The Los Angeles Times made a rather humorous error in their TV listings and some, depending on what they personally think of MSNBC talking head Keith Olbermann, may not have noticed the difference.

Their TV listings for Thursday listed Jackass in the time slot where Countdown with Keith Olbermann should have been. The paper issued a correction the following day, disappointing thousands of easily hammered frat boys (including me) who thought MTV's nightly cavalcade of nut shots and poo fights had returned to television on another network.

Olbermann was OK with the mistake until one of the paper's bloggers used it as a political parry against him and his network. That launched the MSNBC host into a personal tirade against the blogger and anything else that happened to saunter into the path of Olbermann's angry spittle cannon.

Andrew Malcolm, a writer for The Times' political blog Top of the Ticket, noted that without the correction "a few thousand people might have tuned into MSNBC, the Obama administration's favorite cable channel, expecting to see a Jackass show, and instead they'd have found Olbermann." I know I was disappointed. I thought I was finally going to get to watch Olbermann do a little blindfolded skateboarding or take a spin on the crapper sled.

Olbermann took to the airwaves and launched a rebuttal against Malcolm by lumping him and his struggling newspaper in his daily "Worst Person in the World" segment.


I've noticed this trend developing on MSNBC and their arch-nemesis Fox News. It is slowly becoming my biggest pet peeve behind coffee houses that don't give out stirrers and force you to use your finger and pushy Jehovah's Witnesses who talk like they were trained by used car salesmen.

Whenever a network or newspaper calls out either MSNBC or Fox on something, their immediate rebuttal is to spout how much better they are doing in the ratings than them. Stop it already. That is not news. It is petty. It is self-serving. It is childish. It is, at its most mature, a company memo that they are sharing with their customers. So unless I'm allowed to attend the next MSNBC Christmas party, there is no reason to share it with the rest of us.