Media stories and analysis has become a regular point of focus for Keith Olbermann on his Countdown podcast. On his latest episode, Olbermann took listeners down memory lane to explain how he wound up talking politics on television and how he first decided that he couldn’t do it anymore.
While he had joined NBC months earlier, it was Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky that changed the trajectory of his role there. Olbermann explained that he had been doing some work for both the fledgling news network, hosting a general interest show, and working on NBC’s coverage of Major League Baseball.
Coverage of Clinton and Lewinsky became the bulk of his show every night, drawing tremendous ratings success. MSNBC made Olbermann the anchor of its coverage of the 1998 State of the Union Address. He hosted a pre-speech show and a show that followed NBC’s analysis. During that “postgame show,” Olbermann says an NBC News executive delivered big news to him.
“The speech did in 0.8. Brokaw and Russert on the wrap up did an 0.6. Since 11:00, you’ve been doing a 1.7,” Olbermann says he was told. “You have had three times the audience of Tom Brokaw, three times the audience of the old man himself. This isn’t just people crossing over from NBC to watch more. This is people watching the speech, turning off the old man, then turning back at 11 to watch you.”
He also found out that the AP had used a joke he told on that postgame show in its official recap of the State of the Union Address. All of the success being tied to a presidential sex scandal made Olbermann uneasy.
“I had this sudden horrible feeling that the usually slow to decide American viewing public had instantly concluded that for some reason, elusive even to me, they really like to hear me talk about the whereabouts of the president’s penis.”
Olbermann says it was not long after that that NBC News executives came to him with the idea of creating a nightly show all about the scandal. In order to entice him to give up a planned vacation and commit to the show, Olbermann says he was offered the chance to anchor NBC Nightly News on multiple occasions.
The show eventually launched. It was a ratings success for MSNBC, something Olbermann says he did his best to reverse.
“For months. I mocked the story. The ratings went up,” he said. “I tried to quit the show. The ratings went up. I gave a speech insulting the network for covering the story 24/7. The ratings went up. Fox Sports approached me and offered me five times what NBC was paying me to go out to LA to do their sportscast. LA., which was kind of near Hawaii, nowhere near the Clinton-Lewinsky story. And the ratings went up.”
The network’s dedication to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal is what eventually drove Olbermann back to sports. It was seeing an NBC News promo for Jane Pauley’s interview with another woman accusing the former president of an extramarital affair that had him call his agent to learn more about FOX Sports’s offer.
