Home » » Keith Olbermann gone in a flash/quits in a huff. The Cable Gamer hates to say "I told you so," but... I told you so!

Keith Olbermann gone in a flash/quits in a huff. The Cable Gamer hates to say "I told you so," but... I told you so!

Written By mista sense on Friday, January 21, 2011 | 6:49 PM


The Cable Gamer has been predicting for years that it was only a matter of time before Keith Olbermann blew up.  Blew himself up, that was one possibility, was blown up by others, that's another possibility.   But either way, gone baby gone.      And so it has happened--as the LA Times and everyone else are reporting.  

What's notable is the almost complete absence of any warm words on either side.  As the LAT put it in its flash report.

"MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors," NBC Universal said in a statement.

No nice words about "we wish Keith luck," or "Keith wants to spend more time with his family."  Just a terse goodbye.

But The Cable Gamer can't help but think that two big events in the news: The FCC's approval of Comcast's takeover of NBCU, and Jeff Immelt's ascension as the Obama administration's favorite corporate stooge, have something to do with this.    That is, either Comcast wanted Olby gone, or else Immelt figured that he was so golden with the Obamans that he could do something that he always wanted to do--fire Olby as a way of clearing the decks for the new bosses--who, of course, might have put Immelt up to it, as part of the deal, so that the old regime would take the hit, not the new regime.

Or maybe it was MSNBC chief Phil Griffin, who finally saw an opening, amidst all this change at the top, to get rid of the man who had emasculated him so many times. 

Obviously there is much more to this story, and it will be told.  Most likely, there will be an NBC/MSNBC version, an Olbermann version--and the real truth, which will await the diggers at TheWrap, or Vanity Fair, or Big Journalism.

Undoubtedly Olbermann will resurface somewhere.  Daily Kos?  Not big enough?    Perhaps at the Huffington Post--which is increasingly Cable Game-y in its multimedia aspirations.  Stay tuned, or, perhaps we should say, keep clicking.

UPDATE: The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz reports that  Olbermann "resigned," while Kurtz's successor at the Washington Post, Paul Farhi says flatly that Olbermann was fired, while his predecessor

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