No wonder Keith Olbermann has been, from time to time, found cowering under his desk. Because I am a glutton for punishment, I watched the Olbermann Q&A interview on C-SPAN.org earlier today. What really struck me is how conflicted KO really is and how this might help explain his sometimes irrational behavior. He's got a lot of great advice for people...too bad he never applies it to himself.

IGNORE CRITICISM FROM THOSE WITH SMALLER AUDIENCES THAN YOU

What Keith Says...

"When I attack Bill O'Reilly or criticize him for something that he said on the air...if I punch upwards at FOX News, the clever response, the cynical and brilliant response is to just ignore. Like, well, why do we have to worry, they have one-seventh of our audience? [but] they attack. Bill O’Reilly's agent calls the head of NBC week after week saying, you have got to get Olbermann to stop this, as if for some reason there are rules here...these are the people who have suspended the rules and they want the referee to step in protect them against my little pinky."

NOTE TO KEITH: I opted not to report the calls to Tribune Broadcasting...yet.

What Keith Does...

Olbermann response to Bob Kur on Howard Kurtz's profile of Olbermann in The Washington Post:

"Olbermann told Kurtz he had no problem with the story, but then said there was one thing he didn't like: the conservative Olbermann critic in the piece, Robert Cox and crew at Olbermann Watch, which he protested is 'a site created to mock me.'...He claimed that when a commenter went after Cox, Cox put up "information of a personal nature" up against him, so 'he's not a reliable observer of my work.'"

QUOTE PEOPLE ACCURATELY

What Keith Says...

Lloyd Grove, his assistant Katherine Thomson, and their employers at The New York Daily News...are guilty of taking quotes out of context in such an egregious manner -- and ignoring an extraordinary conflict of interest for Ms. Thomson -- that what they published wouldn’t have gotten past the editor of my 4th Grade Class Newspaper.

What Keith Does...

What Keith claimed about Brit Hume: "Your runner-up [for 'Worst Person in the World'], Brit Hume. Another reason that the phrase Fox News Channel is just a brand name, not a description. Hume criticized as 'excessive' the TV coverage of Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela because, he said, Robertson has 'no influence.' Probably why Fox has had Robertson on their network ten times in the last year."

What Brit Hume actually said: "Televangelist Pat Robertson's political influence may have been declining since he came in second in the Iowa Republican caucuses 17 years ago and he may have no clout with the Bush administration, but you wouldn't know that from watching CNN today. CNN covered his call for Hugo Chavez's assassination at length, undeterred by the fact that during the noon hour CNN's own analyst, Bill Schneider, said Robertson had little influence."

BE FAIR AND HONEST

What Keith Says...

I tried to be fair and honest and as accurate and as informed as possible, and allow my viewer to be the same way.

What Keith Does...

What Keith claimed about Bill O'Reilly: [he] "told his audience that on Election Night [Nov. 2nd, 2004], at this hour, nine times as many Americans were watching Fox News as were watching MSNBC. Actually, they had seven and a half million viewers at 8 Eastern last Tuesday, and we had 2.6. That wouldn't be nine times as many...that would be less than three times as many. Too bad Billy isn't as good with a calculator -- or a brain -- as he is with a loofah
What Bill O'Reilly said...

What Bill O'Reilly actually said: "Last night [Nov. 3rd, 2004], on the Fox News Channel, at 8 o'clock, the Factor time, nine times as many Americans watched us as MSNBC. Nine times."

NOTE: Cable News Ratings for Nov. 3rd, 2004 - The Factor: 5,400,000 viewers; Countdown: 596,000 viewers (a greater than 9:1 ratio)

DON'T OVER SIMPLIFY

What Keith Says...

"What he [Bill O'Reilly] does on the air, everything is a simplification. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about inspiring fear in people, both in terms of what the world is going to be like, and also what the rest of the media is like. And I don’t hate him. I’m entertained, to some degree, by him. I wouldn’t watch him with a gun pointed to my head because I - people watch and actually think they’re hearing the truth.

What Keith Does...

"There is a whole army of bloggers, radio hosts and TV people who have decided that any deviation from their political view is to be persecuted - and the "Olbermann Watch" and Bozell jokers are foremost among them."

STAND UP FOR YOUR PRINCIPLES

What Keith Says...

"On occasion you need to stand up and say, I’m not going to feel right about this if I do it, and I’m not going to feel right about it for the rest of my life. And it’s violating my principles and I want to say something and I want to do something now. And it’s going to put me at person risk"

What Keith Does...

I was prepared to do it [quit MSNBC over covering the Clinton Sex Scandal]. And I have always felt that I was, you know, two or three crises of conscience -- or consciousness, but you know, two or three moments away from saying, no, sorry, I’m out...[but I] said, all right, Keith, you have got eight months to go, they owe you $100,000 a month, you can shoot your mouth off to the magazines and the newspapers right now, feel really good about it for about 20 minutes, and they get to keep the money.
Or, you can keep the money, you get $100,000 a month until the end of the year, at which time you can spend the rest of your life shooting your mouth off about these people. Every day of my life I would have taken the option that allowed me to keep the money, every day of my life. I’m not that crazy, never have been, never will, and I would hope anybody given that situation would say, this is my point about moral force, seriously. You don’t have to operate it immediately. You do not have to operate it in terms of destroying yourself or not taking advantage of the lotto ticket that has just been handed. You can keep that money, do something with it later on.