Olbermann: A liberal icon’s demise

“Our long national nightmare is over,” said Greg Pollowitz in National Review Online. In the closing moments of last Friday’s broadcast of Countdown, the highest-rated show on MSNBC, its host, Keith Olbermann, delivered a typically bombastic six-minute farewell speech in which he shocked his loyal audience of rabid liberals by announcing, “This is the last edition of your show.” Olbermann’s righteous, hyperpartisan rage made him the face of MSNBC, said Howard Kurtz in TheDailyBeast.com, but it also “drove his bosses crazy.” MSNBC boss Phil Griffin and the notoriously combative Olbermann frequently butted heads over the host’s open scorn for network rules and less-partisan NBC anchors. “A divorce was inevitable,” especially with the recent calls for “a new civility” in political discourse.

Olbermann “will be sorely missed,” said Steve Benen in WashingtonMonthly.com. In a cable landscape dominated by the right-wing ratings juggernaut of Fox News, Countdown’s arrival in 2003 gave us “something we couldn’t find anywhere else: honest, sincere, unapologetic liberalism.” Through wry, well-written satire and his blistering Special Comments, Olbermann pushed back relentlessly against the fabrications and excesses of the Bush administration, Fox, and the Right in general. In the process, said Steve Kornacki in Salon.com, Olbermann gave MSNBC an identity. Countdown’s high ratings inspired the network to build itself a stable of liberal anchors, from Rachel Maddow to Ed Schultz, and the network brass may eventually have decided they had a sufficient quantity of mini-Olbermanns to dispense with Olbermann himself. He may have been, in other words, “a victim of his own success.”

That success was as greatly exaggerated as Olbermann’s ego, said John Avlon in TheDailyBeast​.com. One reason MSNBC wasn’t afraid to fire its big-name host was that his ratings had declined by 20 percent in the past year, from 251,000 nightly viewers down to a measly 198,000. Tellingly, the slump in Glenn Beck’s ratings has been even more dramatic—down from 965,000 nightly viewers in January 2010 to a meagre 377,000 last week. What’s going on? Polarization made Olbermann and Beck rich, but Americans may be finally wearying of night after night of “predictable hyperpartisan talking points and canned anger.” To paraphrase Howard Beale in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, America seems to be saying to Beck, Olbermann, and their fellow apocalyptic ranters: “You’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

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