Hey, Olbermann: Murrow Was No Wingnut

In the second in a series of excerpts from his new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, John Avlon examines how Keith Olbermann tries to echo the moral authority of Edward R. Murrow, but only delivers self-righteous indignation.

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In the beginning there was Phil Donahue. The soft and snowy-haired advocate of liberal causes, a caring, not confrontational ‘70s-style talk show host—he wanted to feel your pain.

Then there was Keith Olbermann—he wants you to feel his pain.

Liberals’ new assertiveness accompanies the rise of this unlikely on-air advocate, a sportscaster turned straight news anchor turned partisan pit bull.

Smart, funny and acerbic, Olbermann also has a reputation for being prickly and paranoid. But his instinct to pick fights provided important utility: At a time when conservative opinion anchors were ruling the cable news world, Keith Olbermann decided to return fire.

Here’s a measure of his success, When Olbermann started his eight p.m. show, Countdown, on MSNBC in 2003 there were no overtly liberal prime-time anchors in all of cable news. Now his network is seen as the liberal corollary to Fox, featuring a full line-up of liberals in the orbit of his eight p.m. slot.

Aiming to echo the moral authority of Edward R. Murrow down to his lift of “Good Night and Good Luck,” Olbermann trades in self-righteous indignation. His signature schtick is the special commentary, five minutes of Keith staring right into the camera delivering a diatribe that he has written himself. It’s a radio sermon made for TV, delivered in a born broadcaster’s baritone. His targets are anyone-or anything-to his political right.

It’s tempting to describe his commentary style as full-contract, to reach for an available sports metaphor for combat, but it wouldn’t be accurate—because Olbermann doesn’t have guests on his show who disagree with him. It is an amen corner, an echo chamber presented as a truth-telling moment for America. Keith Olbermann isn’t interested in any opinion but his own.

Like his rising alter-ego Glenn Beck, Olbermann had his roots in radio, a precocious if isolated teenager running a half-watt station at his high school in Westchester, New York, and then graduating to the Cornell University radio station. His love of radio is evidenced in his pauses and diction, delivering a point with dramatic effect. He doesn’t talk so much as deliver.

But it wasn’t politics but sports that drove him, and after bouncing around local sportscaster gigs in regional markets, he landed at ESPN in 1992, selected to co-host SportsCenter at eleven p.m. with Dan Patrick. Their repartee redefined the model, with amped-up humor and sly asides (“If you’re scoring at home, or even if you’re alone…”) they mocked the formalities of the format and made the show an event, a return to the frat house for exhausted adults. Most of all, they made the news fun to watch, a lesson that would last.

But Olbermann did not last at ESPN. In 1997, at the height of his public popularity as a sportscaster he left. One colleague recalled, “He didn’t burn bridges, he napalmed them.”

Olbermann’s reputation as a malcontent would dog him as he hosted shows on Fox and MSNBC. Sometimes contracts were not renewed, sometimes he was fired. After an ESPN expose portrayed Keith as a sour, insular man who made co-host Suzy Kolber cry after shows, Olbermann felt compelled to write a public mea culpa in Salon.com. More than a face-saving PR stunt, the 2002 essay was a reflective walk through Olbermann’s psyche, full of competing insecurities and perfectionism: “I have lived much of my life assuming much of the responsibility around me and developing a dread of being blamed for things going wrong,” he wrote. “If anything would have cut through my neuroses, it would’ve been a colleague’s tears. If I had known, I think I could’ve jumped over the fence I’d built around myself and said what the inner guy always knew: No TV show is worth crying over. Suzy: I’m sorry.”

In 2003, Olbermann got a rare second chance to host a prime-time show on a network he’d left on strained terms, MSNBC. Countdown was a late March replacement for Phil Donahue’s brief return to television, a ratings failure that was seen as the end of experimenting with liberal views in prime time. “MSNBC takes sharp right turn,” was one typical reading of the tea leaves. Ironically, the night of Olbermann’s debut, he announced, “Our charge for the immediate future is to stay out of the way of the news. … News is news. We will not be screwing around with it.”

He played it straight down the middle and enjoyed middling ratings. He cultivated a feud with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, naming him one of “the worst persons in the world” more then fifty times in four years. He reenacted news stories with puppets (another thing he shared with Glenn Beck). Humor was his calling card as a news broadcaster. His personal political beliefs were unknown even to people close to him, and Olbermann has said he doesn’t vote.

But that profile changed dramatically in August 2006. Then-general manager Dan Abrams had written a memo encouraging hosts to offer opinion on air. Waiting for a flight at LAX, Olbermann happened upon a speech given by Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in which he compared opponents of the administration’s war and counter-terrorism strategy to Nazi appeasers, saying that America was fighting “a new type of fascism.” Fired up and fueled by a few screwdrivers, Olbermann wrote his first special comment.

“The man who sees absolutes where all other man see nuances and shades of meaning is either a prophet or a quack,” he began. “Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.” Olbermann accused the secretary of impugning “the morality or intelligence-indeed, the loyalty-of the majority of Americans who opposed the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. … This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count–not just his.”

It was a forceful but odd addition to prime time, a counter-speech with an inner history nerd erupting from within: Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Hitler, Nixon, Joe McCarthy, General Curtis LeMay and Ed Murrow all mentioned within five minutes. The audiences loved it. The special commentaries continued and the ratings spiked with the rhetoric.