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CHICAGO, March 31, 2012— Yesterday, cable channel "Current TV" fired noted baseball collector, toxic-talker, and the "Worst Person in the World," Keith Olbermann.
Not only was he fired. He was given the respect, or lack thereof, he finally deserved. "Current TV" dishonored him by not allowing him to air a sign-off show. The channel simply said hit the road, adios, hasta la bye-bye, get lost, and don’t let the door hit you in the… on the way out.
It only took "Current TV" less than a year to realize what it took eight years for MSNBC to learn. Media is a business, especially corporate media. And Keith Olbermann is bad for business.
Paying this posturing prima donna $10 million a year was a serious lapse of business judgment. He could not generate that much revenue for the network to break even.
Al Gore and "Current TV’s" executives may have been ingesting greenhouse gas when they hired Olbermann, paying him a king’s ransom, a contract reportedly worth upwards of $50 million. It is not a matter of what they were thinking. You wonder whether they were even thinking at all.
Perhaps they're ingesting something more powerful now. They hired the boring and infamous Client Number Nine, disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, to replace Olbermann.
They replaced a miserable misanthrope with a patron of prostitutes.
Actually, Eliot Spitzer is the political equivalent of Keith Olbermann. He spent his career chasing, persecuting, and destroying the reputations and careers of everyone who represented all the things he hated, which proved to be quite a few. All the while, he indulged himself by–David Letterman said it best–“banging whores.”
Perhaps Al Gore saw a kindred spirit in Eliot Spitzer, given the former veep's, ahem, similar problems as reported not so long ago.
"Current TV" originally hired Olbermann as their Chief of News. The acronym C.O.N. was apt. Olbermann is an expert on baseball cards and sports memorabilia, not news, journalism, or politics.
He has been conning media executives and the public for years.
Olbermann was never knowledgeable, cute, funny, entertaining, witty, or even intelligent. He was both clever and savage, a bad genetic hybrid between a sly fox and a snarling junk-yard dog. Hatred, it seems, consumes Olbermann.
It is all he has to deliver. And he delivered it in spades.
His savagery tapped into the abiding hatred that is the current hallmark of what's known as the "progressive" movement, whose members hypocritically proclaim that “hate is not a family value.” Unless they are doing the hating.
Olbermann fit right in with their hypocrisy. Haters needed someone to affirm and play to their tender sensitivities. Olbermann affirmed their self-esteem.
Olbermann brought viewers and decent ratings to MSNBC. But Olbermann always forgot one thing. He is the talent. He is an employee. He works for other people.
Olbermann thinks it is the other way around.
He has a nasty habit, matching his personality, of battling his employers at every turn. It is not sound to go to war with the people who pay your salary.
Olbermann also imagined he was the only star at his various places of employment. Everyone else was a just bit player in his orbit. As a result, his ego rose as rapidly as his ratings and numbers of viewers did. It took MSNBC too long to realize he and his super-sized ego were damaging their brand and the brand of their parent, NBC.
It took them way too long to realize they did not need Olbermann.
Olbermann is the Michael Savage of the left, a raging lunatic and master of asinine agitprop.
The real problem with liberal and progressive media is their absolute refusal to do those things that make conservative media so successful. Which is why they consistently fail or flounder.
If you want to be as successful as Rush Limbaugh you have to model Rush Limbaugh.
If you want to be a network success, like Fox News, you have to model Fox News. You need a combination of knowledge of what it is that the public really wants, needs, and desires and talent that can produce and give it to them. It helps to find a niche too, preferably one that's not already saturated with coverage.
Conservative media was successful because in the beginning, there was none, and it still remains in the minority in the media firmament. People are always looking for something different, especially if they possess more than a few functioning brain cells.
Most "progressive" programming is either boring, vulgar, silly, or inspired by pure hatred. Some of it is simpering superciliousness, like the work of Chris Matthews. Such programming is not informative or entertaining.
Constantly repeating its mantra that the right lies, or worse, the right is expletives deleted, the dubious work of what some have called the "mainstream media" (MSM) is hardly a blueprint for lasting success.
In terms of popularity, it also helps if the on-air talent has an appealing personality. "Progressives" are like dour, angry, protesting, temper tantrum-throwing two year olds. The cuteness wears thin whether such spoiled brats are toddlers or middle aged adults.
Look at poor Al Franken. A man of enormous talent, he found out the hard way that "progressive" media is not profitable media. After he failed in radio he needed to eke out a living. Not being overly proud, he lowered himself further, taking a menial job as a lowly politician. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.
Keith Olbermann is now unemployed and probably unemployable in news or opinion media.
But perhaps there's hope. Maybe he could pitch a new show for the "Home Shopping Network," selling baseball cards and sports memorabilia. Something he really knows about.
