One Angry Man: Keith Olbermann

In a previous post I linked to a feature by the New York Times on Conservative figurehead Rush Limbaugh. This time we present you a feature by the New Yorker on Keith Olbermann, the closest thing the left has to a figurehead but with not nearly the same type or breadth of following as Rush'.

One Angry Man: Is Keith Olbermann changing TV news? by Peter J. Boyer

The piece refers to a little known tag-team partnership with an unlikely APF Pundit:

Shortly after Olbermann’s “shut the hell up” commentary on President Bush last month, conservative radio pounced on the implication that he was calling American troops in Iraq “cold-blooded killers,” and Olbermann took particular note of criticism from Laura Ingraham, who said on the air, “I believe MSNBC really needs to bring in a medical team at this point. . . . I don’t know what happened to him. I really don’t. He didn’t use to be this way.” (Olbermann dated Ingraham briefly a decade ago. “There were a few problems,” he told me. “There were a few things that I could see were going to be impediments. Oddly, they were not political things.”)

A profile of Olbermann's famed rivalry with Bill O'Reilly

Olbermann chose his office, a corner office on the fourth floor of NBC’s Rockefeller Plaza headquarters, for its view. From his desk, he can look out the window and see, directly across Sixth Avenue, the studios of Fox News, the broadcast home of his rival Bill O’Reilly. “Sometimes I imagine that I hear a howl coming from there,” Olbermann told me during a visit one afternoon. “I have been accused of having an obsession with him. I am a minor-leaguer compared to his obsession with me.”

The Olbermann-O’Reilly feud, which is wholly Olbermann’s creation, began with a wisecrack in 2003, the first year of “Countdown.” It evolved after Olbermann instituted a farcical segment called “The Worst Person in the World,” in which O’Reilly, depicted as a pompous buffoon, was regularly cited. O’Reilly, the biggest draw of the highest-rated cable-news network, could only lose by engaging with Olbermann, but he could not resist...

More illuminating than the written piece is the author's discussion of it with Matt Dellinger of New Yorker Out Loud
Listen and download audio of Peter Boyer commenting on Olbermann’s style and how it contrasts with traditional television news.
Find the Original New Yorker link here: Mouthing Off