Former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw died Wednesday, and former co-worker Keith Olbermann opined about the anchor’s death on his podcast Friday.
The Countdown With Keith Olbermann host noted Shaw gave CNN credibility when it struggled to find its footing during its first decade, but also claimed Shaw was not a kind man.
“Bernard Shaw was also the anchor of CNN’s firsts newscast of record Prime News. When I broke in at CNN, 1981-1984, I spent about a third of my time working from the Washington bureau of CNN, often for weeks at a time. And I’m sorry to say this under these circumstances but I never saw Bernie Shaw be nice to anybody.
“The newscast Bernie Shaw did was in the newsroom. In the middle of all the desks. Every person there at every desk — and there had to have been 40 of them right around the anchor desk — was on a deadline of some sorts. All I remember about Bernard Shaw from literally 100 days or more from the newsroom while he was on the air was the studio lights coming on and Bernard Shaw shouting ‘Typewriters’. And everybody there, no matter how important their task, or how pressing their deadline, stopped their typewriting. Except me, of course. I didn’t work for him.”
Olbermann then went on to criticize Shaw’s work during a 1988 Presidential debate between then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and opponent Michael Dukakis, a staunch opponent of capital punishment.
“As the opening question, this is what Bernie Shaw said: ‘The first question goes to Governor Dukakis. You have two-minutes to respond. Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?’ There must have been a reason for Bernard Shaw to frame that question in such a way. To make another man hypothesize about the rape and murder of his own wife live, in public, on television, in a president debate. There must have been a reason to frame it that way, but I’ve been thinking about it pretty much non-stop since 1988, and I’ll be damned if I ever figured out what that reason was.”
