Another guy 'mad as hell'
By Gail Shister
INQUIRER TV COLUMNIST
SECAUCUS, N.J. - Keith Olbermann types with one finger.

Speaking of luck: Steel-cage match between Olbermann and O'Reilly, who wins?

"O'Reilly is a big, mean, tough ***** who's out to kill, but I have
to bet on my boy," says MSNBC's Wolff. "He believes in his cause."

And he's mad as hell.


I'd bet on Olberman as the winner. O'Really is older,
meaner, a hypocrite, a liar and a coward. Olberman
is younger, smarter, more sincere, angry as hell and
brave as they come. O'Really would try to be sly in a
fight against Olberman but, Olberman would figure
out his every move in advance and stomp him. And,
while O'Really would literally try to kill Olberman,
Olberman would allow the old man to live to
experience his defeat and bellyache about it for the
rest of his worthless life. Actually, O'Really would
probably come up with some excuse to back out of
such a fight proving his cowardice once more. After
all, if he's afraid to do interviews, a real fight would
definitely be beyond his ability.

Another guy 'mad as hell'
By Gail Shister
INQUIRER TV COLUMNIST
SECAUCUS, N.J. - Keith Olbermann types with one finger.

His right pointer. Eighty words a minute. We saw.

"I taught myself at 8," he says. "Every time I try to learn real typing, I
get a little confused. I usually charge admission for people to see me."

MSNBC doesn't pay its liberal provocateur to type. It pays him because,
almost single-handedly, he's made the once-foundering network a serious
player in the cable wars.

"Keith is MSNBC's rock star," says Phil Griffin, NBC News senior vice
president and executive in charge of its corporate cousin. "People follow
him. They believe in him."

Well, liberals do. On Countdown, a newscast built around Olbermann's acerbic
wit and passionate rants, he relentlessly pounds at President Bush and Fox
News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, his nemesis at 8 weeknights.

That partisan approach works. Check the numbers.

Countdown averaged 709,000 total viewers in the February sweeps, up a
whopping 77 percent over the same period in '06, according to Nielsen Media
Research. Among 25- to 54-year-old viewers, the demographic advertisers pay
a premium to reach, Olbermann, 48, spiked 59 percent. He easily beat CNN's
Paula Zahn in both categories.

No wonder MSNBC just quadrupled his salary. At an estimated $4 million a
year, he's the highest-paid on-air talent at the network. As part of his new
four-year deal, he'll also do occasional essays for NBC Nightly News and
prime-time Countdown specials for NBC.

On this dreary afternoon, Olbermann is sitting in his surprisingly tiny
office inside the astonishingly expansive MSNBC headquarters.
State-of-the-art when it was unveiled in spring '97, the facility hasn't
aged well. It feels like some obscure museum set down miles from nowhere.

By the end of the year, however, MSNBC's 500-person staff will relocate to
NBC's Rockefeller Center digs. NBC calls it a cost-cutting move. MSNBC
staffers call it a return to civilization.

Olbermann says his NBC pieces will be "briefer, tamer, yet still with a
point of view. In a network setting, you don't need as much TNT for the same
yield. It's a lower threshold."

At 8 p.m., the biggest bang still belongs to O'Reilly. He notched 2.5
million total viewers (up 11 percent) in February, including 536,000 in the
25-to-54 group (up 17 percent).

But by responding to Olbermann's barbs, O'Reilly has helped Countdown close
the gap. "Keith played O'Reilly. We might as well have sent promos to Fox
News, for all the attention he paid," says Rick Kaplan, the former president
of MSNBC who this week was appointed executive producer of the CBS Evening
News. "All of a sudden, a show with millions of viewers was, in effect,
promoting a show with thousands of viewers. Keith ought to send him a hunk
of his check."

Fueled by Countdown, MSNBC is up 40 percent in prime time this year compared
to all of '06, averaging 562,000 total viewers. CNN has 900,000 (up 6
percent) and FNC, 1.9 million (up 14 percent).

Olbermann's rants, which he quaintly labels "special comments," are filled
with sound and fury. His wrath is genuine, he says, never simulated.

Still, for inspiration, Olbermann keeps in his iPod a clip of the famous
"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" speech by Peter
Finch's crazed anchorman Howard Beale from the 1976 film Network.

"In madness, Beale was expressing some great truth," he muses. "It was
beautifully written, eloquent, forceful. Anger as a means of expressing
truth resonates with me."

No question, anger is part of Olbermann's DNA. You don't have to dig very
deep to find it, either.

"My natural position is headfirst into the wind. It's raining right in my
face... . But if I sit around and think 'I'm going to get angry about
something,' that's the moment I go right down the Bill O'Reilly path.

"If it's not organic, I don't do it. With O'Reilly, a lot of that anger is
manufactured. The longer he goes, the more he does not know the difference."

O'Reilly has taken numerous shots on the air at NBC and its so-called
liberal bias, but he doesn't mention Olbermann by name. Olbermann says it's
because he can't pronounce it. His boss, Griffin, says O'Reilly was ordered
not to.

When asked for a response, O'Reilly "took a pass," according to a Fox News
Channel rep.

Though Olbermann denies it, some say O'Reilly has become an obsession. One
example: Olbermann has highlighted O'Reilly in his daily "Worst Person in
the World" segment more than 100 times since Countdown's '03 launch.

To Olbermann, the feud stems from what he says are O'Reilly's inaccuracies
on his FNC show.

"He's said crazy things, inaccurate things, divisive things," Olbermann
says. "Nobody was calling him on it. We go after him so often because he
does it so often... . He just can't say, 'Hey, I made a mistake. I'm wrong.'
"

Robert Thompson of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular
Television says Olbermann "is much more amusing to watch, whatever your
politics are."

With Olbermann, "you get the sense that he knows you know we're all in on
the joke," Thompson says. "O'Reilly seems so self-righteous."

Thompson describes Olbermann's style as "news journalism in the jazz idiom.
He uses a basic set of reported news of the day, then improvises riffs on
them."

These days, Olbermann's happier than he's been in years, thanks to
girlfriend Katy Tur, 23, a freelance cable producer in New York.

He's older than her father. They've been dating since June. She moved into
his place in October - the first live-in girlfriend of Olbermann's life.

"We're each actually about 9," he says. "We get along really well. In many
respects, she's much more mature than I am."

An only child growing up in the suburbs of New York, Olbermann says he was
"perfectly content in my own company." (He lived in a single dorm room at
Cornell.) Now he's thinking about marriage and children.

Olbermann says the impediment is that Tur's not ready, but "if I wait much
longer, my kids will have to carry me to their high school graduation."

He carved out his own career ascent, a road lined with burned bridges and
scorched earth.

After five years on ESPN's SportsCenter, KO abruptly left in 1997, with
management steaming. He went to NBC, as an anchor for NBC Sports and
launching The Big Show on MSNBC.

When the Monica Lewinsky scandal exploded in '98, Big Show morphed into the
all-Lewinsky-all-the-time White House in Crisis. Olbermann said it made him
so ashamed and depressed, he bugged out.

Next stop was Fox Sports, followed by commentary gigs at CNN and ABC Radio.
In early '03, he returned to MSNBC for a short fill-in stint. Three days
became four years.

"Keith has always had a complex relationship with management because he's
such an independent thinker," says MSNBC's Griffin, his Big Show producer.

"He's defiant. He's challenged authority all his life. He's always gotten
himself into predicaments. He wasn't happy, and that made him challenge his
bosses even more."

If Olbermann were a cat, he says he'd be on his fourth life. "I'm very good
at evolving. I don't reinvent myself, I reinvent what I do and make it
suited to the time I'm in."

This time, his bosses understand that he works best on a loose leash. And
that makes Keith a happy lad.

Ultimately, management has veto power over Countdown's content, but it has
never used it, says Bill Wolff, head of the network's prime-time
programming.

It would take a lot. "If Keith said 'George Bush is the minion of the devil
and we have the DNA to prove it,' I'd probably stop it."

Says Olbermann, "Whatever seems to operate well against the curve of life,
we'll go for."

Olbermann ends each Countdown with an update on how many days have passed
since "the declaration of 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq." He signs off with
Edward R. Murrow's "Good night, and good luck."

Speaking of luck: Steel-cage match between Olbermann and O'Reilly, who wins?

"O'Reilly is a big, mean, tough ***** who's out to kill, but I have
to bet on my boy," says MSNBC's Wolff. "He believes in his cause."

And he's mad as hell.


I'd bet on Olberman as the winner. O'Really is older,
meaner, a hypocrite, a liar and a coward. Olberman
is younger, smarter, more sincere, angry as hell and
brave as they come. O'Really would try to be sly in a
fight against Olberman but, Olberman would figure
out his every move in advance and stomp him. And,
while O'Really would literally try to kill Olberman,
Olberman would allow the old man to live to
experience his defeat and bellyache about it for the
rest of his worthless life. Actually, O'Really would
probably come up with some excuse to back out of
such a fight proving his cowardice once more. After
all, if he's afraid to do interviews, a real fight would
definitely be beyond his ability.