'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Jan 3, 2005

Host: Keith Olbermann

Updated: TRANSCRIPT PENDING
Guests: Jonathan Turley, Mo Rocca

OLBYWATCH GUIDE: It appears that Keith thinks the tsunami a little more important than he did a week ago, when he only devoted 11 minutes to the item. This time it was both the #5 and the #4 stories. (Does it bother anyone that the inane format of this hour makes the most important news of the day #5 and something frivolous and trivial #1?) For the most part Keith let the disaster story tell itself, although after running an amateur video he oddly commented:

We apologize for the inadvertent broadcasting there of an obscenity.

Inadvertent? From a video tape? Whatever. Then, since NBC slept on the tsunami story for days before bothering even to send a reporter to the scene, KO had to rely on outside sources. He got a phone report from a journalist for Agence France Presse (but of course!); a call from a Washington Post reporter degenerated into indecipherable digital noise.

The Jonathan Turley interview was interesting--but not as interesting as the one Turley did with Fox on the identical subject last week (to a much larger audience). Last week's news, this week! But just when it seemed Keith might disappoint us entirely, he gave us a tantalizing bit of breaking news:

On Thursday of this week there will be a fair chance that a member of the US Senate will co-sign what will be at least a symbolic challenge to the electoral votes from the state of Ohio.

Yes, the news is that there will be a "fair chance". Keith is not your average, mild-mannered reporter: he tells you not just what happened, but what might happen, based on his impeccable sources--in this case, John Conyers! We must have missed KO's reporting about how there's a "fair chance" that a meteor could hit Mount Rushmore, or that a penny could land on heads eight times in a row. Is the chance that Bill Clinton is a rapist fair, or better than fair? Tomorrow, on Countdown!