Olbermann Signs Off

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ProfJohn

Lifer
Jul 28, 2006
18,161
7
0
I understand that he is going to follow in Oprah's footsteps and start his own network.

He'll call is EGO. And give it massive call letter to match his own ego and sense of self importance.
 

matt0611

Golden Member
Oct 22, 2010
1,879
0
0
"Those of you who've posted about Comcast meaning the end of my show or Rachel's can, I think, relieve yourselves of such concerns....Whatever else you think of these guys, they are not in the habit of saying "a billion in profit over the next five years? Who needs it! Cancel the shows that generate it!"

Woops
 

Red Dawn

Elite Member
Jun 4, 2001
57,529
3
0
So if you had a 2 year vacation with $14M to spend, it would be boring as shit? Remind me not to invite you to parties :)
He is not going to prison, he's just barred from competing with his former employer. He can still write a book, travel, engage in charity work, etc, and he's getting paid $20,000 PER DAY from his old job.
Yeah he should be able to afford all the Hookers and Blow he wants:biggrin:
 

Thump553

Lifer
Jun 2, 2000
12,750
2,524
126
I understand that he is going to follow in Oprah's footsteps and start his own network.

He'll call is EGO. And give it massive call letter to match his own ego and sense of self importance.

That's an interesting rumor, but I doubt it's true. Personally I don't see how Oprah's network is going to succeed and she has far more starpower and money than Obermann (heck she has a lot more money than a lot of countries).

Bad news for MSNBC unless they are planning to go to prison shows seven days a week.

Personally my favorite show on that network is Lawrence O'Donnell's "The Last Word" which is pretty unique for all the commentary shows on any network in that it is informative, fairly broad scoped and doesn't participate in firebrand demogogary. Obermann had his moments but his obession with O'Reilly got old fast.
 

Jadow

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2003
5,962
2
0
I will concede that Fox has some people on the right including Beck who is far to the right. I will concede that he has strong opinions.

However, he and his show never comes off as mean spirited like Olbermann did. Beck is self deprecating, has some friendly humor in his show and doesn't come off as a mean elitest snob like Olbermann.

Olbermann just oozes arrogance.
 

GroundedSailor

Platinum Member
Feb 18, 2001
2,502
0
76
I will concede that Fox has some people on the right including Beck who is far to the right. I will concede that he has strong opinions.

However, he and his show never comes off as mean spirited like Olbermann did. Beck is self deprecating, has some friendly humor in his show and doesn't come off as a mean elitest snob like Olbermann.

Olbermann just oozes arrogance.

There are some who disagree with you. about Glen Beck.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/business/media/22beck.html?_r=2
Spotlight From Glenn Beck Brings a CUNY Professor Threats
By BRIAN STELTER

On his daily radio and television shows, Glenn Beck has elevated once-obscure conservative thinkers onto best-seller lists. Recently, he has elevated a 78-year-old liberal academic to celebrity of a different sort, in a way that some say is endangering her life.

Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck’s warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.”

Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.

Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.

In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.

“Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response,” the group wrote.

Fox News disagrees. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president, said Friday that Mr. Beck would not be ordered to stop talking about Ms. Piven on television. He said Mr. Beck had quoted her accurately and had never threatened her.

“ ‘The Glenn Beck Program,’ probably above and beyond any on television, has denounced violence repeatedly,” Mr. Cheatwood said.

He said he had no knowledge of the threats against Ms. Piven, and noted that The Blaze was operated independently of Fox News.

Ms. Piven said in an interview that she had informed local law enforcement authorities of the anonymous electronic threats. But she added, “I don’t want to give anybody the satisfaction of thinking they’ve got me trembling.”

The interest in Ms. Piven is rooted in an article she wrote with her husband, Richard Cloward, in 1966. The article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” proposed that if people overwhelmed the welfare rolls, fiscal and political stress on the system could force reform and give rise to changes like a guaranteed income. By drawing attention to the topic, the proposal “had a big impact” even though it was not enacted, Ms. Piven said. “A lot of people got the money that they desperately needed to survive,” she said.

In Mr. Beck’s telling on a Fox broadcast on Jan. 5, 2010, Ms. Piven and Mr. Cloward (who died in 2001) planned “to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse.” Mr. Beck observed that the number of welfare recipients soared in the years after the article, and said the article was like “economic sabotage.”

He linked what he termed the Cloward-Piven Strategy to President Obama’s statement late in the 2008 presidential campaign that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Mr. Beck has invoked Ms. Piven dozens of times since. Conservative Web sites, like the ones operated by Andrew Breitbart, have also spent time dissecting her articles and speeches.

Ms. Piven came under additional scrutiny when she wrote in the liberal magazine The Nation this month that unemployed people should be staging mass protests.

Her assertions that “an effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece,” and that “protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones,” led Mr. Beck to ask on Fox this week, “Is that not inciting violence? Is that not asking for violence?” Videos of fires in Greece played behind him.

“That is not a call for violence,” Ms. Piven said Friday of the references to riots. “There is a kind of rhetorical trick that is always used to denounce movements of ordinary people, and that is to imply that the massing of people itself is violent.”

That, she said, is what Mr. Beck is doing, trying to frighten his viewers.

The Nation, which has featured Ms. Piven’s columns for decades, quoted some of the threats against her in an editorial this week that condemned the “concerted campaign” against her.

One such threat, published as an anonymous comment on The Blaze, read, “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back.” (The spelling and capitalizing have not been changed.)

That comment and others that were direct threats were later deleted, but other comments remain that charge her with treasonous behavior.

Mr. Beck generally does not have guests on his hourlong Fox program, and Ms. Piven has not been invited to defend herself on the program. Neither Mr. Beck nor any of his producers have ever contacted her, she said.

The Center for Constitutional Rights said it took exception to the sheer quantity of negative attention to Ms. Piven.

“We are vigorous defenders of the First Amendment,” the center said in its letter to Fox. “However, there comes a point when constant intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods about a person can put that person in actual physical danger of a violent response.” Mr. Beck is at that point, they said.

Ms. Piven, for her part, said she was amazed that she was still being brought up on Mr. Beck’s show as recently as Wednesday.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of people who are just boiling with anger and hate,” she said.

..
 

soundforbjt

Lifer
Feb 15, 2002
17,788
6,040
136
I will concede that Fox has some people on the right including Beck who is far to the right. I will concede that he has strong opinions.

However, he and his show never comes off as mean spirited like Olbermann did. Beck is self deprecating, has some friendly humor in his show and doesn't come off as a mean elitest snob like Olbermann.

Olbermann just oozes arrogance.

Someone is actually defending Glenn Beck!!! :rolleyes::eek:
 

Elias824

Golden Member
Mar 13, 2007
1,100
0
76
Anyone know who will be taking his spot? Seems like all that was ever on msnbc was Olberman, Maddow and random shows about prison, I never watched any of them.
 

sportage

Lifer
Feb 1, 2008
11,492
3,161
136
The Happy Camper... (Don't cry for me Argentina - as it were)
**THE OlBERMANN POST**

With two years left on his $7 million-a-year contract, Olbermann was seeking a full exit package but he really has his eye on creating his own media empire in the style of Huffington Post, according to the individual. That way, Olbermann would control his own brand and, in his view, potentially earn far more as an owner.

http://www.thewrap.com/television/article/keith-olbermann-leaves-msnbc-24127
 

thegimp03

Diamond Member
Jul 5, 2004
7,420
2
81
If Olbermans' a prick then what are Rush, Hannity, Beck, and O'reilly. Your saints?

I'm not defending them because I don't listen to or watch them, I'm just saying that I never liked Olbermann. From what I've seen of him, he's loud and obnoxious.
 

Craig234

Lifer
May 1, 2006
38,548
350
126
Anyone know who will be taking his spot? Seems like all that was ever on msnbc was Olberman, Maddow and random shows about prison, I never watched any of them.

Lawrence O'Donnell, who has good and bad about his show, it's one of the better though.
 

hal2kilo

Lifer
Feb 24, 2009
24,205
10,865
136
Lawrence O'Donnell, who has good and bad about his show, it's one of the better though.

He's a bit too much on the inside to be completely objective and hard hitting due to the fact that he might want to work on the inside again. A little sample of his bio follows. Otherwise, I do find his show quite informative and the inside stuff works both ways as he has lots of contacts.

Bio stuff.

From 1989 through 1992, O'Donnell served as Senior Advisor to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In 1992, he was Chief of Staff to the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. From 1993 through 1995 he was the Chief of Staff of the Senate Finance Committee. He first began working with Sen. Moynihan as Director of Communications in the Senator's 1988 re-election campaign. A writer prior to entering politics and government, O'Donnell published the book Deadly Force (1983), which was adapted as a CBS movie in 1986. He has written essays and articles for several publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, People, Spy, and Boston Magazine. O'Donnell has also appeared on NBC News’ “Today,” “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” “Charlie Rose,” and several other programs. Suffolk University awarded O'Donnell an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, in 2001.

Also was co-producer of West Wing at some point.
 

boomerang

Lifer
Jun 19, 2000
18,883
641
126
I'm not defending them because I don't listen to or watch them, I'm just saying that I never liked Olbermann. From what I've seen of him, he's loud and obnoxious.
You're entitled to that opinion, and don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise. Let Queef's defenders defend him all they want.

I watched him and Matthews every evening until right after Maddow came on board. Until the run-up to the '08 elections I watched. When they started all the highly partisan shit regarding Obama, I bailed. One sided news is not news, it's mind control. Queef is a dick - plain and simple.
 

Throckmorton

Lifer
Aug 23, 2007
16,829
3
0
The false equivalency trope strikes again. Here's a clue-- taking a side is not the same as lying to your viewers (like Fox does)