"Free copy of Fox News!"

The blogosphere is going wild over Keith Olbermann's idea of breakfast-hour entertainment. Chip Franklin quizzed me about it this morning on WBAL. I was about 10 feet away from Keith at a Saturday morning breakfast press session when he put on the Bill O'Reilly mask and made a Nazi salute. I don't agree with a colleague's assessment that it was "hilarious." It seemed beneath him. But then, the whole puppet-theater idea seems beneath him. It's my least favorite part of the "Countdown."

Here's a link from Olbermann Watch with the picture.

Robert Cox, who runs OW, is a decent guy who enjoys playing with dynamite. I belong to the media bloggers' group he heads up. Cox recently sent out a bulletin noting the 100th occasion on which "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" named O'Reilly its worst person in the world. (Something you'd think Olbermann would have thought of first, what with the book coming out and all.) Anyway, I used that email as the basis for a question about bloggers.

QUESTION: Keith, to follow up on that. Right in front of you. When you made the Bill O'Reilly "the Worst Person in the World" for the hundredth time, I got an e-mail from a guy who runs a blog called "Olbermann Watch," pointing out this milestone.

Do you worry about the blogosphere? Do you pay attention to bloggers? Do you worry that they might take something that you say and extract some sort of revenge, the way they did with Dan Rather?

KEITH OLBERMANN: There's, I guess, a risk for all of us -- and by all of us, I mean everybody in the world -- that the blogosphere is going to take revenge. They don't like your shirt. There could be about your blog -- about your shirt tomorrow. The thing that encourages me about this, to some degree, is that with every medium that is seemingly limitless -- every medium begins that way. Everybody's going to have their own television network. There's going to be 3,000 cable networks. Whatever. It is self-limiting. Eventually there's just not going to be enough money to keep all this stuff going. People are devoting a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy, and not necessarily getting any results in terms of readership.

The thing does tend to balance out. For every blog that there might be somebody criticizing me, of that one in particular, is the one I know of, there's another one or two other ones where they're desperately and unfairly favorable to me. So if you take it in the whole context, I don't really worry about it. There's very little that can be said about me on the blogs that isn't true and is going to hurt me, so I don't worry about it. I truly try to just go ahead and do what I do, based on some sense of logic which eludes me at the moment.

In other words, as long as the TV audience responds, he's going to ignore the blogs.

And the audience is responding.  Yes, O'Reilly beats him like a porch rug in total viewers but ... well, I'll let Keith take it from there:

In the afternoon in New York, so that they don't have to take them back, the distributors of the New York Post stand on the corners and bark, "Free New York Post. Free New York Post." If you looked merely at a total number of newspapers that you printed and did not have to burn at the end of the day or bring back or recycle or something like that, that would be essentially the total audience number in television. The ones you actually sell are the demographic numbers because that's the ones we base the advertising on.

In total audience, we can be beaten on a given night 7-to-1, 3-to-1, somewhere in that range usually. Three-to-one is a good night that we're down by in total audience. But in that demographic number, we have in the last year moved from third place at 8 p.m., past CNN, into second place, which is, if not unprecedented at MSNBC, it is unprecedented in the last 100 years, 200? OK, five years. (Laughter.)

I'm a little loose with the numbers, as you can tell. On an average night, we might come in somewhere around 150,000, 250,000 in the demographic number. And O'Reilly is somewhere between 400. During times of a lot of news like now, it might be higher, closer to 600. It's competitive.

Are we still getting doubled, tripled, in some respects, every night? Yeah. But in terms of the growth number, our numbers are continually up over the last two, three years. All of Fox's numbers are continually down in that area of the demo, which is, as I said, where you make your money off of. Every other viewer is basically, "Free copy of Fox News."