Keith Olbermann: Crazy Like a Fox?

[babylonsister]

Keith Olbermann: Crazy Like a Fox?
Media
by Sherwood Ross | July 28, 2008 - 10:49am


Chairman Rupert Murdoch of Fox News once said of his former sportscaster Keith Olbermann, "I fired him. He's crazy." And when MSNBC's Senior Vice President Phil Griffin hired Olbermann for his new "Countdown" show in 2003 he agreed "The guy is crazy" but "he is made for this."

According to a revealing profile about Olbermann by Peter Boyer in the June 23 The New Yorker titled "One Angry Man": "Fox News still dominates the cable competition, and MSNBC over all continues to lag behind second-place CNN. O'Reilly's audience is more than twice as big as Olbermann's, which airs in the same prime-time period. But Olbermann's ratings grew by nearly 75% the year he began doing Special Comments, and the show is making money, a rare hit in MSNBC's twelve-year run."

Lately, though, Olbermann is scoring new gains on leader O'Reilly.The Huffington Post reported last June 10th, that "Countdown" beat out "The O'Reilly Factor" in the key Adults 25-54 demographic "for the first time ever last week." "Countdown" averaged 477,000 viewers in that group compared to 472,000 for O'Reilly, marking "the first time that MSNBC has beaten Fox News in O'Reilly's 8pm time slot since June 2001."

Boyer quotes Griffin as saying, "All of a sudden, he (Olbermann) took off. In ways that MSNBC never had a show take off." Likely this is because there is a growing army of Americans thrilled by Olbermann's tongue-lashings of the Bush regime.

"Keith went into sports and changed sports and now he's doing that in news," Griffin told The New Yorker."What cable emphasizes, more and more, is opinion, or even advocacy," Boyer quotes the late Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet The Press," as saying. "Whether it's Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann or Lou Dobbs, that's what that particular platform or venue does."

Cable news seems to be evolving a new genre of opinion columnists--sort of like the glamorous dueling aviators of World War I dogfighting over the trenches while their partisans in the trenches below cheered them on. Industry folks say these new media stars benefit from "cocooning," when people tune in to a personality that tells them what they crave to hear. So it shouldn't be surprising that as President Bush's popularity plunges, more and more people will tune in to "Countdown" to hear Olbermann blast Bush, Senator John McCain, and Republicans in general.

more...

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/16128

[Buzz Clik]

1. Jon Stewart set the trend with his comedy. Olbermann followed suit with a more serious approach.

Prior to Jon Stewart, we were being fed total bullshit by everyone.

Hats off to MSNBC for giving it a chance to work.