....Olbermann chuckles at the memory. "It wasn't a rhetorical question," he says. "The guy was really trying to find out if I was thought of as a jackass, or if there was some other explanation."
This is an issue of ongoing resonance with current Olbermann watchers, some of whom wrestle with the same question as they tune in to his nightly MSNBC newsmagazine, "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." In the past two years, the former ESPN anchor has assumed a polarizing role as an outspoken liberal voice amid the right-leaning talkers on cable news. The position comes with all the glory and infamy of digital-age punditry: video clips of his speeches assailing the Bush Administration ranked among the most popular blog links of 2006 and have raised Olbermann's profile in antiwar circles. Some network execs and industry critics tracking the show's rising ratings and pop-culture cachet have suggested that "Countdown," with its brisk mix of serious policy discussion, tabloid whimsy, and unabashed commentary, is nothing less than the network news of the future. "The most compelling news personality of his generation," the Hollywood Reporter recently proclaimed. "Love him or hate him, he is a charismatic, righteously indignant force of nature who is inspiring fervent cheers and detesting jeers in equal measure."...
***
The voice is deployed to its most striking effect when he delivers a "Special Comment," an op-ed monologue that closes the show occasionally ("whenever my blood rises to a sufficient height," Olbermann says). The first, inspired by the woeful official response to Hurricane Katrina, ran in September 2005, and its memorable charge that the government "has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water" was so well received that MSNBC execs asked for more. Olbermann demurred. "It has to be organic," he says. "I viewed it as an isolated incident."
The Special Comment would not re-emerge until August 2006, with an epic denunciation of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had just compared critics of the war in Iraq to appeasement-minded politicians of pre-World War II Europe. "Thus did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy," Olbermann began, "excepting the fact that he has the battery plugged in backwards. His government, absolute and exclusive in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis. It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain."He closed with a McCarthy-era quotation from his broadcasting idol, Edward R. Murrow. Less than two weeks later he excoriated the Bush Administration on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Clips of those two speeches, posted to YouTube and several political websites, have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, making "Countdown" a multiplatform phenomenon.
Despite the newfangled distribution technology, there's something distinctly retro about the performance: a man in a suit, eyes locked on the audience, aiming ten minutes of well-modulated spleen at an unmoving camera. The essays bristle with literary references, ornate locution, and a barely contained sense of cosmic indignation. Associations with CBS newsman Murrow are both inevitable and intentional--more so since Olbermann began borrowing Murrow's sign-off, "Good night, and good luck." But a more frequent point of comparison is a fictional one: Howard Beale, the old-school anchorman prone to on-air meltdowns in the 1976 film Network. "You could do worse, "Olbermann says of his two journalistic models; a fan of the movie, he posed as a pajama-clad Beale for GQ's 2006 Men of the Year issue. "I can tell you that when I did that
, I felt like I was going to get up out of the chair and grab the camera and go, ‘Are you listening to me?' "At this, the voice assumes full Special Comment intensity, a swelling tide of outrage. "Did you hear how little he understands of the history he pretends to be a master of? That he thinks he would have been Churchill when in fact he's clearly Chamberlain? And, oh, by the way, it was his party in this country that appeased Hitler! It was his party that didn't want to get involved in the Second World War!" He cuts himself short and returns to his smoothie. "Anyway, I'm doing it again."...
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