So says Peter J. Boyer, who has written a long profile of the left-wing bloviator for the New Yorker:
The O’Reilly feud was the gateway to Olbermann’s emergence as a political polemicist. It was a short leap from denigrating Bill-O to Olbermann’s first “Special Comment,” aimed at then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in August, 2006. […]
His bosses loved it. “I think we’re onto something,” the president of NBC News, Steve Capus, told me. “That’s what we keep hearing from the audience, more and more, is that they appreciate that we have people who are actually speaking truth to power, or being transparent in their own personal viewpoints.” That’s another way of saying that liberals, after many failed attempts, seem finally to have found their own Bill O’Reilly.
This must be a bittersweet victory for Olbermann. In a piece I wrote about him for NRODT a while ago, I noted that back when Olbermann made his debut as the host of Countdown, he made it clear how much he didn’t want to be like Bill O’Reilly:
Shortly before Countdown with Keith Olbermann debuted in the spring of 2003, its host told the Washington Post, “Our charge for the immediate future is to stay out of the way of the news. . . . News is the news. We will not be screwing around with it.” When asked how he felt about competing nightly with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, he answered, “I’m not looking to take down Bill. It will be a totally different program. It will not be a show in which opinion and facts are juxtaposed so as to appear to be the same thing.”
The 2004 presidential election marked the turning point between Olbermann’s early ambitions to do a hard-news show and his more recent efforts to resemble, as much as possible, a Daily Kos diarist with a TV show. From my piece:
In the weeks following the 2004 election, Olbermann seized on scattered stories of voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida to suggest that Republicans had somehow rigged the election. He told a reporter for his alma mater’s newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, “I don’t think there is any question that Ohio messed up the election [in some way]. The question is: Was it deliberate or accidental?”
I find it amusing that magazines like the New Yorker are just now figuring out that Olbermann is a lunatic. Alternatively, maybe they just found it harder to ignore once Olby started attacking Hillary Clinton with the same frothing intensity he usually reserved for Republicans. Here’s Phil Griffin, the senior vice-president in charge of MSNBC, telling Boyer what that was like from his perspective:
But, just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. “It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,” Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. “And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”
The New Yorker piece leaves you with the distinct impression that Griffin isn’t just talking about Hillary supporters here. Olbermann’s show is the only program on MSNBC that doesn’t routinely get slaughtered by Fox News and CNN. Where else is Griffin going to go?