Olbermann leaves Daily Kos By: Andy Barr June 17, 2010 01:33 PM EDT Keith Olbermann announced Wednesday night that he will cease blogging for the liberal Daily Kos over a comment directed at the MSNBC host’s coverage.
Olbermann and some of his MSNBC colleagues surprised their left-leaning fans on Tuesday with eviscerating critiques of President Barack Obama’s Oval Office address on the oil spill spewing off the Gulf Coast.
“It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days,” Olbermann said of the president’s remarks, echoing similarly negative comments from fellow MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow.
One commenter on the Daily Kos, where Olbermann has frequently blogged over the years, speculated that the pattern of hosts generally sympathetic to the president bashing the administration was too consistent to be a coincidence.
“Can’t verify, of course,” the commenter began, “but a friend in the news biz tells me he got a damaging e-mail from one of his pals at NBC. Something to the effect that their anger was pre-planned because ‘beating up on the president has been good for ratings.’ I haven't checked, but I'm hearing that Olbermann slammed the speech on Twitter before it even started.”
Olbermann, incensed by the commenter, later fired off a posted titled “Check, Please” explaining that he won’t be “back” to the site until it stops delving into “conspiracy theories.”
“‘Can't verify’... ‘haven't checked’...It can't be verified because it's nonsense, and it wasn't checked because nobody bothered,” Olbermann said before launching into a critique of the blog.
“For years, from the Katrina days onward, whenever I stuck my neck out, I usually visited here as the clichéd guy in the desert stopping by the oasis,” he wrote. “I never got universal support, and never expected it, nor wanted it (who wants an automatic ‘Yes’ machine?). But I used to read a lot about how people here would 'always have my back,' and trust me this was of palpable value as I fought opponents external and internal who try to knock me and Rachel off the air, all the time, in ways you can imagine and others you can't.”
Olbermann went on to say that he understood if some of his viewers were frustrated to see him criticizing the president but that he would not stand for being accused of doing so just to boost ratings.
“To accuse me, after five years of risking what I have to present the truth as I see it, of staging something for effect, is deeply offensive to me and is an indication of what has happened here,” the liberal host wrote. “You want cheerleaders? Hire the Buffalo Jills. You want diaries with conspiracy theories, go nuts. If you want this site the way it was even a year ago, let me know and I'll be back.”
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