On the jump, most of the transcript between the founder of C-SPAN and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who continues to demonstrate why he's both too good for cable and perfectly suited to cable, especially as a thorn on the TV grid directly adjacent to Fox's Bill O'Reilly.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
C-SPAN’S “Q&A”
Host: Brian Lamb
Guest:
Keith Olbermann, host, MSNBC’s “Countdown”
AIR DATE: SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2006
AIR TIME: 8 P.M. & 11 P.M. ET
USE WITH ATTRIBUTION TO C-SPAN’S Q& A
Copyrighted material: use with attribution only
© NCSC
BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Keith Olbermann, this is one of your quotes from the past: "My ego has always operated on all cylinders."
KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST, MSNBC’S "COUNTDOWN": Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
OLBERMANN: And your point on that being what?
LAMB: But why would you say that?
OLBERMANN: Because it's true. I think it gives people an insight into not only what I'm doing, but also my business and the things that are necessary. It's what would ordinarily be personality disorders in other fields can be useful, productive things for society if you channel them correctly and if you acknowledge them.
So I, you know, say a lot of things like that.
...
LAMB: How many in the family? What do your parents do?OLBERMANN: My parents, my sister and I, were and are the family. My folks are both retired. My father is an architect, one of the, I don’t' know, two or three dozen in the country who did not go to college and still became an architect, took him 20 years to do it.
My mother off and on throughout my lifetime has been a teacher, usually of young kids, although I would never think of her in those terms, she is just mom. And she was the big sports fan in the family.
And my sister, who is nine
years younger than I am, is -- was herself a teacher and is married
in Rochester, New York, with a son, my nephew Jake.
And that's the whole set, there
are very few others. If you are named Olbermann and I don't know
you already, the odds are we are still, you know, blood relatives.
LAMB: Now you have told
somebody you have signed 14 contracts in your 27 years of professionalism.
OLBERMANN: Yes, CNN,
one, two, you know, I think that's right -- that might even be low.
That might have been before the last one or two, but yes, that's about
right. I think a lot of people have signed that many.
And I have been in this --
counting college where we had a professional radio station at Cornell,
I have been in this business for 30 years. So, you know, two or
three years on a contract, 14 is a reasonable number, isn't it?
(LAUGHTER)
...
...LAMB: Sold you? [regarding 1998 when he left NBC for Fox]
OLBERMANN: Sold me. I was -- as you may have seen recently, Al Michaels, the sportscaster, was traded by ABC to NBC for some old cartoons. I was sold by Dick Ebersol, the head of sports for NBC to FOX.
I might add I was sold for
a million dollars. It was a very nice experience, like being a
utility infielder, being swapped from one ball club to the other.
LAMB: I mean, did they pay you a million dollars to sell you or did…
OLBERMANN: No, no, they
gave -- no, no, FOX gave NBC a million dollars. What they gave
me was something that was between me and FOX. We had to negotiate
a deal. But I was literally -- to compensate NBC for -- I don't
know, for giving in -- I don't know, I never really understood what
they wanted the million dollars for. They were recouping advertising
expenses or something like that. And so I wound up traded.
LAMB: MSNBC may quarrel
with this, but I remember when it started, what, about 10 years ago?
OLBERMANN: Ninety-six, we are coming up on the 10th anniversary, yes.
LAMB: And I remember
every night they had a program at 8:00 where they had a big name.
OLBERMANN: Yes.
LAMB: Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric…
OLBERMANN: "Internight," it was called "Internight."
LAMB: "Internight." It had no audience.
OLBERMANN: Yes.
LAMB: Thirty thousand
people some nights. And then all of a sudden something called
the death of Princess Di happened. Five straight months, all day
all night, Princess Di, the ratings went 10 times higher.
OLBERMANN: And even in those occasions when the ratings did not go that high, the recognition factor what MSNBC was went through the roof. Two factors in play there. Number one, big names from broadcast television do not translate to big ratings on cable.
As you know, it's an entirely
different world. It is a world of loyalty. It is a world
of affection. It is a world of people feeling as if somehow you
are intruding on them in cable until they get to know you.
And this was the mistake at
the beginning of the planning of MSNBC. Well, we are just going
to throw out the big names and everybody will -- gasp, it's Tom Brokaw,
interviewing -- I don't care who he's interviewing, it's Tom Brokaw.
It didn't work, nobody watched. And the original plan, I got there on the air about a month after Diana died, but I was supposed to take over that show that you are describing that had this -- I think it was basically 10 rotating hosts, filmed interviews, Costas, Bill Moyers, Brokaw, Jane Pauley, Katie Couric, everybody in the NBC family…
LAMB: Ed Gordon.
OLBERMANN: Ed Gordon, yes. And then they just said, no, we need a live show instead, let's get this sportscaster guy. So I took in -- I came to that role. And we hit, because of that Lewinsky story, as, you know, previously the whole network had hit because of the Diana story, the Lewinsky story just sort of catapulted me into some sort of prominence there.
The ratings were spectacular, and they didn't want to let go of the ratings. But what they missed in the equation was they had identified -- the audience has identified with somebody new. They don't necessarily want Tom Brokaw. You don't throw a big name from broadcast news or broadcast television at them.
And despite the quick successes that we had there, that unfortunately taught them to expect quick successes. So I left there, as an example of this, December 2nd or 3rd, 1998, was my last show first time around.
My first show the second time
around was March 31st, 2003. So that's a period of not much more
than four years. At 8:00 p.m. there were 17 different shows in
those four years. How are you going to build an audience of any
kind when it takes about three years per show before people will say,
all right, we don't hate you so much, maybe we will watch?
That's the history of MSNBC
in a nutshell. We finally figured it out about three years ago.
Just let it alone for a while and then people will tune in.
LAMB: Quote, Keith Olbermann: "I loathe FOX."
OLBERMANN: I do. I worked there. I had an idea before I worked there what they were doing to the news business and how cynical they were about television, but I really had no idea until after I had worked within that company just how bad it was.
LAMB: Let me run a clip, Roger Ailes appeared on this program at the end of the year before last. Let's watch what he had to say.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROGER AILES, CHAIRMAN/CEO, FOX NEWS: I think FOX News has come on the scene and identified itself as fair and balanced. We try to do that every day. I think others, instead of trying to get more fair and balanced, probably are offended by that or worried about it.
You know, we get attacked and we get copied, usually at the same time by the same people. And basically it's fear that we are doing something they are not doing. And they try to pretend that we are doing something political that they are not doing, but that's nonsense.
We have been around eight years. We are not retracting stories. We don't have a former attorney general looking into us to try to determine how we screwed it up. We are just doing the news every day.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
OLBERMANN: Contained in that, and you could analyze -- we could play it several times again and I could stop it at moments like the Zapruder film and say, well now, here, this -- what he just said there means -- if you noticed, there is no way for him to describe FOX and FOX News without taking a shot at somebody else.
He has got references to CBS
and the Dan Rather memo story from 2004. He has got shots at other
broadcast networks, the other cable operations, political parties, political
interests, it is from the point of view of they are all against you
and we are the only ones telling you the truth.
That's the fundamental -- it's
the inspiration of fear in people, that they are being mislead.
I have been in broadcasting for 30 years, your greatest danger from
watching television is from watching somebody who is tired and says
something wrong. The ability to -- the necessary structure to
manipulate a message, liberal or conservative, is very hard to maintain.
They have done a fairly good
job at maintaining it. Occasionally they wander off into -- you
know, away from their preferred political points of view, but the idea
that there are vast structures designed to foment liberal causes, I
mean, no one in 1998, no one accused me of being a liberal in 1998 because
I was covering the Clinton-Lewinsky story.
And whatever I had to do about
it, I tried to be fair and honest and as accurate and as informed as
possible, and allow my viewer to be the same way. And nowadays
it's the same thing. And now all of a sudden I'm a screaming liberal.
LAMB: We have got some other quotes about FOX from you: "Fortunately for the free world, News Corp.," which owns FOX, "is very aggressive but ultimately not very bright."
OLBERMANN: Yes, they are somewhat self-destructive. And that's the best hope for mankind, relative to them. In other words, you know, Bill O'Reilly, who has an audience at 8:00 that even with recent programming gains on the part of my show, the total audience that he has is still, what, six, seven times what we are doing.
Even -- as FOX and News Corp. put it, the "money demo," the 25 to 54-year-old news viewers who don't watch news, even there they are still about double what we are doing. [That means O'Reilly's padding his lead with older viewers. That can't make Fox News too happy--AB]
When I attack Bill O'Reilly or criticize him for something that he said on the air, some ludicrous suggestion like, you know, we should let al Qaeda go in and blow up San Francisco because he doesn't like San Francisco, I mean, just lunatic things, 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? 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.
We have -- these are the people who have suspended the rules and they want the referee to step in protect them against my little pinky.
LAMB: More quotes.
This is about Rupert Murdoch: "His covey of flying monkeys do something
journalistically atrocious every hour of the day."
OLBERMANN: Yes.
I think that's probably true. I think -- well, sometimes they
miss. They are sometimes -- there are a few hours in a row where
there might not be a flying monkey appearing, devastating society.
LAMB: Doesn't this work for both of you?
OLBERMANN: I don't think so. I haven't met a lot of flying monkeys at NBC. I have met people who -- and by the way, this is the great freedom and the great protection of American broadcasting, commercial broadcasting, we made a mistake in the '20s.
We let broadcasting in this
country develop with commercial broadcasting taking the lead and all
other kinds of information on radio or television secondary or tertiary.
But the protection of money at the center of everything, including news
to the degree that it is now, is that as long as you make the money,
they don't care what it is you put on the air.
They don't care. There are people I know in the hierarchy of NBC, the company, and GE, the company, who do not like to see the current presidential administration criticized at all.
Anybody who knew anything about American history and stepped out at any point in American history and got an assessment of this presidential administration would say, yes, I don't know how much they need to be criticized, but they need to be criticized to some degree.
There are people who I work for who would prefer, who would sleep much easier at night if this never happened. On the other hand, if they look at my ratings and my ratings are improved and there is criticism of the president of the United States, they are happy.
If my ratings went up because there was no criticism of the president of the United States, they would be happy.
...LAMB: We know a lot about
you, but we don't know anything about your personal life. I'm
not sure you want us to know that. Are you married?
OLBERMANN: I'm single.
I am a 47-year-old bachelor. This is not something I'm proud of,
it has just worked out that way. I have been endeavoring to make
it happen otherwise, but through some bad choices by myself and by certain
women, here I stand unshorn with, you know, no rings on my fingers.
LAMB: There is one incident
in your life, I think it was 1981 that I want to talk a little bit about,
and that is getting your head caught in the doors of the subway.
OLBERMANN: No…
LAMB: Is that -- no?
OLBERMANN: No, no, well…
LAMB: What happened?
OLBERMANN: All right,
OK. Well, I'm going to have to refresh my…
LAMB: Because it obviously changed your life.
OLBERMANN: Yes.
That phrase -- you may have heard the phrase, don't run for a train,
there will always be another one. That's a warning. That
one means business. At Shea Stadium in New York, if you come out
of the press entrance, the train there, this New York City subway train
is elevated, as much of the subway system is, even though we call it
a "subway," millions of people get on board an elevated subway
everyday and never stop to think about this and protest it.
From a certain point you can
see the train coming from the last stop on the line going back into
Times Square. I had a job as a sportscaster at a radio network
and I was a little late. I also had a job part-time as a photographer.
It's 1980 -- August 1980. I was 21 years old.
And the trains shot past Shea
Stadium once every half an hour or so and I didn't want to wait because
I was going to be late. So I ran for the train, and literally
running from a certain point near Shea Stadium, if you run at breakneck
speed, which is when I learned they call it "breakneck speed"
for a reason too, you run up a set of stairs, across a viaduct, up another
set of stairs, and there, bless me, was the train waiting for me.
No damage so far, no head injuries sustained. My mistake was I decided to celebrate that I had defeated time and the train was waiting for me. So leaped on board. I'm six-three-and-a-half. The doorway of the train comes about here on me anyway.
(INDICATES TOP OF HEAD)
OLBERMANN: So I caught the doorway as I descended right here.
(INDICATES FOREHEAD)
OLBERMANN: There wasn't a lot of blood, it hurt, there wasn't a lot of stitches. I had a concussion, six months went by, the concussion symptoms passed. Didn't seem to be a big problem. Then I noticed a little nausea at odd times in the next couple of years, but one day at the U.S. Open, right across the street from Shea Stadium, on the other side of the same subway station, two years later covering the U.S. Open where you watched tennis like this for 16 days.
(HEAD MOVES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT TO LEFT AGAIN)
OLBERMANN: You know, I look over here.
(LOOKS TO LEFT)
OLBERMANN: And this eye is still looking out that way.
(INDICATES RIGHT)
OLBERMANN: That hurts, too. Now I have got the reverse of crossed eyes. I'm Marty Feldman and I'm walking around with my hand in front of my eyes for a couple of days. My optometrist starts laughing when I tell him this story.
I said, well, what is the joke? He said, I have to send you to the best muscle ophthalmologist in New York City. Sure, fine, whatever you like, please make it stop. He said, you don't know who that is?
I said, I have left my knowledge
of my muscle ophthalmologists in my other suit, doc. He said,
you have just gone to the tennis for 16 days, covering tennis, and this
is where this happened? Yes. I'm sending you to Dr. Renee
Richards (ph), the transsexual tennis player.
I said, I don't care if you are sending me to a monkey smoking a cigar wearing a stethoscope. I go in to see Dr. Renee Richards, it's two years after this head injury at the train and I'm not even thinking about it. I don't even put it on my history, and she comes and gets this gigantic device, looks in my eyes and says, did you hit your head in August or September of 1980?
And I said, last week of August. That's why I couldn't be sure when, she said, OK, I knew I would see one of these cases eventually. She proceeds to tell me that what I have managed to do by hitting it in exactly the right spot is I have essentially broken my inner ear. That's the very, very simplest way of describing it.
If your gas tank measure on your car always said empty, whether you had any gas in that tank or not, that's what my inner ear says. In motion I have no way of perceiving depth past about 15 miles an hour, so I can't drive and I'm a kind of terrified passenger because things suddenly appear to be closer to me than they really are.
LAMB: And how else does it affect you in your work?
OLBERMANN: I think it might have made me slightly crazy, I'm not sure. It might have improved my syntax, I'm not sure. It improved my hearing. It clearly improved my hearing. What else it did, there have been no other damage that I know of.
LAMB: So you don't drive.
OLBERMANN: I don't drive and I lived in L.A. for 10 years without it, and by the end of the first four or five years I was living there, I had friends of mine coming up, saying, can you show me exactly how to do that to my head so I don't have to drive here, either?
(LAUGHTER)
LAMB: So how did you do it, then?
OLBERMANN: Well, in L.A. -- I mean, how did I get around in L.A.?
LAMB: How do you move around, yes.
OLBERMANN: In L.A. it's a buyer's market when it comes to cabs. If you call up and ask for a cab, they will say, well, what color car do you want? Any particular driver? What side of the street? Do you like this license plate number better than the other? It's a buyer's market there. It's easy to do it. And there are parts of the community you can live without a car.
...LAMB: Who invented "Countdown"?
OLBERMANN: The idea was
Neal Shapiro's. He was the previous president of NBC News, and
he liked -- this is the way a lot of things happen in television.
He had a show called "Countdown to Iraq." And he liked the
concept of it. He liked the name "Countdown."
Then we sent troops into Iraq, and you couldn't have a show called "Countdown to Iraq" anymore because we were already there. So he said, how are we going to keep a show on the air called "Countdown"? I like it. What could we do that would be "Countdown"? We will number the stories, but we will put them in backwards, five, four, three, two or one.
One of his ideas actually had us going as high as 70, numbering them backwards from 70. And I thought, someday you are going to have me saying that the president of the United States has resigned in our 70th story on the "Countdown" tonight.
But he just said, I would like
you to do it, do it in your style. Here are my contributions.
Call it "Countdown." I want numbers. Go backwards.
And the opening line of the open should be, "which of these stories
are you going to be talking about tomorrow?"
LAMB: How much do you have to say about the content?
OLBERMANN: As much as I want, basically. It is -- I don't know what happened, maybe I shouldn't say this aloud or it will all stop, but for some reason after 25 years of professional broadcasting in which people have told me, no, no, you can't do it that way, this is one where they come to me and they say, how shall we do it, Keith?
And to the degree that I want to be involved in the preparation, I used to be very hands-on, the first meetings in the morning I would actually put the rundown together and say, there is your fifth story, your fourth story, your third story. I soon discovered that was causing my hair to fall out in large chunks and I'm much better off letting a very able staff do that preparation work.
LAMB: How many work on the program?
OLBERMANN: Probably full-time
in terms of editorial content, no more than about a dozen of us.
LAMB: And how much of it do you write?
OLBERMANN: It varies.
I have written as much as 100 percent. I have literally written
every word in a one-hour newscast when we have had people out sick or
something. I have written everything from that -- the open I always
write, which you heard there. And then there might be 6,000 words
in the show, I try to keep it down below 3,000. I try to keep
it below 50 percent, but I rarely succeed in that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Now the thing that is
– anybody's that watched it for years – that you see there at the
end is a trademark of yours, throwing paper in the air or just wadding
something up and throwing it at the camera. What's that all about?
OLBERMANN: I wish I knew. It started with the – with the wadding of the paper at the end of the show. That – I think there was in the old studio at MSNBC, the same one you just saw in the clip there, but the equipment doesn't work anymore. There was on the roof there was a track camera, a remote operated camera that (INAUDIBLE) something out of 2001, out of the movie. That just rolled around, this little white nodule that hung from the ceiling. And, at the end of the show if there was 30 seconds to kill, I would just start wadding up my paper and try to hit this thing.
And it was, you know, the height
of about 20, 30 feet. It was – I did it, I think once in a period
of 14 months – that I actually hit the thing. That's I believe
where it came from. People have read symbolism into it that there's,
you know, it's some sort of anti-news, anti-television gesture.
Something that – try to break down the wall with – no it's just
trying to hit the moving camera, that's all it was. And then this
thing where – throwing the papers up at the end of the news maker
segment which is in the middle of the show, I should point out, that's
just being on camera with nothing to say or do and there's nothing worse
than television than just a shot of – I was watching some old tapes
the other night with a friend, of newscasts that I did in 1987, and
there was a 30 second bump at the end of a segment for a commercial.
Thirty seconds where there was – after the last news segment had occurred, where it was just a shot of the three of us sitting there at the news desk, for 30 seconds. That's essentially saying to the audience, "Change your channel right now, please go look somewhere else." And so, here's – I'm on camera, do something quickly, you know, throw the paper, what the hell.
LAMB: Is it true that you have recorded 50 percent of the programs that you have done in your life, on tape?
OLBERMANN: Not including
the Sports Centers, the ESPN shows. That's probably over 50 percent.
The ESPN ones were difficult to time cause we were always – almost
always on after ball games, so I wouldn't tape them.
LAMB: Why do you do it?
OLBERMANN: I do it because we're in an ephemeral business. It goes away. No one else, to my knowledge, is doing it. It's an old habit of mine dating to childhood and really recording for posterity, just to have a record, the works of the great comedians, Bob and Ray, who I listened to as a kid. They were on in New York and I – one day I just said – this is just too good not to – somebody should be taping it. I don't know that they're taping it, I should do it. As for me, it started in college as a learning tool. If I didn't know how good I was, I'm just going to judge it by the five minutes you're on the air. I mean, five minutes on the air, you're nervous and for the first couple days, I was having out-of-body experiences. I needed some reference points, so I taped it. And I didn't really have the modesty to erase the tapes and go back and record over them, so I just kept them. And everybody made fun of me and they made fun of me when I would tape the broadcasts when I worked at CNN and any time there's a reunion with anybody from any point of my many jobs, the first thing is – did you bring some of those tapes because we'd all like to just see what they look like.
LAMB: Where do keep them all?
OLBERMANN: I have a storage
locker. True, I have a storage facility that must have two or
three hundred VHS tapes in it. In about 120 Street in Manhattan.
They've gotten too large. They used to fill my basement in my
home in Connecticut. Literally, you'd walk down to – into this
sort of subterranean, cool basement in Connecticut, go into a room and
there were like all the tapes of every broadcast ever – we're like
the museum of television and radio, it's that bad.
LAMB: Did you have someone as you were growing up in the business that you wanted to emulate? I mean, with …
OLBERMANN: Lots of them, sure.
LAMB: Name somebody that you …
OLBERMANN: Well, really,
truly, just in terms of broadcasting, just the idea of how to do a broadcast,
Bob and Ray were perfect. They were ideal. Their – nobody
more creative. No better broadcasters.
I saw their show – they invited
me to come in and watch them when I was 15, from a studio that I would
later actually broadcast from, at WOR Radio in New York. And the
thrill of that is with me still, and it’s well over 30 years ago.
LAMB: Who else?
OLBERMANN: Jim Bouton, who was a baseball player who became a sportscaster when I was 11 years old and told a joke which taught me – I mean, he might have been on the air three weeks when he did one joke that taught me where the line was.
A former teammate of his named
Jim Wynn (ph) had been stabbed by his wife on their anniversary.
Not serious – stitch, they didn’t break up, she apologized, no charges,
she – no serious injury, there’s no police record, and the couple
is not splitting up. Therefore, you’re entitled to make the
following joke, which is, “Mrs. Wynn (ph) should know that the correct
gift on the seventh anniversary is not steel, but paper.”
I’m 11 years old and just howling that he got away with that, and then proceeds to give the scores. Taught me how to mix television humor and television news. That was another one.
I always enjoyed Tom Snyder’s work immensely. And it was so gratifying to me later on when I found out that he enjoyed my work. It was a real circular kind of thing. I was a guest on his show, he was a guest on my show. It was very nice.
LAMB: So, if somebody is a new viewer to your show, knowing what you know, because you put it together, what did you advise them to do as they’re watching this program? Give them some hints as to what to look for and what you’re really doing.
OLBERMANN: Somebody once
said, when I was doing sports in Los Angeles, that it was the only sports
broadcast wherein the commentary was more important than the visual.
This might be still, to some degree, true. I mean, we really try
to produce this thing up. We’ve got a bunch of clever people
who look for visual puns and actual puns. We have graphics.
There’s almost never a, just straight-on head shot of me. There’s a shot of me, and you see this one monitor over this shoulder, and then the camera pans over and they show this shoulder, and there’s a different monitor with a different – there’s a lot of stuff going on.
But my advice, actually, to
a viewer is to listen, because what we’re about, ultimately, is the
content. I’m asking questions, as you do, I think, to get information.
I don’t – I’m not trying to elicit a political opinion or a stance.
I want to know what’s going on. I want to know what I don’t
understand about this story, what this person can explain to me.
Or, when we start to traipse into some of the less serious subjects, the celebrity news and things that we do, we just consider it part of the news, I will just ask, why am I interested in this?
LAMB: You have made Bill O’Reilly the Worst Person in the World 15 times. ... How long have you been doing this?
OLBERMANN: We started that, I think, sometime early last year. Middle of the summer, sometime in June. I had been wanting to do a list like that, of people who were just despicable, with varying degrees of seriousness and importance. Obviously, no one - none of the people is truly the worst person in the world, but they're just our nominees for the title for today.
LAMB: Bill O'Reilly?
OLBERMANN: Frequently.
LAMB: I mean, is it fair to say you hate the man, or is this just an act?
OLBERMANN: Somebody asked me the other day if he was - you know, if it seemed to me that he was going to retire soon, or leave this - leave the air, and I replied (ph), "I hope not," because he provides me with so much material. I can't hate him. He's so extraordinarily obvious and the antithesis of what I think broadcasters should do and what journalists should do and what people should do that he's necessary, in some way. I would be lost without him, in some respects. But, what he 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.
LAMB: You ever met him?
OLBERMANN: Not really. We were both at a charity dinner. It was a wonderful thing. My friend, Joe Torre, I used to work with years ago in Los Angeles. He's the manager of the Yankees now. And he had a charity dinner, and I was really looking forward to this, I guess last December. Walk into the table to get the little identity plaque or little nametag. One of us "celebrities," and obviously there were a lot of tables, per table, you know. So, they even had people like me there as a celebrity. Well, of course, what do I see right below me under - you know, reading upside-down on this table, here's Keith Olbermann. The next one's Bill O'Reilly. I went, "This is going to be entertaining."
And sure enough, he showed up, and he was - he's a little taller than I am, so most of the people, if you notice, he picks fights with Al Franken and people like that who are significantly shorter, Janeane Garofalo, people like that. I didn't really anticipate that there'd be trouble, but we were, like, 20 feet apart at all times. There was - as if, to use the term, "global positioning satellite," it was as if we knew at all times where the other one was, and we were, like, just staring daggers at each other from the corners of our eyes. But, I used to - I think I did used to hate him, but it's - this segment has become so useful to me, and allows me to express that hatred in a positive, ratings-growing way.
LAMB: I don't know that I've ever seen this fact about any other individual, that three of the four planes that were involved in 9/11 and were - three of the four planes had friends of yours on them, and that two of your friends worked at Cantor Fitzgerald in one of the Towers.
OLBERMANN: To this day,
I don't know what the statistics are against that, the odds.
LAMB: You know, how long did it take you to find out that fact?
OLBERMANN: Well, one
of them was a regular guest on the shows, both that I did and other
people did, in the Lewinsky area, Ted Olson's wife.
LAMB: Barbara Olson?
OLBERMANN: Barbara Olson.
And obviously, we all knew about that fairly quickly because she was
on the cell phone before the plane went into the Pentagon. But,
it was, I guess I found out about her that afternoon, then I did - that
was in that period of time when I was working for Fox and not being
- being paid not to be on the air. I managed to work out a deal
by which I could be a street reporter for a friend of mine who runs
an all-news radio station in Los Angeles. I was on the air with
them when they told me that Garnet Bailey, Ace Bailey was a hockey executive
and who had signed an autograph for me when I was a kid, when he was
still a player, was on one of the planes that went into the Trade Center.
And I guess it was two weeks later that I found out that Tom Pecorelli had died. He had been my - one of my cameramen in the studio at Fox, and I was just - you know, each one of those is exactly what you would expect it to be. These were not close, you know, dear friends or anything, but these were people - you know, Barbara Olson signed a farewell baseball to me when I left MSNBC the first time and, you know, I knew all these people well. And then, in reporting the story on the streets of Manhattan, Amon Mackanady (ph) and Mike Tanner (ph), who I went to college with, who played on the football team, were the quarterback and the receiver at the first sporting event I ever got paid money to go cover. And they both worked at Cantor-Fitz, and I knew about Amon. I don't remember how I found that out that quickly. But, Mike (ph) I saw on one of the "Missing" posters. And that was ...
LAMB: Did 9/11 have any lasting impact on you, do you think?
OLBERMANN: ... Has to have. It must have.
LAMB: On your work?
OLBERMANN: Yes.
LAMB: On the kind of work you do?
OLBERMANN: Yes. I mean, I knew beforehand I was back in sports, and I was very comfortable in it, and I'm back in sports, to some degree, now on the radio. But, I knew that we were entering a period of time in history where I'm not - I'm anemic. I'm not going to be a blood donor. I'm not a good soldier. I'm not any of these other things. If I was going to contribute anything to society, it would have to be journalistically, and if I had news skills and sports skills, I probably should put them to use in news, if I could, and things worked out that I did.
LAMB: We've about a minute left here. There's a quote, one of my favorite quotes that I found from a fellow at ESPN, Mike Soltis.
OLBERMANN: Mike Soltis.
LAMB: Soltis. This
was in one of your alleged difficulties with ESPN.
OLBERMANN: No, this was after I left, in fact.
LAMB: "He didn't
burn his bridges here. He napalmed them."
OLBERMANN: Yes, that's a pretty good one. I liked my version of that better. I had said, when Tom Snyder asked me did you burn your bridges there, I said, "No, I burned the bridges and the river." I'm the only person to have done that.
LAMB: Do you tend to
shout and scream when you're in one of these moods?
OLBERMANN: No, no, no. No, no, no. That's the impression people get, or that I - you know, be just belligerent to people I - who work for me or such. It's not like that at all. It's just I send a lot of memos. But, Soltis still works there, and now I've become associated with ESPN Radio again, and he came back and he said, "Well, you know, we rebuilt the bridge."
LAMB: Under this ability
to use humor in your work, are you angry about stuff?
OLBERMANN: Sometimes. Not that much. I usually find that the humor is much more effective weapon. It stays with people. That's Bob and Ray training coming through.
LAMB: What do you want to do in this business that you haven't?
OLBERMANN: Probably stay and work someplace 25 years.
LAMB: Have you found it?
OLBERMANN: Maybe. We'll find out. I've got another year to go on my contract. I'll let you - give you a call.
LAMB: Thanks, Keith Olbermann.
OLBERMANN: My pleasure, Brian.
END
How can you not love a fan of Bob and Ray? :)
Posted by: Brig McCoy | March 13, 2006 at 04:00 PM