The Olbermann Effect

In 1992, Keith Olbermann, along with Dan Patrick, helped turn ESPN’s SportsCenter, a nightly sports highlights recap, into a cultural force and a bottomless source of catch phrases: “From way down town. Bang!” “It’s deep, and I don’t think it’s playable.” And, “They’re…not…gonna…get him.” With wit and charm, Patrick and Olbermann defined what became ESPN’s signature style.

But after a series of feuds with ESPN’s management, Olbermann left the network, burning bridges along the way, and he bounced back and forth between news and sports until eventually ending up at MSNBC in 2003. It wasn’t long before Olbermann, just as he did with SportsCenter, began to reshape the way cable programming was consumed with Countdown, the news show he anchors.

When CNN went live in 1980, it expanded the news cycle and consequently broadened the definition of news in America. As our definition of news shifted, so too did the definition of newscaster. With the 24-hour news cycle has come a crisis of credibility for news providers and the public alike. Rather than using the extra time to give us in-depth reporting and analysis, instead it provides partisan talking heads — Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, for instance — who shout a lot, generating bogus controversies and an endless spectacle of ideological combat. This shift in emphasis gave Olbermann, a polemicist and entertainer by instinct, his opportunity.

To many, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly represents the worst of cable news. Although O’Reilly prefers to call himself a “traditionalist” who is providing valuable information to his viewers, critics claim his ego drives his programming. His modus operandi is to spread fear and promote misunderstanding rather than supply the “fair and balanced” analysis of issues that the right-wing Fox News comedically promises. It is not unusual for O’Reilly’s big personality to envelop his program, with viewers watching him, rather than the content of the program.

Viewers who find O’Reilly’s style unattractive should find Olbermann’s style unattractive, too. He also baits, name-calls, and bullies. Typical Olbermann barbs include poking Rush Limbaugh as in August 17, 2005’s “Worst Person” segment: “I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics.” He calls Bill O’Reilly “Big Giant Head” and former education secretary and right-wing pundit Bill Bennett “the National Scold”. Sure, the name-calling elicits laughs, but can it be considered journalism?

Journalistic standards seem to have dissolved to keep up with the constant demand for more content, and the public has become accustomed to celebrities as news presenters in the place of trained journalists. For example, the Today show recently hired football player Tiki Barber, and tennis player John McEnroe and comedian Dennis Miller have hosted programs on CNBC. The various subgenres of popular culture seem to be melting into each other.

Former stand-up comedians Bill Maher and John Stewart use news as the catalysts for their humor. And although John Stewart and Stephen Colbert look like news anchors, their programs clearly belong on Comedy Central, which serves as a pretty obvious cue about their satirical content. Olbermann, however, airs on a news channel on a news program, and his humor, while separating him from the other popular cable-news hosts, exists in a more ambiguous cultural space, where news and entertainment blend.

Countdown’s segments often resemble a late-night talk show than a news program. For example, Olbermann, who writes his own scripts, invites to us “play Oddball”, as he examines the weirdest news items of the day. And his “Worst Person in the World” segment comes across like a David Letterman bit. Olbermann’s delivery throughout the program rips through historical and pop culture references with no concern over whether they may sail over the audience’s head. On July 17, 2008, Olbermann named the TSA as the worst person in the world, saying, “The first rule of Watch List is you don’t talk about Watch List.” Countdown can seem like an inside joke. If you read Fight Club and regularly consume the news, you get to laugh at people in the news, and more important, with Olbermann. It’s a small, but smug club.

Olbermann’s adroit writing skills and his maverick sensibilities lend themselves to a new breed of newscaster. He frequently sheds his objective journalist role, morphing into something more than a commentator, a voice of our collective conscience, a defender of liberty, a soapbox-speaker extraordinaire. His rhetorical abilities and penchant for deploying humor makes his presentation of the news anything but objective. He inserts his opinions and his personal protests into the substance of the show, blurring the lines between what is fact and what is opinion. Indeed, viewers are left wondering if there is any difference. Countdown viewers no longer expect the facts; they expect to laugh and to think, and Olbermann seeks to gratify them.

While Olbermann’s skill set was always suited for making fun of the news, it wasn’t until the Bush administration’s failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that Olbermann, like other reporters dismayed by events, began to regard simply reporting the news as inadequate. Instead of quelling his outrage, Olbermann unleashed his own form of justice, by unleashing his pen, then his authoritative stare and staid voice.

As the Katrina story faded, most reporters went back to business as usual, but Olbermann cranked it up. Fashioning himself as a modern-day Edward R. Murrow, Olbermann disparages the people who he sees as abusing their power. He created “Bushed!” a segment on Countdown that functions as a mock Megan’s Law, notifying the public when a member of the Bush administration behaves poorly or defrauds the public. In August 2006, Olbermann created the Special Comment segment, carving out a space to vent his anger in well-rehearsed rants, which are then widely circulated in the liberal blogosphere. In the inaugural Special Comment, which lasted six and a half minutes, he pilloried Donald Rumsfeld for comparing war critics to Nazi sympathizers. Soon after, the video clip of Olbermann filleting Rumsfeld was viewed at least 300,000 times on Crooks and Liars, YouTube and Truthout.org.

Since the Special Comments began, Olbermann’s viewership has increased dramatically. According to Variety, Countdown beat O’Reilly Factor head-to-head for the first time during the first week of June 2008, in the key 25-54 demographic. During these Special Comments, the viewers see Olbermann at his best. His voice is often indignant, yet controlled, and he leaves no mystery about where he stands. As Dan Patrick, his ESPN co-host has remarked, “I think he worked better when he had a pebble in his shoe.”

With the Special Comments as a model, Countdown could be regarded as cultivating critical thinking in viewers and encouraging protests rather than passive consumption of current events. Bill Wolff, MSNBC’s vice president for prime-time programming, has said that Olbermann, “has given voice to a large part of the country that is frustrated with the administration’s policies.”

With more precisely targeted forms of media available, consumers can gobble down only the chunks they want and like. Confronting this reality, Countdown eschews traditional journalism and positions itself next to news. Olbermann is one voice among many, a voice that can’t be stifled or easily lost among the cacophony of other media voices. As Olbermann explains it, “There’s a point at which you can’t sit inside a burning building without shouting ‘fire.’ ”

As Countdown guest Mark Radomsky argues, the show offers a narrative rather than news; its intent, he says, is “to provide a tale of two sides, a villain and a victim — an oppressed group and a big oppressor.” Viewers seek to identify themselves with one of those roles. Olbermann’s popularity rests in his ability to credibly speak for the oppressed, casting himself as a thoroughly modern newsman, speaking out for the citizen rather than merely informing them.