Current TV Dismisses Keith Olbermann
10:06 p.m. | Updated For nearly a year now, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have been building their liberal cable news channel, Current TV, with the mercurial television anchorman Keith Olbermann at its center.
This week, the center collapsed.
Current said on Friday afternoon that it had fired Mr. Olbermann — one of the nation’s most prominent progressive speakers — just a year into his five-year, $50 million contract. It was the culmination of months of murky disputes between Mr. Olbermann and the channel that he was supposed to save from the throes of ratings oblivion.
Yet as inevitable as it might have seemed to some in the television business who know the long history of antipathy between Mr. Olbermann and his employers, it was nonetheless shocking to his fans, to his detractors and to staff members at Current when the announcement was made.
Forty-five minutes afterward, in a stream of Twitter messages, Mr. Olbermann threatened to take legal action against the channel and said its claims about him were untrue. In part because of the prospect of litigation, executives at Current declined to comment on the firing on Friday. But they immediately named as his replacement Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, who took over Mr. Olbermann’s 8 p.m. time slot on Friday night.
By replacing Mr. Olbermann, Mr. Spitzer is getting a second shot at an 8 p.m. talk show; in 2010, two years after he resigned the governorship after he admitted having patronized a prostitution ring, he led a short-lived show on CNN. It was canceled in mid-2011.
In a letter posted on Current’s Web site, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt wrote, “We are confident that our viewers will be able to count on Governor Spitzer to deliver critical information on a daily basis.”
With those words — “on a daily basis” — the founders of Current hinted at one of the reasons for Mr. Olbermann’s termination.
He clashed early and often with Mr. Hyatt, and especially with David Bohrman, a former CNN executive who was installed as president of Current last summer. The clashes became visible when Mr. Olbermann started anchoring his program, “Countdown,” in front of a funereal black backdrop, apparently out of frustration about technical difficulties.
Mr. Olbermann also declined Current’s requests to host special hours of primary election coverage in January, causing lawyers from both sides to intercede. Eventually an election coverage plan was cobbled together, but in January and February, he continued to miss many days of work, as he himself acknowledged on his Twitter page. He attributed some of his absences to throat problems.
In public, Current remained supportive of Mr. Olbermann, whom Mr. Hyatt called “the big gun in our lineup” during an interview on March 5 to promote new political programming on weekday mornings.
“It’s all on top of his shoulders,” Mr. Hyatt said, even as he added new programs, in part as a hedge against the possibility of Mr. Olbermann’s departure.
Behind the scenes, tensions were mounting. That same day, the eve of the Super Tuesday Republican primaries, Mr. Olbermann decided to take a vacation day despite a warning from Current that it would constitute a breach of contract, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who insisted on anonymity because this person was not authorized to speak on the record.
In a termination letter on Thursday morning, Current cited “unauthorized absences” as one of the reasons. It also cited a failure to promote the channel and disparagement of the channel’s executives.
Mr. Olbermann, however, has said he has been very careful to fulfill the terms of his contract. On Twitter on Friday afternoon, he apologized to his fans for joining Current at all, calling it “a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one.”
He encouraged people to “read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee,” and linked to a New York Times article from 1990 that reported on a ruling against Mr. Hyatt’s firm that found that it had illegally removed the head of its Philadelphia office, Clarence B. Cain, after learning he had AIDS.
To many in the television business, the separation was not a question of if, but when. Mr. Olbermann has a history of abruptly and angrily leaving jobs, dating back at least to his days at ESPN, where he was a co-anchor of “SportsCenter” in the 1990s.
Fourteen months ago, Mr. Olbermann abruptly left MSNBC, where he had worked for eight years. There, he nearly single-handedly gave the channel an identity as a liberal counterweight to Fox News — just as Current hoped he would do for it — but he also alienated staff members.
Executives at MSNBC had no public reaction on Friday to Mr. Olbermann’s departure from another channel. But Nielsen ratings demonstrate that Mr. Olbermann was not able to recreate his success there.
In his 40 weeks on Current TV, he had an average of 177,000 viewers at 8 p.m., down from the roughly one million that he had each night on MSNBC. Just 57,000 of those viewers on any given night were between the ages of 25 and 54, the coveted advertising demographic for cable news. Still, Mr. Olbermann ranked as the highest-rated program on Current.
Speculation immediately turned on Friday to what Mr. Olbermann might or might not do next, given that he has moved jobs so many times in the past. Media critics and opponents of Mr. Olbermann’s cracked jokes online about public-access TV and door-to-door visits. For the moment, he at least has Twitter, where he has 377,000 followers.
As the news of his firing reverberated Friday night, his representatives were able to secure him a big-time (albeit one-time) gig: next Tuesday he’ll be the lead guest on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman.”
Would you buy any product that required assembly by these buffoons?
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