Very good article with lots of Olbermann history:
http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/Currentissue/features/Feature.asp
As befits a man who has been doing radio since high school, there is little dead air during a conversation with Keith Olbermann. He's an unlined forty-eight years old, six-three and possessed of camera-ready gravitas: his jet-black helmet of anchorman hair has assumed a dignified pewter cast, the 1980s moustache of the KTLA years is long gone, and he chats in the dulcet baritone of a born broadcaster. On "Countdown," when he needles O'Reilly by quoting the Fox host's own words, he takes his voice down a notch and assumes the stentorian tones of Ted Baxter, fatuous anchor of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show." But the joke is that this sounds little like O'Reilly, who has a plainspoken, I'm-Just-Saying cadence to even his most immoderate pronouncements. It just sounds like Olbermann, only more so.
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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