Back in the summer of 1989, I landed an internship at a certain glossy music magazine. I won’t name it here now, but I’ve done so before, so if you really give a damn, you can probably figure it out. In any case, a huge part of why I was so excited to work at said magazine was because of several articles I’d read by a certain staff writer who I’ll also not name right now. I found their work to be scintillating, insouciant and ever on-point. When I actually got to the magazine and met the writer in question, however, it was a real bucket of cold water in the face. While their writing remained entirely informative, inspiring and entertaining, their personality left huge amounts to be desired, and they treated all and sundry with disdain and borderline contempt. It was a total let down.
Years later, I landed a staff position at what they were then-calling MSNBC Digital, acting as a homepage editor for the website of “The TODAY Show." In retrospect, the stark dichotomy between the sunny sensibility of said morning program and my own interests and predilections should have amply spelled out that I was pretty much doomed to fail at this job, but hey … a gig’s a gig. I tried to keep my pointed, contrary opinions about its content and programming to myself (no easy feat, and one I did not always master), and got on with it. I lasted about four years, and was squeezed out ignominiously. That particular chapter was not much fun and still smarts after all these years.
But when I was just getting started at TODAY dot com, a large, initially-perceived perk — for me, at least — was the concept of working literally just down the hall from Keith Olbermann, the … at-the-time … angrily eloquent mouthpiece of the Liberal Left. Having originally gotten his start in sports journalism — a field about which I know nothing, and care even less about — Keith had gradually distinguished himself as an insightful and incisive political commentator, one who pulled no punches, but delivered his simmering editorials with incredulous aplomb. During his years hosting MSNBC’s “Countdown,” his was a voice I’d regularly pay attention to, speaking what I considered to be finely sharpened truth to power.
As such, I was pretty amped to meet the guy and maybe shoot the shit around the water cooler, so to speak. Suffice to say, this fanciful scenario was never going to be on the menu.
While an amiable-if-sardonic presence on the television screen every evening, Keith Olbermann stalked around the windowless halls of that corner of 30 Rockefeller Plaza like Darth Vader onboard an Imperial Star Destroyer. He did not engage in witty banter — let alone eye-contact — with the junior staffers and woe unto thee who dared try to make casual conversation in the men’s room. To say the atmosphere was uncomfortably chilly around the man is an observation of charitable understatement. Much as with that afore-cited writer at the glossy music mag I’d interned at decades earlier, I did not end up befriending, chatting with, accosting or bugging the man in any capacity. End of story.
Evidently, it was not just the meager digital flunkies like myself who were put off. Keith Olbermann ended up leaving the auspices of MSNBC, but not because he was boorishly stand-offish, but rather over donations he made to the campaigns of Democratic congressmen. From there, he acrimoniously hopscotched to a host of different outlets — notably Current TV and GQ, for short spells — before landing back at ESPN. Given that I don’t give a rat’s ass about sports, I didn’t follow his progress there.
So, yeah, even though my own strikingly limited interaction with him wasn’t especially positive, it’s to be remembered that it’s sometimes better to not meet your heroes. But while I wouldn’t necessarily want to work in a cubicle outside his office, I still think the man’s political observations are well worth listening to, however floridly expressed they may be.
Newly released from his contract at ESPN, Keith has just launched his own YouTube Channel wherein he’ll be sounding off on the remaining days before the impending election, as we plunge headlong in a Hellish death-spiral into the gaping maw of chaos.
Here’s his first episode and — typically — he ain’t wrong.
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