People here will hate this diary, because Keith Olbermann did most of you a favor by worshiping your favorite candidate during the primaries (Barack Obama) while wishing that Hillary Clinton had been led to a room from where only the other person could come out. But it is my responsibility to report this, for the sake of bringing balance to this well-intentioned but blinded-by-bias forum. Here it goes:
The day he stopped criticizing Bill O'reilly (June 1st), Keith Olbermann of MSNBC explained that he did so because he had suddenly realized that not attacking O'reilly was the best line of attack.
But K.O. made no mention of the fact that the real reason (according to Glen Greenwald) for this censorship was a mid-May meeting between the owner of General Electric and by extension MSNBC (Jeffrey Immell) and Rupert Murdoch of Fox.
OLBERMANN (6/1/09): Fox News Channel will never restrain itself from incitement to murder and terrorism, not until its profits begin to decline, when its growth stops. So not so much a boycott here as a quarantine, because this has got to stop.
That I have a commercial conflict of interest here is obvious. So I’ll make the first symbolic contribution to this quarantine. One of my pleasures, obviously, is constantly criticizing him [O’Reilly] in that Ted Baxter voice. It is the idea of laughter as a social sanction against inflexible behavior.
But this is no time for laughter. This is serious. Serious as death. As serious as George Tiller’s death. So as of this show’s end, I will retire the name, the photograph, and the caricature. The words may still be quoted in the future as developments dictate. The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air.
We’re only in the television news business, a profession that is at times about two inches up from carnival barking. We must again separate it, television, from terrorism. And we must again make the world safe for people condemned by the Fox News Channel.
That‘s Countdown for this, the 2,223rd day since the previous president declared mission accomplished in Iraq. I’m Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck.
In other words, we are told that O'reilly was just getting too mean to criticize, so it all had to stop. Media critic Bob Somerby today reacts to Olbermann's June 1st explanation:
We strongly suggest you read the whole segment, understanding as you do that Olbermann is apparently lying right in your faces the whole Fox News-hatin’ time.
No, that cri de coeur didn’t exactly make sense. BillO had sinned as never before—so KeithO would no longer criticize him! (We know—that isn’t quite what he said. But, according to Greenwald’s review, all criticism of O’Reilly ended that night, not just the silly-bill clowning.) But then, very few things this big hack says ever make a whole lot of sense. If Stelter’s report is accurate, we now know the actual reason KeithO quit BillO that night. And we know he was lying right in your liberal faces as he wept, emoted, moaned and wailed all through that inaccurate segment.
Go ahead, read that whole segment. Don’t say we haven’t been telling you.