MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has finally found his purpose in life, and it is to hate Fox News and Bill O'Reilly. In his destined-for-infamy (as in, perhaps the last interview before he flees television and moves to St. Barts to bartend on the beach) conversation with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN, Olbermann shows that for a former sportscaster, he can't even talk a good game. The interview is rife with laugh-out-loud lowlights (transcript from Aaron Barnhart's TV Barn) and here's a biggie:
OLBERMANN: How are you going to build an audience of any kind when it takes about three years per show before people will say, all right, we don't hate you so much, maybe we will watch? That's the history of MSNBC in a nutshell. We finally figured it out about three years ago. Just let it alone for a while and then people will tune in.
There you go. When your cable news network is slowly rotting in a state of not-so-benign neglect, do nothing, and wait for viewers to lower their standards.
But wait, there's more craziness from the man who thinks he's smarter than Roger Ailes, the most brilliant mind in news:
LAMB: Quote, Keith Olbermann: "I loathe FOX."
OLBERMANN: I do. I worked there. I had an idea before I worked there what they were doing to the news business and how cynical they were about television, but I really had no idea until after I had worked within that company just how bad it was.
LAMB: Let me run a clip, Roger Ailes appeared on this program at the end of the year before last. Let's watch what he had to say.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROGER AILES, CHAIRMAN/CEO, FOX NEWS: I think FOX News has come on the scene and identified itself as fair and balanced. We try to do that every day. I think others, instead of trying to get more fair and balanced, probably are offended by that or worried about it.
You know, we get attacked and we get copied, usually at the same time by the same people. And basically it's fear that we are doing something they are not doing. And they try to pretend that we are doing something political that they are not doing, but that's nonsense.
We have been around eight years. We are not retracting stories. We don't have a former attorney general looking into us to try to determine how we screwed it up. We are just doing the news every day.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
OLBERMANN: Contained in that, and you could analyze -- we could play it several times again and I could stop it at moments like the Zapruder film and say, well now, here, this -- what he just said there means -- if you noticed, there is no way for him to describe FOX and FOX News without taking a shot at somebody else.
He has got references to CBS and the Dan Rather memo story from 2004. He has got shots at other broadcast networks, the other cable operations, political parties, political interests, it is from the point of view of they are all against you and we are the only ones telling you the truth.
That's the fundamental -- it's the inspiration of fear in people, that they are being mislead. I have been in broadcasting for 30 years, your greatest danger from watching television is from watching somebody who is tired and says something wrong. The ability to -- the necessary structure to manipulate a message, liberal or conservative, is very hard to maintain.
They have done a fairly good job at maintaining it. Occasionally they wander off into -- you know, away from their preferred political points of view, but the idea that there are vast structures designed to foment liberal causes, I mean, no one in 1998, no one accused me of being a liberal in 1998 because I was covering the Clinton-Lewinsky story.
And whatever I had to do about it, I tried to be fair and honest and as accurate and as informed as possible, and allow my viewer to be the same way. And nowadays it's the same thing. And now all of a sudden I'm a screaming liberal.
LAMB: We have got some other quotes about FOX from you: "Fortunately for the free world, News Corp.," which owns FOX, "is very aggressive but ultimately not very bright."
OLBERMANN: Yes, they are somewhat self-destructive. And that's the best hope for mankind, relative to them. In other words, you know, Bill O'Reilly, who has an audience at 8:00 that even with recent programming gains on the part of my show, the total audience that he has is still, what, six, seven times what we are doing.
No one thinks you're (that much of a) a screaming liberal, Keith. They just think you're an intellectually-dishonest sore loser who exists to call attention to the fact that you share a time slot as a wildly popular American news icon/legend who absolutely creams you in the ratings every night. But hey, everybody's got to have a reason to get up in the mornings, I guess.
