We’ve shown how the Media Research Center continued to obsess over things Bette Midler said years after deeming her irrelevant. It has done the same for another less than prominent liberal personality. Kevin Tober wrote in a March 2022 post about speculation that Keith Olbermann might substitute for Rachel Maddow after she left nightly duties on her MSNBC show:
The fact that Olbermann was even being considered is strange considering he was suspended from MSNBC for making political contributions during the 2010 midterm elections in a blatant violation of the network’s rules. He subsequently left the network in January 2011. Olbermann was also fired from ESPN in 2015 for making insulting comments about Penn State students on Twitter.
But the MRC had decided that Olbermann was not so irrelevant that it wouldn’t stop whining about him for years afterward:
- Olbermann Claims Second Amendment Doesn’t Give Gun Ownership Rights
- Keith Olbermann Has Mental Breakdown Over Gun Decision, Floats Nullification (Tober laughably added: Warning: The following post contains profanity from Olbermann that is not suitable for children. Reader discretion is strongly advised.)
- Top 7 MOST INSANE Olbermann Tweets on Overturning of Roe: ‘Arrest’ the ‘Terrorists!’
- Olbermann to Alito Over Death Threats: ‘Eat Sh*t’
- Olbermann Screams Bloody Murder After Twitter Ban For Doxxing
- ‘You Sucked at Swimming:’ Olbermann Attacks Riley Gaines for Protecting Women’s Sports
- Are You Serious?! Olbermann Thrilled Unvaccinated Aaron Rodgers Tore His Achilles
- ‘Get Your Fifth Booster Keith:’ Aaron Rodgers Claps Back At Olbermann
And those are just the ones specifically about Olbermann; there are several others that otherwise reference him. Then there is also an April 2022 post by Matt Philbin headlined “Masters Name is ‘No Coincidence!’ Unhinged Olbermann Says Boycott Augusta,” which has been mysteriously deleted from the NewsBusters database; this may have something to do with the fact that Philbin himself was mysteriously deleted from the MRC in early 2023 after we caught him whining that a “Peter Pan” remake wasn’t white or male enough and the MRC has blocked access to his article archive.
And this year — nearly a decade after he last held a steady TV hosting job — the MRC is still obsessed with Olbermann. Tim Graham dedicated his March 4 podcast to him:
On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously shredded blue states attempting to rip Trump’s name off the ballot, 9-0. They ruled states could not edit the ballot using their novel interpretation of the 14th Amendment against alleged insurrectionists. This drove leftists mad, especially former MSNBC rage-monster Keith Olbermann, who called for SCOTUS to be “dissolved.”
Graham then spent a May 5 post noting that Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan, ” once a Reagan speechwriter and is now a dyspeptic critic of Donald Trump,” wrote a column about observing a pro-Gaza protest at Columbia University and that Olbermann didn’t take it well:
Raging kook Keith Olbermann, the man so unbalanced that he tweeted the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe vs. Wade were “domestic terrorists,” argued [New York Times reporter Peter] Baker and Noonan were not journalists:
[…]The Left could certainly argue that college kids might be smart not to sit down with a journalist they don’t know, and Noonan could be characterized as an establishment Republican, who wouldn’t naturally love radical disorder. Noonan noted they were yelling “Israel bombs, Columbia pays! How many kids did you kill today?”
It could also be argued that Graham is wasting time by writing about Olbermann — whom, again, his employer has deemed an irrelevant commentator — to get cheap and lazy nostalgia clicks instead of, say, offering any sort of substantive criticism of Fox News for lying to its viewers.