While detailing his history with new MSNBC primetime host Alex Wagner Tuesday, Keith Olbermann laid into MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough with some of the harshest criticisms imaginable on his Countdown with Keith Olbermann podcast.
“The entire morning of MSNBC’s programming features — and is ruled with an iron fist by — one of the worst human beings I have ever met,” said Olbermann. “The man who, in every day in 2015 and the start of 2016, tried to mainstream Donald Trump to the MSNBC audience and only stopped when he realized Trump was not going to offer him the Vice Presidency, ‘Joey Scars’ himself, Joe Scarborough.”
Olbermann’s sentiment came after he detailed his desire for Alex Wagner, whose new MSNBC show Alex Wagner Tonight debuts this evening, to be a guest host on his MSNBC version of Countdown during the late 2000s, but in his eyes, her lack of work ethic doomed her candidacy.
“I, along with the last executive producer of MSNBC version of Countdown, Richard Stockwell, all saw Alex Wagner from Politics Daily with The Huffington Post on, I’m pretty sure, Hardball with Chris Matthews. As we TV fatheads say, she popped. Jumped right off the screen. In many ways, not unlike Maddow did, before and after all the MSNBC geniuses who claimed credit for her success now fired her in 2006. Alex Wagner was well spoken, intelligent, informed, and vivacious, and you can teach any of those things but you cannot teach all of them to the same person.”
Olbermann then noted there was just one problem with Wagner. Just like Rachel Maddow, Wagner struggled to read the teleprompter. But unlike Maddow, Wagner, according to Olbermann, wasn’t willing to put in the work to fix the issue.
“When Stockwell and I lit upon the idea that Alex Wagner might be the next great guest host of Countdown and maybe someday, like the others (Maddow and O’Donnell) host her own MSNBC show spun off from ours, we invited her up for an audition and a meet-and-greet. Stockwell handled the audition and he came back to me that night crestfallen. It wasn’t only that Alex Wagner could not read the teleprompter, Stockwell told her ‘I told her we can teach her the teleprompter. She could become as good as Maddow in 30 minutes but she said how hard could it be? I can pick it up. Anyway, I gotta go to a dinner party’. Now, I didn’t hear that. That’s what Stockwell told me. I doubt he had the imagination to make it up.
“We talked to our people at Countdown and other MSNBC shows who had produced her segments and the same message came back each time. ‘Nice person, very intelligent, mails it in.’ “
Olbermann then went on to point out the amount of shows and career stops Wagner has had over the last 12 years since her Countdown audition, while saying while it may not sound like it, he wishes her success in her new role.
