's, TV started going towards the conservative end of the spectrum. And most of us "libruls" have been bored with TV news for a long time now.

When Countdown started in 2003, Keith was like a breath of fresh air.  Here was someone different, someone a little bit like us.  Phil Griffin, the senior vice president in charge of MSNBC says this about Keith's success:

Olbermann’s success, like O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. "People want to identify," Griffin says. "They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify, or you see where you fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long."

I could go on and on about this great article, but I won't. Go read it for yourself and then come back to discuss whether Keith really is changing TV news.