Seriously, what a disaster at that network. And they deserve every bit of audience loss they get.

If Griffin is willing to say this in public:

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,

[. . .]

 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.

But I'm gone now and for good -- because, y'know what?  There are lots of other information sources out there that don't abuse me.  And y'know what else?  Clinton isn't the only one with bargaining power still.  I have bargaining power, too.

Or as the inimitable Fanny Flagg wrote so well in Fried Green Tomatoes: I'm older, and I have insurance.  Byeeeee, Phil.

Signed,

Towanda!

I don't get MSNBC anyway, I saw his stuff on Youtube, maybe twice. So they never had me to lose.

That core, which includes men, has also been a good portion of the democratic base.

It's amazing how peaceful it is when the TV is silenced, and no one is yammering his or her self-important opinions at us.

I just keep thinking about that line in the recent Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman movie - The Bucket List (which I didn't see, but caught this in the promos): "No one cares what you think."

What MSNBC has is a psychosomatic, baby who loves doing his temper tantrums in front of millions.

That pathos is in MSNBC's corporate, where they sit and take it. Don't they know they are the joke as much as Olbermann.

There would have to be major restructuring for me to ever watch the channel... can't call it a news channel.

But I do think they're going to come back. There's nowhere else to go."

MSNBC and the NEW Democratic Party should collaborate and write a song for this meme.

The host then read a smear from Powerline about the Clintons, and they whooped it up all the more, mocking the Clintons. They literally proved the Clintons correct right before your eyes, in a revolting charade of denial.

LOL!  I wish we could model what Olbermann's ratings would have been if he'd been at least somewhat even-handed in coverage, so that Olbermann himself could see how self-destructive he is.  Is that ego a mask for self-hatred?

Of course, it's not just Keith.  MSNBC has become generally symbolic of Hillary hate.

Mr. Griffin:  I'd rather sit handcuffed to a chair watching Barney reruns than spend a second of my precious life watching anything produced by MSNBC.

But I do think they're going to come back. There's nowhere else to go."

does this guy exist in a vacuum? some alternate universe perhaps? maybe he's mentally stuck in the early 60's, when there were 3 networks and 3 news programs?

i don't watch msnbc, at all, and somehow manage to stay reasonably well informed (ok, i was a little late on that appomattox thing), between print, net and tv media.

I will never forget or forgive his foaming-at-the-mouth, Howard Beale-esque performance over Hillary's reference to Robert Kennedy's assassination and the CA June primary.  I actually had a fight with my mother, who unfortunately buys into this ratings-driven idiocy, over whether or not we ought to be able to say the "a" word.  Funny, we never had a problem with that 'a' word before KO and his MSNBCretins got ahold of it.  Guess I missed it on Carlin's list.

Can't you just hear the Special Comment?  "You, sir, are nothing more than a corporate hack, oblivious to the guarantees of the First Amendment and more concerned with the almighty dollar than the principles I put myself on the line for every night.  How dare you speak of my calling in life in such condescending tones.  Muzzle me and you, sir, have just muzzled millions of concerned Americans fearful of the evil of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton cabal."

These guys, sooner or later, lose sight of their function.
In Olbermann's case, his function was and is ill-defined.

But - Griffin's statement is shocking to me. You quote him as saying "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."

This is classically sexist, in my opinion.
It portrays the woman who has been brutalized (his description) as having no alternative but to come back to the man who brutalized her. This is textbook sexism.

Doesn't it occur to this idiot that women, like men, would rather be alone that choose an environment in which they are degraded and brutalized?

Even his suggestion to Olbermann to tone down his attacks on Clinton were based on a fear of ratings diminishing, not on a sense of principle, civility or justice.

These are the people who control the media these days, and it ain't pretty.

When I read the part of his quote, ""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," he, Griffin is talking about himself and his crush on Keith.

When the vitriol season opened this year and Olbermann headed up the effort my viewing habits changed.

The fact that he bought into the spin about the Clintons - which was probably in part true but nowhere near what he and others described - brought me to the conclusion that he is kind of sucker - easily duped - and easily manipulated.

I can't blame anyone for being a fool.  I can blame our current media environment and the conglomerates for producing and offering up so many of them though.  But, let's face it - the only reason people are really mad at Olbermann is that he was one of "our" fools and he became a disappointment.  The reality is that there are next to no really clever journalists or pundits on TV anymore.  That has pretty much been the status quo for sometime now.

I saw that "shoehorn her way in" comment when it ran live.  All I could think was how stupid he sounded suggesting that anyone running as she did with the votes etc. was shoehorning was preposterous.  He sounded like the cool guy on the football team who was upset that some freshman could pass better than he could.  Invoking kewl kidz popularity over skill which is pretty much how this whole primary went.

It was the accuracy of the allegations made against her that irked everyone - the RFK comment mind-reading, the taking her into a room comment, the "racist fairytale" fairytale, passport gate nonsense and all the undeniably SEXIST CRAP we heard and saw coming over their airwaves.

MSNBC should probably start watching, I dunno, fricking MSNBC sometimes. They might learn a little something about their own network.

His election night coverage was especially savagely biased. I thought I was taking crazy pills watching a "respected" journalist bash Hillary with reckless abandon to a degree he made Brokaw and Tweety pull back and blush.

During the primary I sometimes heard the pundits spin on a debate or speech before going back to watch the recorded event.  I remember more than once thinking did they hear/see the same thing I did?!

I probably recommended the show to a hundred of my friends and colleagues.  I liked the eclectic nature of the show, the segment with the dancing pigs and world's largest ball of string, the running jokes like "comedian Rush Limbaugh" and  "another (celebrity) story my producers made me cover".  I admired their persistence in covering the Plame story and Abu Ghraib when few other TV sources were.

Keith's first Special Comment felt completely genuine to me and had tremendous impact.  But then he started cranking them out like clockwork and they lost the sense of outrage.  There was also a point -- I think just before Keith started posting on dKos himself -- where I began to feel that Countdown was taking a lot of cues on ideas and talking points from the front page at dKos.  As the primary season began, I found the show increasingly uninteresting.  It wasn't the anti-Clinton bias per se -- although I always liked her, she was not initially my favorite candidate.  It was that they would seem to devote most of a show to some triviality like the sniper-fire thing, for several days in a row.  Even if I agreed with it, why would I watch it?

I haven't watched it now since March, I think.  And despite what Phil Griffin says, most professional broadcasters will tell you that when you lose an audience, you rarely get it back.  Maybe, if the reason you lost them was that they were temporarily watching American Idol, or your regular host was sick.  But if the essential qualities of your program make people want to change the channel?  Those people don't come back.

After the New Hampshire Primary, he reminded the others at MSNBC that he had been right.

Somewhere between Nevada and South Carolina, he took a turn to Obama.

Olbermann in general is too dramatic, too overwrought....I like it when he is wry; outraged, not so much.

When he was at ESPN working with Dan Patrick, he became so wound up it just burned him out, as he has described it.

  The first time I saw the outraged KO as commentator was after the 1989 earthquake that collapsed portions of a double decker freeway in the Bay Area.  Olbermann was the local sportscaster at the CBS affiliate in LA.  He was outragaed that the World Series between Oakland and the San Francisco Giants was not going to be postponed--and he loves baseball.  What struck me was how extreme his reaction seemed to be; he was close to a rage and defiantly said he would donate a week's salary to the victims....

And not sucking up the media yet leading with the voters.

Step aside, people, this looks like a job for

:: shirt rending ::

this "typical, bitter 'old' white woman" can find plenty of places to go at 8PM weekdays.

This doesn't mean new outlets will be any different than blog outlets for similar bigotry and lack of journalism. But what it will mean is even more choices and variety.

Where is the media coverage of the Senate report on prewar intelligence?   Where is their real sensible review of the various platforms like health care, economics etc?  Where is the review of the press during the lead up to the war?

Olberman is a talking head like Glenn Beck, O'Reilly, and Lou Dobbs, they rile up people and get folks to watch them.  He has been this way for some time.

But we also have a Democratic party and liberal media who think progressives are disposable; they can violate our trust, kick us around, but we've got no where else to go so they're not worried because they say we'll be back. We'll continue to watch MSNBC, continue to vote for a party who kicked one of their own to the door.

If you take into consideration the public pulse,collectively it has the potential to take any one down in days, whoever and whatever, i.e. Oprah after she endorsed Obama lost some of her female audience.

What's incredulous is that all of this is not a bigger media story, but the public pulse and some in the media who have an ethical bone left are sending schock waves nevertheless. The pulse is beating out, "They can't tell us what to think, how to vote, decide elections in our stead, they can't."

The saddest thing about Olberman is the embarrassment of watching an ego that huge. To fancy himself on the same scale as legendary newscaster Edward R. Murrow; to have hijacked the CBS newscaster's iconic "good night, and good luck" sign-off; to think that he has anywhere near the courage and integrity that made Murrow a true hero...it's sad.

I remember Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor, Roger Mudd, and others who took the broadcasting of news as a solemn responsibility, as a true service to the citizens of this country, representing the fourth estate. I remember when you could trust the news, when rarely (for better or worse) was heard any opinion on TV; the appearance of non-bias being essential to credibility. I remember the excitement of the conventions and having the machinations on the floor explained to us. I remember the Apollo missions, the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy -  times when the country came together and these newscasters truly helped us to understand, to celebrate, to mourn, and to heal. They were key pieces of everyone's memories of these events.

Olberman is just another sign of the decadence the media. TV news is a joke, a farce, a shame, a pity - and to use an Olbermanish phrase - an abomination.

He may not be a nice guy, but KO is good TV; he understands that people love drama; they love conflict, and he's more than willing to engage in guerilla tactics to entertain his audience. Had he chosen Sen. Clinton over Obama, I sense that it would be the same story just reversed; Keith would have annoyed Barack's camp just as much. That's what he does, and it works.

He just beat O'Reilly for the first time ever in the 25-54 demo (O'Reilly was on vacation), so we'll see how the new Clinton boycott works out. I think it might just increase his numbers. Some will watch to see him continue to needle Clinton, and some of her supporters will continue to go back, watching for the newest ourtrage.

I don't believe that Obama was any more vile towards Clinton than she was to him.

I don't believe that the campaign of one woman is larger than the goals that liberals aim to achieve.  

He still feels that things weren't really so bad, that his news team (or whatever you call the crap they dish out) was relatively unbiased.

He also feels that the watchers will come back - after all, where else will they go?

Also, for the New Yorker article to suggest that Olbermann is the only guy that Clinton supporters can go to is ridiculous. Has the guy who wrote that crap ever heard of Dan Abrams? Abrams is definitely a liberal and fair to Clinton. He has done countless segments about media bias towards Clinton but he is fair and did segments about media bias against Obama over the endless coverage of his pastor. So, I would suggest that Clinton fans can watch him without wanting to puke.