The good fight: a farewell to Olbermann

There is no media journeyman like Keith Olbermann. Over the past three decades he has left or been fired from shows, both sports (including an almost uncountable number of stints at ESPN). His Countdown show enjoyed popularity on MSNBC, before being exiled to Current TV- the Siberian gulag where journalists went and were never heard from again.

After a two-year contract, he’s been let go from Olbermann, an obscure ESPN2 program that generally competed with marquee live sports on the other ESPN channels. I’m not surprised it’s ending, as nobody watched it live and the YouTube content (which was most of my exposure) had pretty dire viewing numbers.

Plenty of people are sick of Keith and his shtick, and while he’s never been able to pick his battles, some of his battles were important and I’m glad he gave them due coverage. It had excellent coverage of the NFL’s negligence on domestic violence, the griminess of the Angels’ treatment of recently-relapsed drug user Josh Hamilton, and how many sports teams took money from the military in order to showcase seemingly-altruistic ceremonies to honor veterans. These are important things, and Olbermann was a merger of the pundit-heavy cable news style of sports show, and the more serious and provocative Outside the Lines. However, Outside the Lines never compared bizarre player statements and press releases by teams to the church scene in Blazing Saddles, where the minister thanks a crotchety old sourdough for his “authentic frontier gibberish”.

So maybe that’s why I liked the show and many people did not. It had that strange mix of culture callbacks and jokes that I find funny, material that was intentionally dated and different from most sports shows, that tend to stay near to the present.

Thanks for letting this show run for two years. While his material on MSNBC was pretty forgettable once Rachel Maddow became a better alternative for liberal pundit shows (if you were into that sort of thing), this was the best in its field, mostly because it made its own niche that nothing else quite fits into.

Author: AJM

Writer, sociologist, Unitarian Universalist. View all posts by AJM