T A B L E_.T A L K

B-1 Bob vs. Rush Limbaugh! Will politically disgraced Bob Dornan turn to AM radio to spread his views? Discuss right-wing talk shows in the Media area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Democracy on life support
By Steve Erickson
The cynical Starr hearings were to their Watergate precursors as Jack Kevorkian is to Mother Teresa
(11/25/98)

What kind of woman reads Playboy?
By James Poniewozik
After 45 years, your grandfather's skin magazine is trying to be all things to all groins
(11/24/98)

Boy story?
By Susan Lehman
A former editor charges that the New Yorker's fiction has gone off the deep end of the testosterone scale
(11/19/98)

Starr dust, pundit bust
By Steve Erickson
The independent counsel will crash and burn on Thursday -- and the humiliated pundits will be too afraid to say anything about it until the polls come in
(11/18/98)

Pundits to Saddam: Your evil derrière is OURS!
By James Poniewozik
When Saddam Hussein canceled our regularly scheduled war, Sam "Strangelove" Donaldson and his hotblooded colleagues practically climbed into the F-16s themselves to finish the job
(11/17/98)

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________game over

 
Keith Olbermann is bemused as hell and he's not going to take it anymore.

BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK
It was on a chilly night late this election season that Keith Olbermann stole my heart. A Republican spokesman on Olbermann's prime-time MSNBC news program, "The Big Show," was holding forth with one of those 30-second stump speeches political operatives stencil to the inside of their eyelids before hitting the chat shows, accusing Democratic candidates of "demagoguing Social Security," among other crimes. After wrapping up the interview, Olbermann paused a beat, looked into the camera and declared:

"Sir, 'demagogue' is not a verb."

Denigrate, if you like, the smirking approach to the daily news that Olbermann brought to his two nightly news shows; condemn him, if you will, for transplanting the flippancy of ESPN's "SportsCenter," where he made his name, to the haughty environs of the nightly news -- but in the post-Edwin Newman era, what so-called traditional TV news anchor is willing to throw down the gauntlet over a part of speech?

It's disappointing, then, that Olbermann has decided to leave for Fox News to host another sportscast, ending, after this week, the bizarre experiment that was "The Big Show with Keith Olbermann." When MSNBC hired Olbermann away from ESPN last fall, it probably expected a diverting news program with an edge -- a can't-miss combo of hot-button politics and Olbermann's patented highlight-reel shtick. (Right down to the pseudocollegiate opening graphics, in fact, "The Big Show" was designed more like a sportscast than a news show, even opening with its own version of a bloopers reel -- three or four minutes of quick-cut soundbites from the day's news interspersed with Olbermann's wise-ass commentary.) What the network got instead was a nightly metacommentary on the very scandal-milking that had become MSNBC's reason for being. The Monica Lewinsky story, which broke just a few months after Olbermann started with MSNBC, turned him into the Ted Koppel of presidential blow jobs (just as Ted Koppel was becoming precisely the same thing), doubling his workload as MSNBC soon tapped him to host a second show, the late-night "White House in Crisis."

After four months Olbermann vented with a surprising commencement speech at Cornell University, beating his and his colleagues' breasts for "covering this story 28 hours out of every 24." As I wrote in August, it was a little hard to empathize with Olbermann trying to have his fame and loathe it too -- Olbermann has cashed a half year's worth of checks since declaring that "about three weeks ago I ... told my employers that I simply could not continue doing this show." But it undeniably made for interesting television. Over the past several months, Olbermann's show has turned into a long-running one-man psychodrama, the main subject of which has been not Clinton's troubles but the increasingly sardonic anchor's cheerful contempt for his own job.

N E X T_ P A G E | Olbermann's parody of a news show