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Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Keith Olbermann is in trouble and needs our support
Posted by Jill | 3:46 PM

Keith Olbermann may be the last real journalist in America. The other night, as part of his coverage of the death of Peter Jennings, Olbermann went into some rather graphic detail about his own bout with what he feared was oral cancer. This account can also be seen on his blog.

As Bob Cesca reports at The Huffington Post, this did not sit will with The Suits Upstairs, and quotes the Daily News:

I hear that MSNBC staffers in the Secaucus newsroom-studio watched in horror Monday night as the volatile Kaplan, the president of the cable outlet, publicly laced into the eccentric Olbermann, anchor of the 8 p.m. show "Countdown," after the latter eulogized lung-cancer victim Peter Jennings with a graphic rant about his own cancer scare.

Olbermann - a former pipe and cigar smoker - is said to have looked stunned as Kaplan raced onto the set and shouted at him after he signed off.

Olbermann had urged viewers to quit smoking and repeatedly mentioned "spitting blood" and "spitting globs of myself into a garbage can" while discussing his bout with a benign tumor in in his mouth.

I'm told that Kaplan erupted angrily and at length, calling Olbermann "out of control" and "not to be trusted," and accusing him of driving away viewers from the 9 p.m. debut of Kaplan hire Rita Cosby's show, "Live and Direct."

Kaplan - a friend and former ABC News colleague of Jennings, and a frequent cigar smoker - apparently got even angrier when Olbermann suggested that the reason he was upset was that "this is about you."

I'm told that the anchor quietly asked the news exec to move the discussion to a private location, but the enraged Kaplan wouldn't hear of it.

"I don't care if you don't come to work tomorrow," Kaplan told Olbermann, according to my spies.


Olbermann is right. He hit a sore spot (no pun intended) with Kaplan because Kaplan is a cigar smoker. Trust me when I tell you that smokers all over America were turning off the television set every time a story relating Jennings' death to cancer came on. They know they should quit, but they can't. And the government is still subsidizing what is a highly addictive drug at the same time as they're putting kids in jail for a quarter-ounce of pot.

Isn't it funny how one person's first-person account using the word "blood" is regarded as inappropriate, but Joe Scarborough has been almost literally drooling on a nightly basis with speculation about what happened to Natalee Holloway on that beach in Aruba -- which is in particularly bad taste given the mysterious death of his young female assistant in his office. You didn't hear about that one, did you. I thought not.

At any rate, Olbermann is the best thing on MSNBC. He's honest, he pulls no punches, and if he goes, then television news really DOES become just a vast wasteland of Bush Junta propaganda.

Write to Rick Kaplan and tell him if the shoe fits, wear it:

Mr. Rick Kaplan
President/General Manager
MSNBC
1 MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094-2419

Or send an E-mail: rick.kaplan@msnbc.com
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