Attytood Will Bunch: The true meaning of Keith Olbermann (Went to HS with KO)

[RamboLiberal]

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The irony here -- and it's a big one -- is that one of Olbermann's best contributions to our political dialogue was going after the bogus idea of false equivalency, that people on the left and the right are always equally bad in equal proportions while only centrists are the possessors of beauty and light and truth. Ironic because no one has been a bigger victim of false equivalency than Keith Olbermann himself.

But then, Olbermann's odyssey as a journalist has always been grossly misunderstood, not just by the right-wing haters but even by the media critics who are paid six-figure salaries to know more than they do. The naysayers have tried to portray him as a kind of "Manchurian candidate," a hard-core doctrinaire leftist who must have been some kind of community organizer in a past life if he didn't emerge directly from the Politburo. What balderdash! I can tell you certainly that in high school the only "left" that Olbermann cared about in high school was who was in left field for his beloved Yankees. Which may explain why he so focused on his future career...in SPORTScasting! He was just not a particularly political guy.

Which also explains the true meaning of Keith Olbermann. He became a hero to so many TV viewers (and saved MSNBC, which was really in its proverbial "last throes") in the mid-2000s because his journey was not that of a liberal ideologue but simply an American citizen who was appalled at the lies coming from the Bush White House and increasingly looked for ways to use his platform as a national journalist to relate something he came to see as not just a news story...but a threat to the Republic.

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People who try to define Olbermann's significance as "finally a liberal came along as a counterweight to Fox News Channel" totally don't get it. Olbermann started the 2000s not as a liberal but a guy who still wanted to be a sportscaster. Things changed because he registered his disbelief at things that so many other regular Americans also could not believe were happening -- that America has pre-emptively invaded another country on false pretenses, that a country founded on civil liberties was now promoting torture and indefinite detention, that the government was not capable of responding to the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. There was a time when so many citizens who saw these things and were appalled by them did not have any voice in the mainstream media -- until Olbermann spoke up.

And if you're thinking thet Olbermann's move to the left was a shrewd career calculation...it wasn't. Around the time that MSNBC was hiring Olbermann, it was also firing its top-rated host at the time, Phil Donahue, because at the tme the network thought liberal views like Donahue's were out of step with post-9/11 America. Again, I would ask you to contrast Olbermann with Beck, who went from pony-detailed pro-choice and anri-death-penalty libertarian in the 1990s to political conservatism because he was a failed "Morning Zoo" jock who emulated guys like Rush Limbaugh and Shaun Hannity who'd become multi-millionaires through their right-wing blather . Olbermann, in contrast, was not just copying but going well beyond a guy, Donahue, his bosses had just canned.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/The_true_meaning_of_Keith_Olbermann.html

[spooky3]

1. This is very interesting and insightful. Thanks.

[Cleita]

2. Since I knew Olbermann from his sportscasting days

in Los Angeles, I pretty much see him as the article states. I never watched Countdown at first because I knew he was a sports guy and I wasn't interested in sports. It's only when his name and his show, as a political antidote to the rest of the news media, kept popping up at DU that I tuned in and was pleasantly surprised.

[Poboy]

3. Recommend

[aquart]

4. I always knew that about him.

It was so obvious he would rather have a reasonable world in which he could pay all his attention to baseball and was furious that these idiots were being such greedy stupid jerks that he had to mention it.

[Heidi]

5. Recommended.

:kick:

[ellenfl]

6. kick for later. eom

[eridani]

7. Do sports reporters have better BS detectors?

Their usual line of work involves realizing that the ball went over the fence, or it didn't.

[Major Hogwash]

8. No, they're just louder about it when the ump calls a strike a ball and everyone knows it.

Or when a referee blows a call on the football field.
It's just wrong to be wrong, and sportscasters know that.

Keith was a baseball purist, so he was especially pissed about the steroid scandal in baseball.
Nothing pisses off a purist more than someone cheating.
Play the fucking game the way it is meant to be played, but don't fucking cheat!

Cheating is cheating, whether it is baseball, football, or presidential elections.
I think Keith learned a lot more than what he intended to learn about our political system when he first took the job at MSNBC.
And we learned right along with him.
That's what pisses me off about this non-compete clause, for the next 6 to 9 months, Keith won't be exposing those bastards the way he was doing.

As for MSNBC, why they canned Phil Donahue back in 2003 is beyond me.
But I remember when John Stewart ridiculed Phil for having low ratings -- yet Phil's program was the highest rated program on MSNBC.

Last fall Stewart ridiculed Keith even though Keith had the highest rated program on MSNBC.
Some people just don't like having liberals on tv.

[ellenfl]

9. based on the comments, this must be a right leaning paper.

thank you, anyway, mr. bunch.

ellen fl