Olbermann

You have to give ESPN's Keith Olbermann credit for sticking to his guns about Cal Ripken's pursuit of Lou Gehrig's consecutive-games record.Olbermann, who returned to "SportsCenter" Sunday night from vacation, quipped after noting the Orioles' loss to Seattle that the argument that Ripken should continue to play past tying Gehrig's mark of 2,130 games because the team needs him for the pennant race has vanished."

We had a spirited discussion Sunday on CNN's  "Reliable Sources" about Keith Olbermann's suit against Al Gore's Current TV. The video is at the end of this post, and I urge you to take a look especially at what Sharon Waxman, founder of TheWrap, has to say about Olbermann having played his games maybe once too often. Here's something Olbermann should perhaps be even more worried about: the fact that to win his suit he is going to have to trash a liberal icon in Gore. And how are Olbermann's liberal fans (however many might be left)

They made him wear funny shirts and leather jackets. They sat him next to a guy who smacks a hammer on the desk. They put him on a network whose programming staple is snowboarders sliding to heavy-metal music.All of this apparently drove Keith Olbermann to shave off his mustache.But soon his nightmare will be over. Olbermann will leave ESPN2 and return to ESPN on April 3, it was announced this week.Olbermann will rejoin Dan Patrick to re-form ESPN's best "SportsCenter" anchor team, and they will be hosts of an expanded "SportsCenter."

I was stunned by The Sun's description of Keith Olbermann's firing from Current TV as, "A mainstream media figure washes out at Current. " You had me for a minute, then I realized the headline appeared onApril Fool's Day. How else to attribute The Sun referring to Mr. Olbermann as a "mainstream media figure?" Joseph L. Holt, Chestertown

Just like your humble media watcher, ESPN's Keith Olbermann has been taking some time off recently, but unlike your humble media watcher, Olbermann's time off was not by choice.Olbermann got his break courtesy of a two-week suspension from the network for putting his mug where it didn't belong, or at least putting it there without permission, according to sources.It seems that Olbermann was a guest on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" on April 16, firing off witty retorts and rejoinders. When asked during the "Five Questions" segment where the most godforsaken place on the East Coast was, Olbermann, with a big grin, answered "Bristol, Conn.

BRISTOL, Conn. -- In his office in the ESPN complex of buildings here, Dan Patrick has two monitors on his desk, one of which, he says, is always trained on his former "SportsCenter" partner Keith Olbermann."

As Keith Olbermann was plotting his departure from ESPN to MSNBC, a bigger threat to the all-sports network officially set sail yesterday as two broadcasting giants officially joined forces on a new venture.Fox/Liberty, which already controlled nine regional sports channels in an amalgam called Fox Sports Net, purchased a 40 percent equity stake in eight similar channels run by Cablevision a price of $850 million.The 17 channels give Fox Sports Net nearly nationwide coverage in 55 million homes, and will spread its programming into such key areas as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston.

Keith Olbermann's deep, but he's not playable anymore, or at least not on ESPN.Olbermann, 38, whose insouciant persona dovetailed nicely with the unflappable Dan Patrick on the 11 p.m. "SportsCenter," will appear on the show for the final time on June 29, a full six months before his ESPN contract expires.Olbermann could not be reached yesterday, but his agent, Jean Sage, told the Associated Press that the departure was "amicable," and said no decision on Olbermann's future had been made.

When ESPN's "SportsCenter" signs on tonight at 11, tag-team member Keith Olbermann will be back in his usual place -- anchor desk left, next to Dan Patrick, and our long national nightmare will be over.Olbermann has been away from the "Big Show" the past two weeks, sitting at home on what ESPN is calling a cooling-off period and what you might call a suspension. Reasonable people can debate the semantics, but Olbermann says this time away has been "productive.""Everybody sees things a lot more clearly now, from both sides.

In a shot across the bow of its archrival, ESPN, Fox is expected to announce today that it has signed former ESPN anchor Keith Olbermann and current ESPN host Chris Myers.Both Myers and Olbermann are expected to have prominent anchoring roles on "Fox Sports News," the nightly sports news show that goes head-to-head with "SportsCenter," the ESPN program on which both made their reputations.Neither Olbermann nor Myers nor their agents could be reached for comment yesterday, and Vince Wladika, a Fox Sports spokesman, would neither confirm nor deny their hirings.

Talk about a Friday afternoon dump: Keith Olbermann and his $50-million, five-year contract dumped by Al Gore's audience-challenged Current TV after less than a year on-air. There is no shortage of meat for analysts to chew on these bones, and that is going to make for a tasty couple of days of media dish as Olbermann's enemies tear into whatever hide the one-time relatively powerful cable TV anchor has left. For his part, Olbermann was on Twitter Friday threatening to sue. "I'd like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV. Editorially, Countdown had never been better," Olbermann tweeted.

I have had my disagreements with Keith Olbermann the last few years, but I have been watching in admiration lately as night after night he's covered the Occupy protest movement like no one else in the media. I am surprised that he has not received more praise for getting to this major story before anyone else and understanding the massive sociology of it better than anyone yet. Olbermann understands that Occupy Wall Street is an eruption of the pain millions of Americans are feeling.

Current TV, the prime-time home of Keith Olbermann, Wednesday announced a strong election-year move with Jennifer Granholm joining the channel in January to host a show weeknights at 9 following Olbermann's. Granholm, the former governor of Michigan, will be host of "The War Room with jennifer Granholm," and I'll tell you what, I'll be there with big expectations on opening night. Here's the release from Current TV: San Francisco, CA, October 12, 2011--Current TV will launch THE WAR ROOM WITH JENNIFER GRANHOLM, hosted by the former two-term Michigan Governor.

Given the size of Keith Olbermann's audience on Current TV, what goes on during his "Countdown" show probably isn't worth the energy it takes to denounce it. On the other hand, the more marginalized he becomes, the more likely it is that "Countdown" will become a crucible for the kind of reckless and possibly slanderous speech Olbermann allowed from Janeane Garofalo Wednesday night. And part of this job is to identify such speech and warn of its dangers. This utterly unsubstantiated attack on GOP candidate Herman Cain, with its allegations that he must be getting "paid" by someone to run as a Republican, is outrageous.

Watching Keith Olbermann interview his boss, Al Gore, Tuesday night for the second night in a row, I couldn't help noticing something: How much Olbermann looked like the RCA dog, head cocked slightly to the side, listening intently at his master's voice. That is, of course, when Olbermann wasn't nodding in agreement at what his master said. Check out the video at about 1 minute and 8 seconds and again at 2 minutes and 40 seconds for some of the enthusiastic nodding. This is Keith Olbermann, the guy who thinks himself worthy of Edward R. Murrow's legacy.

MSNBC is built on a lie, and it's one that the cable channel is never going to be able escape as long as sticks to its leftist ideological guns. That's what I kept thinking as I watched Keith Olbermann's strange, coded, wink-wink interview with Cenk Uygur last week on the new version of "Countdown. " (That's the nightly show that is doing so well that Olbermann and Current TV  have not released any ratings since the first week of July -- and those showed a 30 percent drop for Olbermann from his premiere week.)

Just before she took my call earlier this week, an NBC Sports spokeswoman said, she had phoned back someone she assumed to be a member of the media. But all the fellow wanted to do was yell at her about NBC's addition of Keith Olbermann as a co-host of the Sunday night highlights/preview show Football Night in America. Olbermann's liberal viewpoint and unrelenting criticism of President Bush on his nightly Countdown MSNBC news show can have that kind of polarizing effect. But anyone who remembers his pairing with Dan Patrick on ESPN's SportsCenter recalls what a terrific sports studio presence Olbermann is and should be glad to welcome him to a regular network sports gig. Dick Ebersol, NBC Universal Sports and Olympics chairman, said: "Most importantly to me, the studio world of sports has had very few wildly successful practitioners and, in Keith's case, it's more than being successful; in many ways he and Dan Patrick were pioneers in the SportsCenter world.

Expansion draft fulfills a fantasyRotisserie League players are sort of like Vanilla Ice -- they're stuck with a bad rap.No, wait a minute, Vanilla Ice is a bad rapper. Let's try again.Rotisserie League players are sort of like wire hangers in Joan Crawford's house -- afraid to come out of the closet.No, that doesn't make sense. How can hangers be afraid? All right, one more.Rotisserie League players are sort of like marigolds -- they bloom in the spring, but disappear in the fall, when you go out, dig them up and try to toss them into the neighbor's yard without his seeing, because you're in a hurry and you'd much rather be in the house watching MTV and wondering if they could bring back Nina Blackwood now that Downtown Julie Brown is gone . . .But I digress.

The hypocrisy and truth issues of Jon Stewart were among the topics debated Sunday on CNN's media review show, "Reliable Sources," with host Howard Kurtz. Stewart's weak performance last Sunday in an interview with Chris Wallace, of Fox News, and his post-interview whine about how he was edited, were part of the conversation. I called him a liar, while one of the co-panelists called his appearance on Fox and act of "genius. " You can guess there might have been a little disagreement.

After four nights of watching Keith Olbermann, there are two things I can say with some certainty. First, he has put together a first-rate production team. Current TV is producing a more focused and faster moving “Countdown” than MSNBC did. That is either high praise for a relatively little outfit like Current, or a harsh indication of how slipshod things sometimes get editorially and production-wise at MSNBC, especially with some of its, shall we say, less focused hosts likeChris Matthews.