If you watched the studio portion of last night's Football Night in America perhaps you were missing a familiar face that had been on the set since 2007. Or perhaps you didn't. Either way, Keith Olbermann is no longer part of that in-studio cast of thousands as his bosses at NBC want him to focus more on his job as the host of Countdown over on MSNBC. Insert wise-crack about needing to focus and his show's anemic ratings, here.
But perhaps there was another reason why Olbermann was dismissed from the show.
Alternate theory #1: Recall the dust-up last year when Rush Limbaugh was reportedly part of an ownership group that was offering to purchase the St. Louis Rams and the subsequent faux outrage firestorm ginned up by the sporting media world and from within the NFL itself to the point where people were dropping any pretext of objectivity and journalistic integrity and were just making up and/or passing along unseemly quotes to attribute to Rush? We can't have that wing-nutty and probably racist rabble-rouser associated with the prim and proper image we have crafted of the NFL.
Is it possible that NBC execs actually tuned into one or two of Olbermann's Countdown episodes and saw what he was dishing out? After all, likening conserva-babe Michelle Malkin to a "mashed-up bag of meat with lip stick" isn't just political polemics but rather the sort of family-values misogyny the NFL/NBC partnership desires for it's viewers.
Alternate theory #2: Or, possibly because Olbermann fires off inane and sophomoric tweets regarding Rush and the imminently possible Koran-burner down in Florida:
‘Rev.’ Terry Jones was classmate of none other than Rush Limbaugh (Cape Central class of ’69). Coincidence?”
None other
Coincidence?
This be the level of professionalism we've come to expect from the host of a show watched by literally hundreds of people around the country.
Yeah, he probably did need to, you know, focus more on Countdown but we're glass half full kind of people and we want to think that NBC/NFL knew they were being completely hypocritical by keeping on this miserable hack and it would be refreshing that, if true, they would come out and admit as much.
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2 comments:
I loved Olbermann before I knew his politics. Olbermann and Dan Patrick on SportsCenter were the best. Every moring I looked forward to that show.
Part of my attraction was the image I had in my head of the two guys. They were people who would be fun to sit with at a sports bar and watch a game with. I don't have that feeling about Olbermann any more. I think he's a sick man who needs help getting over whatever it is that causes his hatreds.
Olbermann on any show poisons it because you can no longer envision going out for a beer with the cast. They're not friends any more. He taints everyone around him because you know they know who he is and they still hang out with them.
KT, I agree. Patrick and Olby were cultural titans back in the 90s. But there is something wrong in the head of Olby.
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