Two Shows Later, Olbermann Back On The Air
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Keith Olbermann might have been suspended from MSNBC after breaking company rules regarding making contributions to political candidates, but now sources tell me it’s Keith whose demands have been met, allowing him to return to his perch atop the cable network.
“Keith is furious about the way this has all been handled and insisted that MSNBC bosses apologize to him before he would agree to return,” a network insider tells me. “Keith sees himself as the star of MSNBC, the person who put them on the map and discovered fellow network anchors Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell. To be treated like this by the network he helped shape, he considers disgusting.”
MSNBC employees follow ethics guidelines barring them from making political contributions. After Olbermann’s “indefinite suspension without pay,” it appears those rules may see some revision.
“In addition to an apology, Keith is demanding that the rules be changed,” an executive tells me. “Keith thinks it’s unfair that FOX News anchors can make contributions and support candidates and he can’t. It’s his money that he has earned, he should be allowed to do whatever he wants with it. What sort of country do we live in where an actor can trash a hotel room with an escort and drugs and Keith can’t donate money to people running for office he believes in? It makes no sense. If they think they can slap Keith’s wrist and have him to return a few days later like nothing happened, they are wrong. They picked the wrong guy.”
Keith Olbermann’s “indefinite” suspension from MSNBC turns out to be definitely short: two days.
The liberal host will be back on the air Tuesday, the cable news network said Sunday night. Which means that Olbermann’s punishment for violating NBC’s policy against making contributions to political candidates amounted to being taken off the air for only two shows, on Friday and on Monday.
Olbermann, the host of the prime-time program “Countdown,” was suspended by MSNBC on Friday after news broke that he’d contributed a total of $7,200 to three Democratic candidates in October.
MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in a statement that “after several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night’s program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy.”
MSNBC had been deluged with protests over the suspension of Olbermann, who vies with Rachel Maddow as the network’s star attraction, with more than 1 million viewers a night.
Like many news organizations, including The Washington Post, NBC News prohibits its employees from making political contributions, a ban designed to prevent the appearance of partisanship by a news organization.
Olbermann’s “indefinite” suspension without pay touched off a debate about the limits of political involvement by journalists, particularly in an era when many news organizations are erasing the lines between news reporting and advocacy. Partisanship is on particular display each night on the cable news networks, which typically cover the day’s political developments from a single point of view (Olbermann’s or Bill O’Reilly’s programs, for example) or as a debate between talking heads from rival parties.
The issue becomes further blurred when opinionated hosts shuttle back and forth as anchors for major news events. Olbermann and Chris Matthews, who hosts “Hardball” on MSNBC, have both anchored the network’s election coverage. Anchors have traditionally tried to stay impartial.
Some — including Maddow, who follows Olbermann’s program each night — used the episode to attack rival Fox News, which places no restrictions on its commentators’ contributions.
“Let this incident lay to rest forever the facile, never-true-anyway, bull-pucky, lazy conflation of Fox News and what the rest of us do for a living,” she said on her program Friday. “Hosts on Fox News raise money for Republican candidates. They endorse them explicitly, they use their Fox News profile to headline fundraisers. . . . We are a news operation, and the rules around here are part of how you know that.”
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The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters found that more than 30 Fox News hosts and contributors had donated to conservative candidates.
But others saw much ado about nothing, in view of the fact that Olbermann is an avowed liberal who is not bound by the same standards of neutrality as traditional news reporters.
“Watch ‘Countdown’ for five minutes and it’s clear that Olbermann is a fierce partisan who uses his program to bolster liberal causes,” wrote Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, in a Web column. “It’s an approach that has worked big time, hugely increasing MSNBC’s audience during Olbermann’s time slot.” But he added, “Let’s face it: neither Fox nor MSNBC is really a news organization, at least not in the traditional sense. Their primary mission is to espouse political causes. . . . Political activity is what Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and [MSNBC host] Ed Schultz do for a living.”
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