When MSNBC moved a couple of months ago from its longtime home in New Jersey to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, Keith Olbermann got his pick of offices.
It was a nice perk for the anchor whose bracing mix of irony and stridency made him the first big star the 11-year-old cable channel can call its own.
Olbermann chose a room looking directly into the street-front studios of MSNBC's rival, Fox News. If you're walking up Sixth Avenue, look for the huge cardboard cutout of Bill O'Reilly's head gazing out of a third-floor window in the world headquarters of NBC.
Rare is the night when Countdown with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's highest-rated program, doesn't take aim at something said on "Fox Noise" or "Fixed News," Olbermann's pet names for the channel. He has more ways of describing O'Reilly than baseball announcers have home-run calls. Bill-O. Bill Orally. Bill "Oh Really?" Falafel Guy. The Frank Burns of news. And so on.
But when I asked Olbermann about being able to peer into the glassy soul of the enemy, he said the point was not inspiration but caution.
"The reason my computer faces out that window is ... to remember the lessons learned in that building."
To him, Fox News is an object lesson in how not to handle success. To an observer familiar with Olbermann's career missteps, he seems determined not to repeat them as his star rises again.
By any measure, 2007 was a terrific year for him. Since mid-2006, when he began inveighing against the Bush administration in a series of on-air editorials, known as "Special Comments," ratings for Countdown have risen 55 percent. MSNBC is beating CNN when Olbermann is on, and catching up to the second-place news channel overall.
His new book, Truth and Consequences: Special Comments on the Bush Administration's War on American Values, was assembled from a year's worth of editorials on Countdown. This week it entered The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list at No. 19.
"I've often thought the real danger in broadcasting is people going on the air without ever stopping to ask: `Now why is it again that I think people want to hear me talk about this?'"
"Inasmuch as it is a responsibility and it is the public airwaves, I think I owe the viewers and the industry and the people who've gone before me -- who have been role models, who have faced actual dangers to do this in the history of our country -- I owe all those things and people my best. To try to present an honest version of what I see around me."
