Or not?
Olbermann is apparently in a tizzy with his most recent employer, Current TV. The story begins to seem familiar.
I know you folks with a right-ish orientation that didn’t like him before still don’t like him. I was wondering how much support he’s lost from people who generally were fans or at least agreed with the viewpoints he expressed from his MSNBC show.
Are you still a fan? Are his problems playing with others just a side-affect of his enormous talent?
Or is he a jerk?
IMO anyone who craves that much attention is a douchebag. not nearly limited to Olbermann.
Well, he still comes off as ten times smarter than Glenn Beck, so I’ll cut the douchebag a lot of slack.
Got link?
Just google Olbermann.
I did. Got a NYT article which included (bolding mine) …
"For both parties, millions of dollars are at stake. Current, which has occupied a lonely position on the cable dial for years, is investing in programming to become **a liberal alternative to MSNBC **and other cable news channels. "
…frickin hilarious!!!
That NYT article also says, “When he was hired by Current shortly thereafter, he was given an equity stake in the company and given the title chief news officer, so he is both a boss and a person who is notoriously resistant to the notion of having a boss.” It also mentions that one of his complaints was the crappy production quality at Current TV, although that’s no surprise given the low budget. Basically, he comes off as a pain-in-the-ass.
About time we had a liberal alternative to MSNBC. They’ve ventured so far right recently that the other day one of their newscasters actually referred to Fox News as"Fox News"! Not “Fox Noise” or “Faux News” or “Fake Noise”. By this time next week they’ll probably be doing retrospectives on how much they loved George Bush.
As for the OP, I don’t think he’s any worse than O’Reilly or Hannity or worst-of-the-lot Beck in terms of bias and obnoxiousness but he’s not any better either. (He is not as deliberately inaccurate or pandering as they are and unlike them he will criticize a member of his own side- usually for not being liberal enough.) He’s an obvious egomaniacal “the other side is WRONG WRONG WRONG!” fanatic.
And of course there was that incident with his landlord and his cat.
Wow, there is damning with faint praise.
Olberman is very difficult to work with by reputation. Self-centered, abrasive, demanding and loving to get in pissing matches on and off the air. And he is a liberal. While this sounds like my kind of guy on the surface, it is everything that is wrong and unprofessional in the media. Rachel Maddow comes so much closer to the ideal.
He’s entertaining but I doubt very much I’d enjoy working with or even personally knowing him. So yeah, definitely a huge ego and probably a bit of a douche.
Olbermann has never gotten along with bosses; he’s naturally resistant to authority. After he left ESPN, someone commented, “Keith didn’t burn his bridges; he dynamited them.”
He’s basically the O’Reilly of the left (but with less outright lying) - just another flaming douchebag with a huge ego and a massive chip on his shoulder. This comes as no surprise.
In my experience if someone’s an asshole, they’re an asshole and I don’t want to be around them. Olbermann simply isn’t a team player, and never has been, which is why he keeps getitng fired (or jumps before he’s pushed) despite being as talented as he is. It’s hard to deny his douchebaggery; the evidence is pretty piled up by now.
However, as Keith Olbermann is not someone I have to deal with personally, I don’t actually care if he’s an asshole or not; he’s an entertaining TV personality, so I’ll watch. I don’t watch shows or movies based on whether the performers are nice people or not because I don’t give a crap. I’m not going to stop enjoying Mel Gibson’s movies because he’s an asshole.
His former colleague actually said he napalmed, not dynamited them. Keith himself later quipped, “I don’t burn bridges, I burn rivers.” I loved him on Sportscenter with Dan Patrick. I became a fan of his when he was one of the first talking heads to go after Bush, but once others joined the bandwagon, it became obvious how bad at it he was. He seems to have a lot of anger issues. Yes, he is a giant douchenozzle.
Ohhhh. My pretty intense disliking of him came from when he was on SportsCenter. Which preceded my even knowing anything about his politics, so it’s not bias.
In fairness, I have hated just about every SportsCenter anchor for 15 years. The smirky attitude, the dumb catchphrases, the attitude that the story is about the anchors and their personas rather than reporting on games. Chris Berman and Olbermann were/are the spiritual grandfathers of every jackass Stuart Scott that we’ve had to endure since then. Not surprising to learn that Olbermann has a similarly smug high opinion of himself when holding forth on politics.
The other reason for my revulsion from Olbermann (on SportsCenter) has been shamefully covered up by the national media, but I for one will not allow his pornstar-look days to be forgotten or forgiven:
Not that it makes him more, less, or same on the Douchemeter, but he has a major reputation as a horndog in the giving the “Hey, I’m a rich TV personality and you can be underneath me” spiel to flight attendants and waitresses sense. There used to be a 'celebrities who will try to get into your pants" web site (no longer up apparently) and he was usually on the short list of “most notorious” lechers for attractive young women he came in contact with. (Of course looksism plays a part: if Johnny Depp or George Clooney was on such a list I don’t think many would complain, but Olbermann being not particularly attractive and kind of skeazy gets more flack for it.)
I had not heard that but it does not surprise me.
I actually would say “not particularly attractive.” I would say he’s a reasonably handsome middle aged guy. I think that the difference in his being perceived as skeezy is that hitting on stewardesses and flight attendants is cheesy because it’s trying to exploit someone based solely on assumptions that your much-superior power and wealth should obviously overwhelm the reticience that women might otherwise have about you. Clooney’s reputed to be a serial playboy, but he and Depp (apart from a few of his old anti-American jabs) generally seem to have a great reputation as basically good guys. Part of why people don’t think they’re jackasses – they don’t try to coerce low-status (I don’t mean that as a classist slur, just based on lower-income) retail service providers, they date actresses and models who are at or close to their socioeconomic level. Depp apparently views waitstaff not as a potential dating pool (see also Nicolas Cage) but as often underpaid and underappreciated people who deserve respect and reward for good service. http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/access-hollywood-johnny-depp-tip.html
I can imagine that Olbermann is not that good a guy in his interactions with the service industries, and can readily imagine that he’s will to act predator-ish toward low-paid young women who have to be nice to him rather than risk being rejected by an attractive professional woman at his own level based on his personality flaws.
This is all speculation of course based on your scuttlebutt, but since it serves to confirm my bias that he’s an ass, I’m all for it!
I believe it’s the OP’s duty to set up a thread with sufficient information to form the basis of a discussion.
Back in the day, I would only watch Sportscenter if it was Dan and/or Keith. I like watching sports, but I am not terribly interested in watching highlights. Then they came along. They spawned a lot of imitators who were really just poor imitations. No one could call highlights like they could, before or since.
As for his dating life, I know he dated Laura Ingram once upon a time. He said the break up had nothing to do with their differing politics. My WAG is that she started to rise in her career and he couldn’t impress her by being Mr. Big Shot anymore.