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Olbermann snipes back at Chris Wallace and Fox News - TCA Report
by Joel Keller, posted Jul 21st 2008 12:23PM
I caught up to Keith Olbermann at NBC's all star party last night, and talked to him a little bit about the election, the origin of his "Special Comments," and getting back to doing highlights with Dan Patrick. More on that in a few days. But the first thing on my mind was if he read the comments uttered by Fox News' Chris Wallace earlier in the tour, notably that MSNBC's election coverage was biased because commentators like Olbermann are used as anchors."Oh yeah, I thought they were disingenuous and ill-informed," he told me, "because during the primaries as I'm sitting there, and we have the other monitors on, and a couple of weeks at least I saw O'Reilly on in the middle of the primaries, one week Laura Ingrahm filling in for O'Reilly, and Hannity and Colmes at 9:00. It's the same thing, whether you officially say, 'Well, this is not our election coverage between 8 and 10, but between 6 and 7 was, and 10 to 12 was ... ' It's a game being played that's pretty silly."
He feels that he's specifically a target because his show Countdown is doing so well. "Our show is, usually, on a given night, second or third in the demo in cable news. In a field in which nobody's ever been competitive with O'Reilly, we've closed the gap on him in this, from not being on the same horizon to standing pretty much a foot behind him, of course they're going to attack me. And to be absolutely fair, I spend about half my time attacking them. So if they didn't respond, I would be surprised." He doesn't think the "venom" used is any worse now than it was has been at either of his stints at MSNBC.
When I asked about Wallace's remark that MSNBC was "in the tank" for Barack Obama, Olbermann didn't spare any words. "It's a talking point. I mean, (Fox News chief) John Moody issues talking points to his staff every day." Even Wallace, a guy who's made a reputation over the last three decades or so as a hard-nosed journalist? "Well, he's not at NBC, CBS, or ABC right now. There's a reason for that. Nobody held on to him."
Ouch. He told me that there was stuff that Wallace has done in the past that he had a lot of respect for, "but this stuff was, as I said ... he didn't know what was going on at his own network."
As for the "in the tank" remark, Olberman said that "I found it hilarious because, as late as January I was regularly being accused of being "in the tank" for Clinton. If you criticize somebody, it does not mean that you're "in the tank" for the other candidate, as if you criticize somebody, you're biased against that person. I don't think that everybody who was critical of Obama was a racist, and I don't think that everybody who was critical of Hillary Clinton was a sexist."
Like I said, more with Olbermann in a few days. He's quite the chatty guy, as you'd expect.
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