Will the third time be yet another charm? Still, Olbermann will have his work cut out for him at Current. Long-term, though, Olbermann has big plans for the place. His mandate is nothing less than to build an entire network around his show, one populated with righteous liberal voices like his own and perhaps, once contracts expire, former colleagues like Rachel Maddow—a network, in fact, that sounds remarkably like MSNBC.
I selected the interns. Everybody on this staff is equally invested in the risks involved. Will that continue once the show starts? I just think people can trust what we do to be entirely based on the news merits. It will be that simple kind of old-fashioned television news operation of the Sixties and Seventies that had the proverbial Chinese wall around them to keep them away from concerns about advertisers. What were they going to do about it? It was live. I will say this. The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction.
It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive id and they do whatever they want. It was three years ago, when Tim Russert died. One of the reasons I got as far as I got was that Tim was there to run interference for me. He never made a big deal out of the fact that he probably was my biggest supporter within the network. Or is the notion of the impartial journalist essentially bullshit?
Let me read this to you. You can see how old it is—it already came apart. March 5th, , Wednesday morning, a. So there you have it. Why do you carry that around? Originally I carried it around because it was confirmation from somebody I had great respect for.
From one of the best in the business, it meant a great deal to me. Why did you give money to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and two other Democrats when you knew there was a rule against it? I discovered from a friend of mine who knows Arizona politics really well that all three had spent a lot of money, and I mean a lot of money, protecting themselves from assassination threats.
To me, as a small-d democrat, as a member of a democracy, it pissed me off. It seemed like the network felt they needed to tone things down. Questions have cropped up about whether Olbermann and MSNBC would part ways ever since the network suspended its top-rated host for making campaign donations to Democratic candidates.
The agreement between Olbermann and NBC prohibits Olbermann from hosting a television show or commenting publicly on his departure for an undisclosed period of time. Was he fired? Did he quit? Whether that's because of money, control or something else is a matter of dispute. The Hollywood Reporter said last week that ESPN wanted Olbermann to stop delivering "commentary" on his show as a condition of the contract renewal. The network denied that, saying in a statement that "Keith Olbermann has never been told any topic is off limits for his commentary nor has continuation of it been part of any conversation about his future at the company.
Apart from that incident, however, he avoided public disputes or sanctions by his employers. If that had anything to do with his departure, Olbermann hasn't said so; he has yet to comment about why he's leaving. The last broadcast of Countdown with Keith Olbermann will be this evening.
But a spokesman did say that the acquistion of NBC Universal by cable and telecoms giant Comcast , which received regulatory approval this week, had nothing to do with the decision. As speculation swirled about the timing, Comcast later put out a statement denying any connection:. We pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBCU's news operations. We have not and we will not.
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