Legal Commentary

Olbermann Asked To Tone Down Hillary Hate, Refused

By Big Tent Democrat

From a damning New Yorker article

At MSNBC, Phil Griffin was worried, and with good reason. The average “Countdown” viewer is fifty-nine years old, and forty-five per cent of the viewers are women, presumably Democratic—a fair description of a Hillary Clinton supporter. Griffin believed that Olbermann was beginning to alienate his core audience, and asked him to ease up a bit on Clinton, and possibly even make some conciliatory gesture to the Clinton camp. Olbermann was offended by the suggestion. “I can’t do that!” he says, recalling that conversation. “Me doing a commentary against my own opinion is pandering. Black and white. And I’m not going to do it. Would I pull back a little bit, or think long and hard about whether or not I want to knowingly alienate part of the audience? Yeah. And I did. I mean, I held fire on Senator Clinton for quite a while after she began to really scare me, with some of these tactics.”

(Emphasis supplied.) More . . .

BTW, this is the same Phil Griffin who was quoted as saying:

. . . [A]lthough a few mistakes had been made, that they had been corrected quickly and that the network’s overall coverage was fair.

“I get it, that in this 24-hour media world, you’ve got to be on your game and there’s very little room for mistakes,” Mr. Griffin said. “But the Clinton campaign saw an opportunity to use it for their advantage. They were trying to rally a certain demographic, and women were behind it.”

There appears to be a credibility problem for Phil Griffin on this issue. Obviously he DID think his network, or at the least, his biggest star, was biased and offensive towards Hillary Clinton. But he blissfully denied the obvious to the NYTimes. In any event, Tom Brokaw clearly was not comfortable with Olbermann's antics:

Toward the end of the primary season, with Montana and South Dakota going for Obama and Clinton, respectively, on June 3rd, Olbermann earned another on-air scolding from Brokaw after asserting that Clinton was “trying to shoehorn her way” into the coverage of the presumed nominees of the two parties. “I think that’s unfair, Keith,” Brokaw said. “When you look at the states that she won and the popular vote that she piled up, and the number of delegates that she has on her side, she’s got real bargaining power in all of this.”

(Emphasis supplied.) In any event, apparently all is not well at MSNBC and there is real concern about what Olbermann has wrought:

But, just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. “It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,” Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. “And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”

(Emphasis supplied.) I am now a full throated Obama supporter but I will never come back to MSNBC and Keith Olbermann as a reliable source of news. Olberman is a propagandist, as Somerby has pointed out, not a journalist. Chris Matthews is well, you know what he is. And those 2 bully their entire operation. It is a distasteful and unappealing network to me now. I won't be watching them.

Speaking for me only.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 15, 2008 (boomark / email).