Keith Olbermann’s next move

last updated 8 January 2015

Keith Olbermann doesn’t plan to go away quietly, said Mark Binelli in Rolling Stone. It’s been six months since the abrasive liberal talk-show host left MSNBC abruptly, amid speculation that he’d been fired. Olbermann, 52, says that he was actually happy to go, and that his relationship with network executives had been deteriorating ever since Meet the Press host Tim Russert, an NBC heavyweight, died three years ago. “One of the reasons I got as far as I got was that Tim was there to run interference for me,’’ Olbermann says. “He probably was my biggest supporter within the network.”

Later this month, Olbermann will debut a new show on Al Gore’s Current TV, which now averages a mere 23,000 viewers in prime time. People think he was sent into the “wilderness,” Olbermann says, but they’re wrong; his new network will flourish because it is free of the commercial pressures that made NBC—and its corporate overlords—tire of the controversy he stirred up. “I view this as the biggest step up of my career,” Olbermann says. “It will be that simple kind of old-fashioned television news operation of the ’60s and ’70s that had the proverbial Chinese walls around them, to keep them away from concerns about advertisers.

We’re going to take MSNBC’s business away from them. That’s the idea—do it better.” This idea gives him a smile of satisfaction. “They thought I was going to go away for so long that nobody would bring me back.”