Last week brought the news that Keith Olbermann had lost another job. The same man who has been either fired or quit from Sportscenter, CNN, and MSNBC (twice), has now been flat-out canned from Current TV.
“What the hell is Current TV?” Some of you might ask. Well, 1. It’s the TV network that Al Gore founded with some guy named Hyatt and is only available if you pay extra to order it, 2. Exactly.
Keith left MSNBC last year, and almost immediately got snapped up by Current TV in a 50 million dollar deal for five years. It was a natural fit and a seemingly good business decision as Current is a liberal TV network that badly needed a star to get off the ground, and Keith is a liberal TV star that badly needed a network.
I like Olbermann quite a bit, and had high hopes that he’d make it work at Current, both because I want him to be on the air during these turbulent times and because I want Current (one of the only truly-independent liberal news channels out there, totally free from corporate bias) to work in and of itself. I think MSNBC made a big mistake by trying to constantly muzzle Olbermann and their repeated clashes were supposedly about MSNBC’s corporatism taking precedence over Olbermann’s content. [I’m glad MSNBC exists too, even if too many of their shows solely focus on easy issues like saying the president is doing a great job and never on really challenging corporations doing bad things.]
But what’s his excuse for Current TV? No one is saying they’re too corporate or the message is diluted or that Olbermann didn’t have full control over his show. The biggest clashes there have been that Olbermann had to share coverage of the Republican primaries, didn’t get the budget he wanted for certain segments of his show, and missed a lot of work days.
Who knows what the truth is? For his part, Olbermann is saying they just wanted to get out of paying him and hire the much cheaper Eliot Spitzer, which could very well be. Maybe it was because Gore didn’t want to pay Olbermann the agreed upon salary (Gore’s going threw a divorce after all, and that can’t be cheap). Or maybe it’s because Olbermann really is getting impossible to work with. I don’t know, and it’s a sad situation all the way around when liberals fight each other.
In a weird way, I find myself rooting for both Olbermann to find another home, and Current to survive. But how many more places can Keith go? And how many more networks can afford to hire him?