Olbermann was once MSNBC’s point man for the
spewing of progressive lies and hate speech. Even among that network’s
stable of leftist attack dogs like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, the
silver-haired Olbermann was notable for his angry, hyperbolic partisanship.
Journalist and former Nightline host Ted Koppel called him “the most
opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts,”
who “draws more than one million like-minded viewers to his program every night
precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan.”
That was then. Olbermann
left MSNBC at the end of 2010 for reasons that have never
been made clear. Less than 24 hours later, his friend Al
Gore reached out to him, and the next February Olbermann
brought his – at the time – star power to the Current TV network, run by
founders Joel Hyatt and Gore, former U.S. Vice President and tireless promoter
of his lucrative An Inconvenient Truth
book and documentary. Current envisioned the new Countdown as a valuable primetime “tentpole” program. Olbermann
was appointed chief news officer and given an equity stake in the progressive
channel that was originally launched in 2005.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodwin deemed this a questionable move, calling Current “Al Gore’s Channel That Nobody Watches”: “Olbermann may be going to a cable channel that is in 60 million homes, but roughly 59,975,00 of those homes don’t know they have Current.” And indeed, Olbermann went on to attract an average of only 177,000 viewers – a steep decline from his MSNBC reign.
Current and Olbermann, who hosted the show Countdown on the network, have been exchanging
legal filings since last week after Current fired him for breach of contract. He
sued Current right back for “bad faith termination,”
saying the network, which he compared to “an unprofessional cable-access show,”
was riddled with problems. He lambasted
Hyatt and Gore as “dilettantes portraying entertainment
industry executives” who “have
no idea what they’re doing” and accused the network's management of
“increasingly erratic and unprofessional actions.” He blamed Current's production
quality, or lack thereof, for his show’s “precipitous decline in ratings.” He
also claimed he is owed up to $70 million in compensation and the equity stake
he was promised. Olbermann then went on David Letterman’s Late Show and pronounced himself to be like a $10
million chandelier while Current is like the owner of an
empty lot without any building permits.
Current attorneys shot back with open contempt
for, and frustration with, Olbermann in
their counter-suit, claiming he “willfully” failed to
show up for work and did not help create new programming or promote the network
as he'd agreed to do when taking the job. They assert that Olbermann deserves
nothing:
Current seeks a determination that
it is no longer obligated to pay a dime to Mr. Olbermann who, having already
been paid handsomely for showing up sporadically and utterly failing to keep
his end of the bargain, now seeks to be paid tens of millions more for not
working at all.
Apparently Olbermann took unauthorized vacation
time – working only 19 of 41 business days in January and February – and
refused to work on Current's U.S. presidential caucus and primary election
coverage as he was asked to do. A Current spokesman said
that the facts are on the channel’s side in this dispute and Olbermann is
merely “pounding the table.” He added, bitingly, “We hope Mr. Olbermann
understands that when it comes to the legal process, he is actually required to
show up.”
The loose cannon Olbermann’s diva behavior hasn’t earned him
many, if any, supporters. A former (but anonymous) staffer at MSNBC described
him as “the walking definition of a hostile work environment.” A Baltimore Sun critic labeled
him “an arrested adolescent.” An article at The Wrap entertainment website
entitled “Good
Riddance, Keith Olbermann” denounced him for his “self-aggrandizement” and said that, instead of
delving into gritty, street-level reporting practiced by PBS' Frontline or even Current's own Vanguard, “he kept doing what he did on
MSNBC: delivering petty attacks on people he didn't like, while occasionally
feuding with his bosses at yet another network”:
What does it say about Olbermann's devotion to the liberalism he espouses
that he can't even get along with Gore, a boss who praised him up and down and
promised him the freedom to do whatever he wanted? If you have a string of
failed relationships, you have to consider, at some point, that perhaps you are
the problem – and not all of your exes.
What else does
this say about Olbermann? That, thanks to this latest career self-immolation, the
leftist firebrand seems to have been reduced to a smoldering ember, if not
actually cold ashes. Perhaps the same can be said of Gore, whose global warming
hysteria has been exposed as precisely that, and whose fledgling network
initially tried to run on user-generated content from the youth market, until,
as THR’s Tim Goodwin puts it, Current “realized that the youth market
had better things to do – like illegally download HBO and just released movies.”
So these former progressive icons, like lumbering monsters in an old Japanese
science fiction film, have little left to do but begin battling each other.
