Keith Olberman is a Big Douche

is he boots' brother?

 

Hey, Colossus.
Piss off.
(That weenie Cyclops never said that, by Lenin!)
Rok and I can speak for ourselves. Anybody who thinks he's on the Yawn level of sub-primate hasn't been following his stuff.
Thanks for knowing the difference, Rok.

 

Sure thing, FB. I know you better than that.

 

I haven't been around this board too much, and in the brief periods of time when I visited, I always found Rok to have extremely opposite opinions of mine. In this case, though, he is dead on.

Personally, I enjoy watching Olbermann, but he has become a caricature of himself.

 

Tommy, you said it better than I did.

 

Don't kill the messenger. You act a certain way, you treat people a certain way when they don't fellate you and your ideas, it's to be expected that when you want to sell that you're being friendly (or less dismissive?), it's not always seen that way.

Be happy; I gave you something to latch onto to try to argue, since your out-of-nowhere assertion that I said Olbermannn was a hardcore Bush supporter before jumping on the "Let's be loud against the President!!!" bandwagon last summer, was proven false.

Using Olbermann's own words.

 

OK, if we must play big-boy games.
The "wild support" post was in response to Rok, not to you. I didn't assert anything in regards to you and what you said.
Do I wish KO had done what he's been doing sooner? Yes. I feel that way about practically everybody in the media, print and broadcast. They all fell asleep and, worse, they went out of the way to slander and smear the people who were paying attention and calling bullshit. (Something Olbermann never did, by the way, making him virtually alone in the cable-TV universe.) But I don't read anything "in his own words" that says he began doing what he's doing because there suddenly was a profit in bashing Bush. In fact, I'm reading somebody who thought he fell down on the job. And I'm not exactly seeing a lot of people doing what he's doing now, not in that universe anyway. Matthews is all over the lot. Scarborough and Tucker C are conservatives. CNN has bent over so far backwards to be fair that it's flat on its back. Larry King is 105, and the Fox people are beneath contempt. If there's such a profit in fame and fortune in bashing Bush these days, how come more people aren't doing it on TV?

 

I honestly don't know. But there is no question it is a safe bandwagon to be on, as far as public opinion of a commentator. Where Olbermann made the assertion in the story I linked that in 2003 the media was a pro-Bush bandwagon (which he of course was part of), the public opinion has turned completely. Maybe his fans feel he's the only one giving voice to these thoughts, like their anti-Limbaugh.

But he never gave them a voice to follow, to give them new ideas and open eyes. He merely hopped in to join the chorus of popular opinion. You don't expect him to say that, do you? No; he'll couch it in some lines about how in 2003 he was asleep at the switch. "BUT ALL THE OTHER MEDIA WAS TOO!!!!!!" he wastes no time in mentioning, of course. Again, doesn't make him a bad broadcaster, he's just not the innovator and shaper of public opinion some like to paint him as. It was pretty clear at this time last year that the Republicans were in trouble in the mid-term elections, long before he threw in.

MSNBC flounders in the ratings, yet after he started saying things most people already agreed with, the ratings went up. And thus, he accomplished his mission: draw more viewers to a station that is most assuredly not the first people think of when they think of cable news.

 

I would like a single citation of anything KO said that could be constituted as a pro-Bush statement. The way I read the passage you printed is that he kept quiet during those days when he shouldn't have and that, as the law says, "silence gives consent," and that he's kicking himself around the block on the "evil triumphs when good men do nothing" argument. I think that's substantially different from someone who vocally supported the war and the president and is now attacking it and him.
And he can be a "shaper of public opinion" even without being out in front when he should have been. Murrow was dilatory on McCarthy, but he got there and helped change the dynamic.

 

Olberma is also one of the straight up most honest news anchor out there. Some of his rants are amazing and sincere.

-Scott
www.sportblognow.blogspot.com

 

Honest? Olbermann?
Sincere? Sincerely a wack-job, maybe.
He is NOT a news anchor. Like all the other nuts on the air, he is a commentator. It's his opinion.

 

In many ways, it's like S.J. com. A lot of people, including myself, giving their opinions. You either like them or you don't.