November 25, 2024 • 50 mins
SEASON 3 EPISODE 73: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Is Elon Musk going to buy MSNBC and turn it into pro-Trump propaganda channel?
And, if not Musk – could somebody else?
I may be asking the question backwards. Is there anybody to STOP someone, Musk or not, from buying MSNBC and turning it into pro-Trump propaganda? Well – who stopped Musk from doing that to Twitter? Who stopped Warner BROS Discovery from buying CNN and doing that incompletely but sufficiently enough to render CNN irrelevant in television news? We don’t know for certain that MSNBC is for sale. Companies like Comcast take assets like MSNBC – which by itself has made a profit of something around five or six billion dollars since I made it into “the liberal news channel” in 2006 – and spin them off into another separate company they also own, and throw in CNBC and Oxygen and The Golf Channel and USA Network and half a dozen other assets and do it so hastily they don’t even have a name for the new company and they’re just calling it “SpinCo” – companies like Comcast do that all the time and never sell the new separate company oh no I'm being informed they never do that.
Musk and Trump Junior have now had a "joking" exchange about it online but it underscores that this is exactly what Musk did to twitter and there's nobody and nothing to stop him from doing it here. This comes as The Wall Street Journal reports how corporations are seeing Musk as the new portal to Trump - and so is China. And as a purported old friend of his is insisting Musk has lost control of himself.
This did not begin with the Joe Scarborough Trump disaster last week (though his audience in the "advertiser demo" is down to 51,000 people). It didn't even start with Trump. It pre-dates even my arrival there in 1997. MSNBC and NBC News and NBC and NBC's corporate owners have been at loggerheads continuously since long before the first newscast in 1996. To understand what's happening now, you have to understand what's happened already.
B-BLOCK (31:35) SPECIAL COMMENT 2: This is not MSNBC's first existential crisis. The pre-Comcast corporate ownership at GE was ready to not merely sell the then-newly profitable network in June 2009, it was ready to shut it off and shut it down, just because the mother of the chairman of GE was a Fox fan and Bill O'Reilly was insulting her son. What happened then, and what happened with my departure in 2011, again forms a straight line with the sudden spin-off and the Musk "joke."
C-BLOCK (48:00) THE OTHER WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Philadelphia police department thinks a burned body may be "suspicious" (no; it happened naturally). Pete Hegseth once insisted it couldn't be rape if she was too drunk to refuse consent. And Nancy Mace and her chest are attacked by her former Communications Director.
It's all part of life's rich pageant.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Is
Elon Musk going to buy MSNBC and turn it into
(00:28):
a pro Trump propaganda channel? And if not Musk, somebody
else I may be asking this question backwards. Is there
anybody to stop someone Musk or otherwise from buying MSNBC
and turning it into pro Trump propaganda? Well, sir, who
stopped Musk from doing that? To Twitter? Who stopped Warner Bros.
(00:51):
Discovery from buying CNN and doing that incompletely but sufficiently
enough to render CNN irrelevant in television news? As preface,
we don't know for certain that MSNBC is actually force.
Companies like Comcast take assets like MSNBC, which by itself
has made a profit of something around five or six
(01:14):
billion dollars since I made it into the Liberal News
Channel in two thousand and six and hired Mattow in
two thousand and eight. They take assets like that and
spin them off into another separate company they also own,
and they throw in CNBC and Oxygen and the Golf
Channel and USA Network and half a dozen other assets.
And they do it so hastily they don't even have
(01:35):
a name for their new company, and they're just calling
it spin Co. Companies like Crompcast do that all the
time and never sell the new separate company, especially after
gifting it with a great, long lasting heritage of a
name like spin Co. Oh, I'm being told no corporations
ever do that. Comcast wants to get out of the
(01:56):
cable based business, or at minimum give it self the
option to get out of the cable based business Spinco.
This is where Musk comes in, and if Musk comes in,
maybe Trump comes in. As Musk's Twitter x dies, it
(02:17):
seems like half the content now is Musk tweets. Sometimes
it's Musk interacting with bots or other foreign disinfo. Sometimes
it's Musk and a fellow brain dead tech pro. Sometimes
it's a sequence like this. A tech pro posts that
Comcast is putting MSNBC up for sale, not technically true,
(02:38):
but Trump Junior screenshots that somehow steadies his hands long
enough to post that screenshot and type above it. Hey
at elon Musk, I have the funniest idea ever. And
Musk replies and replies how much does it cost? Just
for spits and giggles? Right after this, Megan Kelly, professional
(03:01):
moron retweets a poll reading MSNBC is going up for sale?
Should I buy it? I would like to fire Rachel
Maddow and Kelly who self destructed at MSNBC and NBC
News ads. Oh mg, do it? Never even noticing that
the name on the account that put out the poll
is quote not Elon Musk, and its address is I
(03:23):
Am not Elon Musk. And one wonders which of those
words caused Megan Kelly's tiny little mind to switch into
the off position. But I digress, though the laugh is
much needed. There are many nightmare nuggets in the news
of the last round of Trump cabinet nominations that concluded
this weekend. Past Pam Bondi was with Juliani at the
(03:48):
Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco. Sebastian Gorka counter terrorism advisor.
No no, no, no. The counter terrorism advisor is supposed
to be opposed to terrorism. They found audio of RFK
Junior comparing Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis.
So now, of course rf K Junior is apologizing for
being right the last time he was ever right. The
(04:11):
new Surgeon General nominee sold vitamin supplements on Fox and
friends weekend along with still Secretary of Defense designate Pete
shoot into the crowd. Hegseeth the new would be head
of the CDC was the congressman who introduced the legislation
to force Congress to intervene to force poor Terry Schaivo,
(04:31):
the Florida woman who was brain dead and dependent on
life support, but whose head kept moving from side to
side as if she were following a moving object with
her eyes that were opened but saw nothing. He introduced
the legislation to force her husband to keep this poor
woman alive. But hard as this may be to believe,
(04:53):
with all of that, Musk may be a bigger danger
than all of them combined, including Trump. The Wall Street
Journal reports that while companies like Apple are stretchgizing their
business pitches to the White House by essentially saying they're
going to go in and hold up just one shiny object,
one shiny object alone. To Trump, that's Tim Cook's idea,
(05:15):
or as Trump thinks, he's named Tim Apple. While that's
one strategy quote, a number of companies are also considering
whether to propose ideas directly to the Department of Government Efficiency,
led by Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswami. It
could be a way to develop new relationships within Trump's
inner circle unquote, new relationships or as you civilians might
(05:39):
call them, bribes. It's not just companies who now see
Musk as a portal to Trump. A separate Wall Street
journal piece reads quote. Chinese leaders enjoy some leverage over Musk,
who has poured billions of dollars into investments in Shanghai.
In China, Musk is a symbol of the American dream
(06:00):
and of US technological prowess. Even musk seventy six year
old mother May Musk boasts celebrity status. Sure sure, great
idea Musk as the real president while Trump looks at
shiny objects, while Musk owns what's left of Twitter X
(06:23):
and owns say MSNBC, MSNBC which just got spun off.
And we don't have the Thursday or Friday numbers yet,
But on Wednesday morning, the new version of Morning Joe
in which Joe and Mika like Trump again, it was
down to fifty one thousand viewers in the so called
(06:45):
ad demo. That's down sixty percent in that group since
the third quarter of this year. Fifty one thousand viewers
in the advertising demo is what we used to do
on Countdown in two thousand and three. Meanwhile, Mika Brzhinsky
continues to do damage could control, as in, she keeps
(07:06):
doing more damage. She went on another podcast and still
does not understand what the big deal is, quote taking
stock of everything that's happened. I don't regret anything I've
said during the campaign, and I stand by it, she
told a Daily Beast podcast. But I'm also looking at
how to do things differently, and I would never turn
down an opportunity to gain insider information. Good idea, Mika,
(07:28):
because at the present rate, it'll be far more efficient
for you to dump this expensive to produce TV show
with no audience anymore, and just gain your insider information
by going door to door or stopping passers by in
the street and asking them. So here it is perfect
storm MSNBC hurriedly spun off by another terrified corporation that
(07:51):
already leaned to the right as it was the network
hitting an inevitable troth based on even the most violent
swing of the political pendulum, as it has many times
in the last twenty years, and now it's only identify
Daily show imploding, and Trump Junior joking to a guy
who already took one place for liberals, if not of liberals,
(08:13):
and destroyed it and spent forty four billion dollars to
do so. Because so what, Trump Junior joking, The Musky
should buy it or not joking? I want to go
into depth about how long MSNBC and NBC and its
corporate masters have existed in painful tension. But first, speaking
(08:36):
of tension, did you hear what his self professed former friend,
neuroscientist Sam Harris now says about Musk on The Bulwark
Podcast with Tim Miller. If you think the Musk Trump
MSNBC story is some kind of tinderbox, well here is
mister Harris describing Musk's collection of matches.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
In his case, perhaps more conspicuously than any other. We're
seeing the total derangement of a personality based on social
media addiction. I mean that is in fact what you
see with Elon. He is a Twitter addict, so much
so that he felt he needed to buy the platform.
And now he has this this you know, free speech
(09:19):
evangelist gloss on what he's up to. But really, what
he's up to is you know, snorting ketamine and tweeting
at all hours of the day and night. Right, And
this is his influence on our politics. I mean, his
behavior on Twitter is obviously palpably visibly deranged, right, I
mean he signal boosts Pizzagate lunatics knowing who they are.
(09:44):
He knows who they are because I and others have
told him who they are, and he feels he has
absolutely no compunction about. You know, he thinks he's doing
a service to humanity by boosting to two hundred million
followers obvious lies and conspiracy theories and making some of
the most odious online trolls even more famous. And meanwhile
(10:08):
just you know, declaring war on actually normal people who,
for whatever reason, he's gotten on the wrong side of c.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Boom. So to understand fully the MSNBC thing, spinning it off,
maybe selling it, maybe c and ending it, maybe twittering it,
maybe musking it, you have to understand the background. You
have to understand that while the network went live on
July fifteenth, nineteen ninety six, the friction between MSNBC and
(10:43):
NBC News, and the calls within NBC to get rid
of MSNBC or kill it or do something about it
began on December eighth, nineteen ninety five, the day the
news leaked that NBC was going to transform its failed
chat show cable channel America is Talking, run by Roger
Ayles of All People, Kill It, take on Microsoft as
(11:07):
a partner, and rebrand that outlet as MSNBC News. For
nearly three decades, NBC and its news bosses and its
corporate owners have never been able to decide what MSNBC
was supposed to be compliment to NBC News to which
viewers of the broadcast network could be directed for the
(11:27):
proverbial more coverage or a spillover channel or a separate entity,
or what most of the newsies thought well into its
second decade, a great place to train reporters and anchors
and producers, and the moment they showed any aptitude or
success in cable to promote them from MSNBC to real NBC.
(11:50):
The last concept of what the network was usually prevailed,
and obviously it was suicidal. It meant MSNBC was like
a farm team in baseball. I mean, these were the
Trenton Yankees. Your show is a success at MSNBC. The
producer was good reward them by moving them up and
(12:10):
replacing them at MSNBC with somebody not as good. This
meant anybody who was good at MSNBC immediately left MSNBC
and was replaced by somebody not as good. But it
also meant that anybody who wasn't good at MSNBC and
(12:31):
didn't improve, and wasn't attractive and didn't get promoted to NBC.
Any of those people stayed at MSNBC forever and usually
got worse. Three quarters of management fit that description. My
original nineteen ninety seven MSNBC News Hours, The Big Show,
(12:52):
and The White House in Crisis were the first programs
that made MSNBC any money. I mean seriously. The network
otherwise hemorrhaged cash from its launch in nineteen ninety ten
until about two thousand and five. Throughout my first stint there,
I kept telling the bosses that the problems they had
(13:13):
what was MSNBC supposed to be would be simplified if
not solved by one very easy solution, changed the damn
name of the network. You could use the same people,
the same set, the same cameras, but if MSNBC did
not have the letters NBC in it, there would be
a philosophical degree of separation that would benefit everybody, and
(13:36):
being my bosses, they never listened. I literally put this
in a thirty page proposal for a revamped MSNBC network
master plan. I still have a copy of it. The
date on it is July nineteen ninety eight. I finally
left MSNBC late in nineteen ninety eight and returned almost
(13:58):
by accident to NBC to work the Olympics in two
thousand and two. My sports bosses one day asked me
to help out MSNBC its lineup, depleted by anchor illness
and the upcoming invasion in Iraq. By March of two
thousand and three, the same people I had stormed away
from five years earlier offered me the same eight pm
(14:20):
time slot and a new contract. In the fifteen months
between my departure and my return in that eight pm slot,
MSNBC had had seventeen different shows. They had averaged thirteen
weeks each. But that's deceiving because one of the eight
PM shows on MSNBC in my absence lasted exactly one episode. Anyway,
(14:46):
it was not until two thousand and five that my
new show, my second show there countdown, a low rated
nightly news Digest MAGAZINEI kind of thing started getting really
political and really suspicious of Bush and Iraq and especially
the Republican's political manipulation the threat of terrorism, and suddenly
(15:07):
we had something new in the equation viewers. By the
next year, the ad salesman, and contrary to all logic,
they are the ones from whom you get the truth
in a news company or any kind of television company.
They were sending me bottles of champagne and revealing that
Countdown by itself was now earning a fifty million dollar
(15:28):
annual profit, then seventy five million a year, then one
hundred million a year. The ad guys love me, but
other management at NBC not so much, because this was
a new problem. Rather than MSNBC being an annoying, self
fulfilling prophecy of doom, suddenly it was an annoying, problematic success.
(15:53):
Right after MSNBC started making money, it started making enemies.
The Republicans came right to our door. The psychos at
Fox News like O'Reilly and Hannity and Ale's. This is
when we called them fixed News or Fox Noise. They
started calling executives at NBC and its parent company GE
demanding that I stopped criticizing them. The fascists are softer
(16:19):
than church music. The reason I got personal was the
more personal you got, the angrier they got. When Tim
Russert was still alive and defending me internally and externally,
he would watch every night and send me tips and
warnings and ideas, and he was capable of playing the
Republicans inside NBC and outside NBC like fiddles. It was
(16:41):
pretty much fine. And then came that horrible day June thirteenth,
two thousand and eight, Tim died, and suddenly NBC News
was in the hands of a lot of cowards and
bullies like Tom Brokaw and Joe Scarborough and Jeff Zucker
and Chris Lickt and names you wouldn't know like Jeff
Immelt and Steve Kappus and Phil Griffin and Rick Kaplan.
(17:03):
In Russert's place, we were now run by men like Griffin,
who spent a year fighting my entreaties to hire this
Rachel Meadow, telling me I couldn't even put her on
as my guest host because nobody would watch a woman,
especially a lesbian or another liberal, do the news. Then,
(17:24):
when it was obvious she was popular and they were wrong.
They lied to me, and they told me they had
hired her so that one night Larry King at CNN
talked her into going on his show for two hundred
and fifty dollars. I'll just say that again, two hundred
and fifty dollars. I wound up hiring Rachel that night
(17:45):
out of my own pocket to keep MSNBC from losing her.
Literally the cash in my wallet. I gave her all
but five dollars. I gave her four hundred and thirty
seven dollars. Otherwise she goes to CNN and we never
see her again, at least at NBC anyway. Of two
thousand and eight, the Republicans were threatening Brokaw that if
(18:08):
he didn't get me fired or at least removed from
MSNBC's coverage of the presidential election, John McCain would not
show up for the debate that Brokaw had inherited from Russard.
So Tom went in and threatened, and that is a
nice euphemism for blackmailed NBC management on behalf of the
GOP just so he could host one more debate. Then
(18:31):
within a year it was Fox blackmailing the executives at
GE actually getting the chairman of ge Jeff Immelt, to
threaten to take MSNBC off the air if Fox continued
to criticize him and hound him because Emmelt's mom was
a Bill O'Reilly fan, and O'Reilly kept claiming her little boy,
Jeff was producing weapons used to kill Americans in Iraq.
(18:57):
There was a big meeting at which we were told
the network might be going off the air in six hours.
That meeting kind of summarized the MSNBC NBC corporate tension
that exists to this day that opens the door for
Elon Musk buying it. It could and would get meaner,
(19:17):
and it could and would get easier from time to time,
from year to year, but it's always there, and it
is there to this day. As the spinning off of
the network into part of a new company called Spinco
suggests that meeting, by the way, from two thousand and nine,
the We're All going to Die meeting, that is worthy
(19:37):
of its own lengthy recap, which I will give you shortly.
But anyway, back to the main part of this story,
the current part of this story. Back then, it was
still getting worse and worse. Zucker and Roger Ayles wound
up meeting inside thirty Rock No Less to decide what
I could and could not say on MSNBC about Fox,
and what Fox would and would not say about Ge
(20:00):
negotiating what could be in the news on two of
America's three cable news channels. By twenty ten, NBC started
suggesting we put Republicans on Countdown. They wanted me to
have Scarborough on every night. Nobody ever asked me a
direct question as to how. In January twenty eleven, I
(20:24):
wound up leaving this mess of MSNBC and leaving the
highest rated cable news show that was not on Fox.
And I left because they were beginning to throw up
roadblocks to my commentaries and mess with my producers, and
most importantly because twice they breached my contract. And again,
this is all about the conflict that exists to this
(20:44):
moment between the idea of NBC News and the false
god of neutrality and both sidesmanship and Chuck Todd's and MSNBC.
They suspended me once from making campaign donations. Donations I
(21:05):
made after our election coverage had concluded to acquaintances like
Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who had gotten death threats who had
run out of money to pay for more security. NBC
said I had violated the NBC News employee rules and
really publicly slammed me, which was kind of unfortunate for
(21:25):
them in so much as two years earlier, they had
written up and demanded that I sign a new contract
that specifically said I was not an NBC News employee.
This had saved them thousands of dollars because if I
wasn't an NBC News employee, they didn't have to pay
for my dental care. I swear that was part of it.
The other part of it was if I was not
an NBC News employee, when the spit hit the fan,
(21:48):
they could say, well, he doesn't work for NBC News,
he worked for MSNBC. The sad thing was the original
solution to the news of my campaign contributions had been
president of MSNBC calling me and saying, well, this looks bad.
I mean, I know it's your right to do it.
It's not like going to suspend you or anything stupid
like that, and this is sort of our fault, but
(22:10):
this just looks bad. Can you can you think of
is there anything you can do to make this look better?
And I said, no, you're right, it does look bad.
I'll apologize on the show tomorrow. And I don't have
to do this. I want that it made clear, but
I will voluntarily stop any campaign contributions as long as
(22:30):
I am doing this show. And the president of MSNBC
said great, and I said great. And I wrote the
apology that night and I sent it to him that
night and he said great. And I said great, and
I said great, I already have part of tomorrow's show
written and that was it. And the next morning, without
a hearing, without a phone call, without an email, without
any warning, this hysterical teenager named Steve Kappus, President NBC News,
(22:54):
puts out a press release in which he angrily suspends
me indefinitely without pay for violations of the NBC News
employee rule book that says NBC News employees can't make
donations to political campaign except oops, I'm not an NBC
News employee. Because they wanted to give themselves distance between
NBC News and MSNBC and not pay my dental And
(23:15):
within hours there was a petition on social media demanding
my reinstatement, with two hundred and fifty thousand signatures on it,
plus at NBC there was a lot of shushing and
worrying because everybody at NBC News made donations to political campaigns,
they just hid them. They donated in their wife's name,
or their kid's name, or whoever. I was the only
(23:37):
one who admitted it. Joe Scarborough went on the air
and complained about my donating to campaigns, and two days
later they suspended him for donating to campaigns because he
still was an NBC News employee. And this guy campus
(23:57):
dug in again NBC News versus MSNBC, and demanded that
I be suspended for a month without at least and
all of this was public. In the short term. What
happened was they told me on a Friday, I was suspended.
On Tuesday, I was back on the air. They couldn't
even dock my pay. They couldn't even charge me for
(24:19):
any days off. In the long term, right after I
was suspended, were actually not suspended. Al Gore phoned me
and he offered me a fortune to take countdown to
his struggling network called Current TV. Brain Countdown to Current
TV will give you fifty million dollars, he said, plus bonuses,
plus a piece of the network you'll be an owner. Anyway,
(24:42):
the current thing turned out to be a scam. It
blew up rather quickly. On the other hand, I got
enough money to literally never have to work again for
the next decade. Again touching on this subject of NBC
News and its interests versus the interests of the corporate
entities that owned it and MSNBC. NBC News and ms
(25:04):
NBC and I flirted with a reunion for the next
ten years. Comcast asked as far back as September twenty
eleven if I would consider going back. Then came the message,
we can't do it. We found out that too many
people at NBC News wouldn't like it, although everybody at
(25:25):
MSNBC would like it and we would like it. So
now it was the corporation at MSNBC versus NBC News.
In twenty fourteen, I actually met with the new NBC
News executives for two hours and they wanted me to
bring countdown back and we started the process. And then
the Brian Williams scandal broke and those news executives got
fired because they ignored the Brian Williams scandal. In October
(25:48):
twenty fifteen, I met with the new new executives who
replaced the ones who got fired. They wanted me to
come back. They made an actual offer, and it was stupid,
and it was predicated on having me not do any commentaries,
like what was the point of countdown without the commentaries?
What did you want me to do? Draw pictures? Teach
people to paint? And then that guy got fired in
(26:12):
twenty nineteen, and the new chairman of the entire NBC operation,
Jeff Shell, was an old friend of mine from Fox Sports,
and he wanted to bring me back, and then Matdow
said no, and then Shell got fired and that was
the final stake in what would have been my third stint.
So now, after twenty eight plus years on the air,
(26:34):
they have done something to separate MSNBC from NBC News,
but not really. They still haven't changed the name, and
it may wind up being nothing more than an official
new route of who's in charge and having distinct on
air staffs. Even that could allow Comcasts to continue to
(26:58):
own MSNBC and for it to remain vigorous and liberal
and useful in a time of crisis that we are entering,
or it will allow them to sell it to Elon Musk,
who will change it to musk x TV. Also of interest, here,
(27:29):
MSNBC is experiencing the proverbial existential crisis again, that little
one I mentioned just fifteen and a half years ago.
That one escalated even faster than this one has. And
corporate was so mad back then. They were not talking
about selling it. They were just going to push the
(27:51):
off switch, and I helped. There is instruction for the
future in that part of the past. Let me go
into great detail about the meeting on the mount of
Jeff Zucker's office in two thousand and nine. That's next.
(28:11):
This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Olboman hell
ahead of us here on countdown. Quote, I don't want
to see your botched chief hooker inspired boob job on
my television. Can we introduce a bill to bar that? Unquote?
(28:33):
Which former woman staffer of which current member of Congress
said that about which current member of Congress? Next in
the other worst persons in the world. First, to complete
my theatrical promise from before the break insigne the last
time MSNBC was on the verge of extinction June two
thousand and nine, My executive producer is Epovich and I
(28:55):
are summoned to the fifty second floor office of NBC
president Jeff Zooker. This is at thirty Rock in New York.
It is, in fact a top three rock in New York.
The only other thing on the floor is the private
dining room for Zooker and the other executives of his
corporation and ge which owned us. It's kind of like
Zucker's office, kind of like the Los Angeles Coliseum, only
(29:19):
with floor lamps. Anyway, already in the room MSNBC president
Phil Griffin, a producer from Hardball with Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz,
his producer, some goon from Morning Joe, but not Scarborough
or Brzhinski themselves, and from the new show that had
been spun off from mine, Rachel Maddow and her producer
(29:41):
Bill Wolf. Basically everybody with any chops at MSNBC. And
the message from Zucker, who was bright red and sweating
for the only time in his life, was so existential
that he thought he had to repeat it to me.
I said, Jeff, imilt is going to take MSNBC off
(30:01):
the air. I didn't need any of my over wrought
visions from two years earlier of the future of liberal
news commentary falling out the NBC window to its death
on the rink. This was the real thing. The chairman
of General Electric was threatening to open the window himself,
throw us out the window himself, and then race down
(30:22):
to the pavement to stomp on our dying remains himself.
Poor Ed Schultz heard Jeff Zucker say those words, and
he had screwed up his face and tilted his head
like a puppy hearing a car crash. He had not
believed it the first time. He had not believed it
the second time. Zucker said it a third time. Immelt
(30:42):
is going to take MSNBC off the effing air at,
Schultz groaned. After weeks of Griffin's coaxing, he had finally
just moved from Nebraska to New York the preceding weekend,
Yet he was still, somehow only the second most strung
out person in the room. You, Zucker shouted at me,
You're the smartest one in the room. What do we
(31:05):
do now? I'll confess I was shaken by this because
it appeared for once that Zucker was not being sarcastic.
I had never before seen him flush nor flustered. This
was a guy who wore fleece in July. Now he
was beat red and sweating. Sometimes he knew what he
was doing, and, as his opposition to hiring Matdow had proved,
(31:26):
sometimes he didn't know what he was doing, but he
always acted as the most confident man in the galaxy.
But now he literally had no clue what to do next.
And he not only could not ignore my advice, he
desperately needed it. This situation and that color on his
face were almost worth watching the corporate fascists nuke my network.
(31:48):
I asked Zucker to explain what happened? You got Dan, Well,
know what happened. Zucker moved towards me, and I stood
up and I told him I would see myself out.
He stopped, remembering that he did indeed actually need my help.
I'm sorry. I apologize. This isn't Rachal, this is Melt.
Last week sometime Bill O'Reilly snapped. He told Murdoch he
(32:09):
wasn't gonna take any more of what you were saying
about him on the air. So he did a piece
last night accusing Ge of manufacturing the components that have
been used in roadside bombs that were built in Iran
to kill Americans in Iraq, which is true. Legally, that's
legally true. They found roadside bombs that had like thirty
year old GE transistors or TV tubes from nineteen fifty
(32:31):
four or something in them. Legally, GE did manufacture components
that were used in roadside bombs that were built in
Iran to kill Americans in Iraq. So O'Reilly puts this
on his effing show as a lead story, and then
Fox sent two camera crews in this little crap producer
from o'reiley show, Jesse Waters something to stake emmelt out
(32:52):
and chase him around the GE shareholders meeting in Charlotte.
Zucker finally came up for air, and I jumped in,
Why didn't emmelt have six camera crews to stake out
the two Fox crews and chase them around in Charlotte?
I mean, isn't that one of our news hubs Charlotte.
Doesn't emmelt own like twenty camera crews? There? He bring
a camera crew, you'll bring two camera crews. Zucker started
(33:16):
to not like me again. Now you suggest that where
were you when? All right, never mind, it doesn't matter,
Emmel says, if there's one more story on Bill O'Reilly
about GE manufacturing components for roadside bombs in Iraq. He's
taking MSNBC off the air immediately. It'll just be twenty
four hours of lock up. And I'm fired, and you're fired.
(33:37):
And then he pointed at Chris Matthews, producer, and Matthews
is fired. And he pointed at poor Ed Schultz and
you're fired, and Ed whimpered, So smart ass, what the
F do we do? I feigned all the nonchalants I
could feign. If I could have lit a shroot by
striking a match on the sole of my boot, I
would have. It's manageable. But Jeff, why is Emmelt so
(34:02):
worked up about what O'Reilly said about him? Only O'Reilly's
nutjob viewers actually believe any of that crap. Nobody at GE,
nobody investing in GE, could possibly believe we're building components
for roadside bombs. Zucker inhaled deeply. Emmelt's mother believes it.
All the heads in the room turned toward the president
(34:24):
of NBC. Missus. Emmelt back in Cincinnati is a devoted
Bill O'Reilly viewer watches him every night, sees this, calls him,
says Sonny, why are you manufacturing components that were used
in roadside bombs built in Iran to kill Americans in Iraq?
I had not expected that, I said to Zucker. So
(34:47):
he'll really burn what two hundred million a year in
profits just between Rachel and me? Because his mom watches
Bill O'Reilly. Zucker got angry again. You bet your effing
assi will. Now you said it was manageable. How how
the hef do we manage it? Ulberman? Just a minute?
How old is she? Zucker summoned all his annoyance. How
(35:10):
old is who ML's mother? How old is she? Jeff
Zucker was really annoyed. How they should? I know you're
missing the point. I had him really worked up, nearly
to the boiling point. It was great, guess, Zucker spluttered.
I don't know. He's in his mid fifties. She's got
(35:30):
to be eighty ninety something. I stifled a fake yawn. Yeah,
you're right, probably closer to ninety now that I think
of it. So the problem is she watches O'Reilly. She
tells him what's on Fox, what O'Reilly's saying about Ge. Well,
I think you have a simple solution. I'd say the
first thing you do is you send over a couple
(35:51):
of big guys to her house and you pull the
freaking cable out of the wall. Zucker actually gasped, my producer,
is he Povich unsuccessfully stifled a laugh, and I saw
Rachel crack a smile. Zuke regained himself. This isn't funny, Olderman,
I crossed my legs. Oh, it's a little funny. And anyway,
it's not essential if the problem is emailed is threatening
(36:14):
to take the network off the air because O'Reilly is
avenging himself against me by attacking him and attacking ge.
The short term solution is easy, and in fact it
is manageable. The long term solution that's not easy, and
that's not manageable. But the short term one that's simple.
Rest of this week, next week, maybe the week after that,
even we just don't mention Fox News on MSNBC. Something
(36:39):
resembling a smile crossed Zucker's face. It made him look
a little less like a lizard person and more like
a monkey with glasses. You do that forever? No, not forever.
I would not do that, I said to Bias time. Yes,
but remember who was it who was in my office?
(37:00):
Last winter telling me that I should go on the
air and just to f with Fox. I should ask
why Rupert Murdoch was still running a huge international media
company like News Corp, despite all the reports that he's
suffering from dementia, even though there haven't been any reports
that he's suffering from dementia. For everybody's sake, here, who
was that again who told me to do that? Zucker's
(37:22):
goodwill was gone again? Obviously that was me. What's your point?
My point is, we built this new brand of ours
organically on a couple of themes, a couple of statements
of principle, and one of them is to use your
words just to f with Fox. If we don't f
with Fox for a couple of weeks at the start
of the summer, who's gonna care. Who's gonna notice? But
(37:45):
like after two weeks, three weeks, our viewers are gonna notice,
and the TV writers are gonna notice, and then the
crap will hit from every direction. You can think of.
Temporary freeze on mentioning Fox and mentioning O'Reilly and mentioning Murdoch. Fine,
permanent freeze. Might as well let iml turn us off
in the morning. After all, I don't think Zooker actually
(38:07):
heard the last part about Emil turning us off. After all,
the lack of color was returning to his face. Okay, breathe,
he kept saying to himself. Breathe, breathe, Okay, breathe. He
looked at me and nodded. He pointed at Izzy and
at Phil Griffin and me, You and you and you
and I. We will talk tomorrow, maybe tonight, and we'll
(38:28):
all meet again next week. Until then, nothing about Fox, anybody,
are we clear? Nothing on the air about Fox. Silence
in the room. Then the assorted noises of people rising,
mixed with attempts to resuscitate poor Ed Schultz. Somebody Matthew's guy,
Harson I think, was almost at the door out of
Zucker's office, an office so big that it was to
(38:49):
steal the Ring Lardner line, the size of the Yale Bowl,
but with lamps. And then a voice spoke up, quietly
but firmly. Excuse me. It was Rachel Maddow. Excuse me.
I will not have the content of my show dictated
by any corporations, including the one I work for. Remember
(39:11):
this is June two thousand and nine. She still felt
that way then, and especially one I don't work for,
I will walk out first. I cannot have the audience
wondering what else I have not told them. I don't
do a lot about Fox on my show. But if
there is a story about Fox, I will not honor
this freeze. I will report that story. And if I'm
prevented from reporting that story, I will leave. Whereupon she left,
(39:33):
Zucker barked Phil Alderman, is he stay? When the rest
of the room had cleared, Zucker blew air out of
his mouth as if it were smoke. He gestured violently
at me with his right arm. I told you she
was a mistake. You didn't listen to me. I told you.
Now she's your problem. All this is your problem. Get
her back on the reservation or else. Now I had
(39:55):
run out of goodwill and jokes. Oh, I'll get her
back on the reservation, Jeff. But if you think this
is my problem, just think about what happens if he
really does take us off the air, or if it
just gets out that he threatened to take us off
the air because his mother didn't like what Fox said
(40:16):
about him. That's my problem. Uh uh, that's your problem.
And it's the problem of the CEO of the fricking
sixth largest corporation in the world, who makes his business
decisions involving hundreds of millions of dollars of profits based
on what his mother says. At this point, Phil Griffin
(40:39):
managed to pull Zucker away and Izzy and I made
for the door, saying nothing until we were in the elevator. Finally,
she asked, what are you going to do about Rachel?
I look straight ahead. I have depth perception issues while
traveling forward, backwards, up or down. Yeah, if I know
what I'm gonna do about her. But I got an idea.
I mean, the only person she was really talking to
(41:00):
in there was herself. This isn't a brand new Surprise
six success for her anymore. This is successful. This is
what nine ten months she's successful. She said she was
once a dancing cell phone outside of a cell phone
store outside of Boston. She ain't going back to that.
I went to talk to Rachel about an hour later
(41:20):
and reassured her. I mentioned that powerful as Fox was,
they were not going to be able to re invade
Iraq by themselves, and unless she moved it way closer
than it had been, nobody would cross her censorship line,
and I said, just give me as much time as
the French government took before fleeing during the Nazi advance
in nineteen forty. I said, give me, what was it,
(41:42):
thirty three days? Give me thirty three days. If we
aren't back where we were this morning, we can both
quit on the air. I mean that'd be fun, right.
Three nights later, well after midnight on a Friday, my
NBC issued BlackBerry buzzed with a quick email from Rachel
madow Hey. She wrote, don't necessarily quote me because I'm
(42:02):
really drunk, but just make the deal you can for us.
I trust you. We don't need to do Fox all
the time. I never do Fox stories anyway. I just
had to say that, and this is the best platform
we will ever have. Well she was right, at least
for the time being. A couple of weeks later, I
had to sneak in a script that blasted Fox, and
at ten thirty at home that night, I got a
(42:23):
call from a drunken Phil Griffin shouting into the phone.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
I have a family.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Zucker had to go meet with Roger Ayles secretly inside
thirty Rock, and I hope they remember to clean the
room afterwards, and mlt even had to meet with Murdoch.
And then, happily, some idiot Ge executive decided to boast
to The New York Times about getting us little talent
children under control and a big deal with the executives
(42:51):
over at Fox and how they'd settled everything, which blew
up the whole deal instantly, because the moment the deal
went public, NBC looked so stupid, and even NBC News
was now risked. The only point of the whole thing
was to keep the Immelts and the Zookers and the
Griffins and the ales Is from throwing us and our
little island of liberal commentary out of that window at
(43:14):
thirty Rock. But as Rachel Mattow and I would be
constantly reminded in the ensuing years, thirty Rock has a
lot of freaking windows fiddling around with the format. Believe
(43:48):
it or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about,
the daily roundup of the misgrants, morons and Dunning Krueger
effects specimens, who constitute the other worse persons in the world,
the Brons worse. Why for change of top it's NBC News. Well,
this has nothing to do with MSNBC. Why is it
(44:09):
in the show? My pal Will Bunch pointed this out
because it was a story about a fire in his
hometown of Philadelphia. The headline on the NBC News website
US news man's burning body found in driveway of Philadelphia home.
Police call death suspicious. A gas can instruct matches were
(44:33):
found near the body of the man who was found
with severe burns laying in a driveway shortly after three
am Tuesday. Police said suspicious. You say, man's burning body
found in driveway of Philadelphia home. Police called death suspicious suspicious?
Why on earth does that make you think that suspicious
(44:53):
spontaneous combustion is a real thing. This flashed me back
to my youth as a Los Angeles sportscaster not long
after I left there. This is April of nineteen ninety two.
The following appear in the Los Angeles Times. Unfortunately, it
was about a reporter I knew from my old station.
Just the Facts reads this blurb. Last week, when the
(45:14):
severed arms of a woman who has since been identified
washed ashore at Venice Beach and Marina del Rey, Channel
two sent Jody Baskerville in pursuit of the story Baskerville
to a police official. Quote, do you suspect foul play? Unquote? No, no,
of course not. The woman just stayed too long in
(45:36):
the Pacific Ocean. Her arms melted off. The runner up
worser Pete hegseeth the creature Trump wants running. You know
all of our military popular information dug up a piece
that Pete Hegseth published in college, a bemusing yet mandatory
orientation program, revolved entirely around whether an instance of sexual
(45:58):
intercourse constituted quote rape unquote. He wrote, The actual instance
portrayed in the kit was in fact not a clear
case of rape, at least not in my home state.
In short, though intercourse was not consented to, there was
no duress because the girl drank herself into unconsciousness. Both
criteria must be satisfied for rape. Unfortunately, the panelists never
(46:21):
cited any legal definition of rape. Yet the panel, all
females in the session I attended, claimed that rape it waste.
In case you're thinking, well, everybody who writes anything in
college writes something stupid, and this is, you know, nineteen
fifty six or something. This thing from hegseith. You can't
rape an unconscious woman because she's incapable of saying no right,
(46:44):
no duress because she's unconscious. This scumbag graduated college in
two thousand and three. But our winner the worst, Nancy Mace,
the ex Republican gadfly ron Philip Kowski says by his
count in just thirty six hours, crazed Republican congress woman
(47:05):
Nancy Pace posted just a few times on the subject
of barring transgendered congress women from the women's bathroom in Congress.
Just a few times, just two hundred and sixty two
times in a day and a half. This is because
Mace was also trying to fund race off of it.
She text bombed all supporters and some non supporters too.
(47:26):
Natalie Johnson had been Mace's communications director and was so
embarrassed she not only quit, she left Washington. She left
politics to go to Utah to become a skiing instructor.
She got one of the Mace fundraising texts, and her
response was to nuke her ex boss. She posted a
screenshot from Mace's text, I don't want to see your
(47:48):
junk in my bathroom. It's representative Mace. The trans mob
wants to kill me, but I fought back and won,
and then there's a link to making a donation. This
is one of the two hundred and sixty two times
that she I guess text and posted about it, according
to Philip Kowski. Natalie Johnson put out this screenshot and added,
(48:12):
I don't want to see your botched, cheap hooker inspired
boob job on my television? Can we introduce a bill
to bar that kinda say? Cheap hooker inspired boob job
is one of my new favorite all time insults, up
there with pine Cone. I don't want to see your
cheap hooker inspired boob job you pine Cone? Well done?
(48:36):
Ms Johnson, Nancy cheap hooker inspired boob job? Wait, aren't
the terms boob and Nancy Mace redundant? Mace Today's other
worse person in the world. I've done all the damage
(49:05):
I can do here. Thank you for listening. Follow me
for the podcast promo videos on Blue Sky, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter,
x if it's still there, Instagram, threads, and you twit.
Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass, and drums.
(49:29):
It was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy
musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olderman theme from
Me ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of
ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group
No Horns Allowed. My announcer was my friend Larry David,
and everything else was as ever my fault. That's countdown
(49:52):
for today, just one five hundred and eighteen days until
the scheduled end of the lame duck presidency of Trump.
Probably I'm going to try to take the holiday off,
but I suspect there will be a second podcast at
some point this week. I will alert the media the
next scheduled countdown is next Monday. As always bulletins as
(50:14):
the news warrants till the next one, whenever the hell
that is. I'm Keith Olremman. Good Morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production
(50:43):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts,
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Is
Elon Musk going to buy MSNBC and turn it into
(00:28):
a pro Trump propaganda channel? And if not Musk, somebody
else I may be asking this question backwards. Is there
anybody to stop someone Musk or otherwise from buying MSNBC
and turning it into pro Trump propaganda? Well, sir, who
stopped Musk from doing that? To Twitter? Who stopped Warner Bros.
(00:51):
Discovery from buying CNN and doing that incompletely but sufficiently
enough to render CNN irrelevant in television news? As preface,
we don't know for certain that MSNBC is actually force.
Companies like Comcast take assets like MSNBC, which by itself
has made a profit of something around five or six
(01:14):
billion dollars since I made it into the Liberal News
Channel in two thousand and six and hired Mattow in
two thousand and eight. They take assets like that and
spin them off into another separate company they also own,
and they throw in CNBC and Oxygen and the Golf
Channel and USA Network and half a dozen other assets.
And they do it so hastily they don't even have
(01:35):
a name for their new company, and they're just calling
it spin Co. Companies like Crompcast do that all the
time and never sell the new separate company, especially after
gifting it with a great, long lasting heritage of a
name like spin Co. Oh, I'm being told no corporations
ever do that. Comcast wants to get out of the
(01:56):
cable based business, or at minimum give it self the
option to get out of the cable based business Spinco.
This is where Musk comes in, and if Musk comes in,
maybe Trump comes in. As Musk's Twitter x dies, it
(02:17):
seems like half the content now is Musk tweets. Sometimes
it's Musk interacting with bots or other foreign disinfo. Sometimes
it's Musk and a fellow brain dead tech pro. Sometimes
it's a sequence like this. A tech pro posts that
Comcast is putting MSNBC up for sale, not technically true,
(02:38):
but Trump Junior screenshots that somehow steadies his hands long
enough to post that screenshot and type above it. Hey
at elon Musk, I have the funniest idea ever. And
Musk replies and replies how much does it cost? Just
for spits and giggles? Right after this, Megan Kelly, professional
(03:01):
moron retweets a poll reading MSNBC is going up for sale?
Should I buy it? I would like to fire Rachel
Maddow and Kelly who self destructed at MSNBC and NBC
News ads. Oh mg, do it? Never even noticing that
the name on the account that put out the poll
is quote not Elon Musk, and its address is I
(03:23):
Am not Elon Musk. And one wonders which of those
words caused Megan Kelly's tiny little mind to switch into
the off position. But I digress, though the laugh is
much needed. There are many nightmare nuggets in the news
of the last round of Trump cabinet nominations that concluded
this weekend. Past Pam Bondi was with Juliani at the
(03:48):
Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco. Sebastian Gorka counter terrorism advisor.
No no, no, no. The counter terrorism advisor is supposed
to be opposed to terrorism. They found audio of RFK
Junior comparing Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis.
So now, of course rf K Junior is apologizing for
being right the last time he was ever right. The
(04:11):
new Surgeon General nominee sold vitamin supplements on Fox and
friends weekend along with still Secretary of Defense designate Pete
shoot into the crowd. Hegseeth the new would be head
of the CDC was the congressman who introduced the legislation
to force Congress to intervene to force poor Terry Schaivo,
(04:31):
the Florida woman who was brain dead and dependent on
life support, but whose head kept moving from side to
side as if she were following a moving object with
her eyes that were opened but saw nothing. He introduced
the legislation to force her husband to keep this poor
woman alive. But hard as this may be to believe,
(04:53):
with all of that, Musk may be a bigger danger
than all of them combined, including Trump. The Wall Street
Journal reports that while companies like Apple are stretchgizing their
business pitches to the White House by essentially saying they're
going to go in and hold up just one shiny object,
one shiny object alone. To Trump, that's Tim Cook's idea,
(05:15):
or as Trump thinks, he's named Tim Apple. While that's
one strategy quote, a number of companies are also considering
whether to propose ideas directly to the Department of Government Efficiency,
led by Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswami. It
could be a way to develop new relationships within Trump's
inner circle unquote, new relationships or as you civilians might
(05:39):
call them, bribes. It's not just companies who now see
Musk as a portal to Trump. A separate Wall Street
journal piece reads quote. Chinese leaders enjoy some leverage over Musk,
who has poured billions of dollars into investments in Shanghai.
In China, Musk is a symbol of the American dream
(06:00):
and of US technological prowess. Even musk seventy six year
old mother May Musk boasts celebrity status. Sure sure, great
idea Musk as the real president while Trump looks at
shiny objects, while Musk owns what's left of Twitter X
(06:23):
and owns say MSNBC, MSNBC which just got spun off.
And we don't have the Thursday or Friday numbers yet,
But on Wednesday morning, the new version of Morning Joe
in which Joe and Mika like Trump again, it was
down to fifty one thousand viewers in the so called
(06:45):
ad demo. That's down sixty percent in that group since
the third quarter of this year. Fifty one thousand viewers
in the advertising demo is what we used to do
on Countdown in two thousand and three. Meanwhile, Mika Brzhinsky
continues to do damage could control, as in, she keeps
(07:06):
doing more damage. She went on another podcast and still
does not understand what the big deal is, quote taking
stock of everything that's happened. I don't regret anything I've
said during the campaign, and I stand by it, she
told a Daily Beast podcast. But I'm also looking at
how to do things differently, and I would never turn
down an opportunity to gain insider information. Good idea, Mika,
(07:28):
because at the present rate, it'll be far more efficient
for you to dump this expensive to produce TV show
with no audience anymore, and just gain your insider information
by going door to door or stopping passers by in
the street and asking them. So here it is perfect
storm MSNBC hurriedly spun off by another terrified corporation that
(07:51):
already leaned to the right as it was the network
hitting an inevitable troth based on even the most violent
swing of the political pendulum, as it has many times
in the last twenty years, and now it's only identify
Daily show imploding, and Trump Junior joking to a guy
who already took one place for liberals, if not of liberals,
(08:13):
and destroyed it and spent forty four billion dollars to
do so. Because so what, Trump Junior joking, The Musky
should buy it or not joking? I want to go
into depth about how long MSNBC and NBC and its
corporate masters have existed in painful tension. But first, speaking
(08:36):
of tension, did you hear what his self professed former friend,
neuroscientist Sam Harris now says about Musk on The Bulwark
Podcast with Tim Miller. If you think the Musk Trump
MSNBC story is some kind of tinderbox, well here is
mister Harris describing Musk's collection of matches.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
In his case, perhaps more conspicuously than any other. We're
seeing the total derangement of a personality based on social
media addiction. I mean that is in fact what you
see with Elon. He is a Twitter addict, so much
so that he felt he needed to buy the platform.
And now he has this this you know, free speech
(09:19):
evangelist gloss on what he's up to. But really, what
he's up to is you know, snorting ketamine and tweeting
at all hours of the day and night. Right, And
this is his influence on our politics. I mean, his
behavior on Twitter is obviously palpably visibly deranged, right, I
mean he signal boosts Pizzagate lunatics knowing who they are.
(09:44):
He knows who they are because I and others have
told him who they are, and he feels he has
absolutely no compunction about. You know, he thinks he's doing
a service to humanity by boosting to two hundred million
followers obvious lies and conspiracy theories and making some of
the most odious online trolls even more famous. And meanwhile
(10:08):
just you know, declaring war on actually normal people who,
for whatever reason, he's gotten on the wrong side of c.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Boom. So to understand fully the MSNBC thing, spinning it off,
maybe selling it, maybe c and ending it, maybe twittering it,
maybe musking it, you have to understand the background. You
have to understand that while the network went live on
July fifteenth, nineteen ninety six, the friction between MSNBC and
(10:43):
NBC News, and the calls within NBC to get rid
of MSNBC or kill it or do something about it
began on December eighth, nineteen ninety five, the day the
news leaked that NBC was going to transform its failed
chat show cable channel America is Talking, run by Roger
Ayles of All People, Kill It, take on Microsoft as
(11:07):
a partner, and rebrand that outlet as MSNBC News. For
nearly three decades, NBC and its news bosses and its
corporate owners have never been able to decide what MSNBC
was supposed to be compliment to NBC News to which
viewers of the broadcast network could be directed for the
(11:27):
proverbial more coverage or a spillover channel or a separate entity,
or what most of the newsies thought well into its
second decade, a great place to train reporters and anchors
and producers, and the moment they showed any aptitude or
success in cable to promote them from MSNBC to real NBC.
(11:50):
The last concept of what the network was usually prevailed,
and obviously it was suicidal. It meant MSNBC was like
a farm team in baseball. I mean, these were the
Trenton Yankees. Your show is a success at MSNBC. The
producer was good reward them by moving them up and
(12:10):
replacing them at MSNBC with somebody not as good. This
meant anybody who was good at MSNBC immediately left MSNBC
and was replaced by somebody not as good. But it
also meant that anybody who wasn't good at MSNBC and
(12:31):
didn't improve, and wasn't attractive and didn't get promoted to NBC.
Any of those people stayed at MSNBC forever and usually
got worse. Three quarters of management fit that description. My
original nineteen ninety seven MSNBC News Hours, The Big Show,
(12:52):
and The White House in Crisis were the first programs
that made MSNBC any money. I mean seriously. The network
otherwise hemorrhaged cash from its launch in nineteen ninety ten
until about two thousand and five. Throughout my first stint there,
I kept telling the bosses that the problems they had
(13:13):
what was MSNBC supposed to be would be simplified if
not solved by one very easy solution, changed the damn
name of the network. You could use the same people,
the same set, the same cameras, but if MSNBC did
not have the letters NBC in it, there would be
a philosophical degree of separation that would benefit everybody, and
(13:36):
being my bosses, they never listened. I literally put this
in a thirty page proposal for a revamped MSNBC network
master plan. I still have a copy of it. The
date on it is July nineteen ninety eight. I finally
left MSNBC late in nineteen ninety eight and returned almost
(13:58):
by accident to NBC to work the Olympics in two
thousand and two. My sports bosses one day asked me
to help out MSNBC its lineup, depleted by anchor illness
and the upcoming invasion in Iraq. By March of two
thousand and three, the same people I had stormed away
from five years earlier offered me the same eight pm
(14:20):
time slot and a new contract. In the fifteen months
between my departure and my return in that eight pm slot,
MSNBC had had seventeen different shows. They had averaged thirteen
weeks each. But that's deceiving because one of the eight
PM shows on MSNBC in my absence lasted exactly one episode. Anyway,
(14:46):
it was not until two thousand and five that my
new show, my second show there countdown, a low rated
nightly news Digest MAGAZINEI kind of thing started getting really
political and really suspicious of Bush and Iraq and especially
the Republican's political manipulation the threat of terrorism, and suddenly
(15:07):
we had something new in the equation viewers. By the
next year, the ad salesman, and contrary to all logic,
they are the ones from whom you get the truth
in a news company or any kind of television company.
They were sending me bottles of champagne and revealing that
Countdown by itself was now earning a fifty million dollar
(15:28):
annual profit, then seventy five million a year, then one
hundred million a year. The ad guys love me, but
other management at NBC not so much, because this was
a new problem. Rather than MSNBC being an annoying, self
fulfilling prophecy of doom, suddenly it was an annoying, problematic success.
(15:53):
Right after MSNBC started making money, it started making enemies.
The Republicans came right to our door. The psychos at
Fox News like O'Reilly and Hannity and Ale's. This is
when we called them fixed News or Fox Noise. They
started calling executives at NBC and its parent company GE
demanding that I stopped criticizing them. The fascists are softer
(16:19):
than church music. The reason I got personal was the
more personal you got, the angrier they got. When Tim
Russert was still alive and defending me internally and externally,
he would watch every night and send me tips and
warnings and ideas, and he was capable of playing the
Republicans inside NBC and outside NBC like fiddles. It was
(16:41):
pretty much fine. And then came that horrible day June thirteenth,
two thousand and eight, Tim died, and suddenly NBC News
was in the hands of a lot of cowards and
bullies like Tom Brokaw and Joe Scarborough and Jeff Zucker
and Chris Lickt and names you wouldn't know like Jeff
Immelt and Steve Kappus and Phil Griffin and Rick Kaplan.
(17:03):
In Russert's place, we were now run by men like Griffin,
who spent a year fighting my entreaties to hire this
Rachel Meadow, telling me I couldn't even put her on
as my guest host because nobody would watch a woman,
especially a lesbian or another liberal, do the news. Then,
(17:24):
when it was obvious she was popular and they were wrong.
They lied to me, and they told me they had
hired her so that one night Larry King at CNN
talked her into going on his show for two hundred
and fifty dollars. I'll just say that again, two hundred
and fifty dollars. I wound up hiring Rachel that night
(17:45):
out of my own pocket to keep MSNBC from losing her.
Literally the cash in my wallet. I gave her all
but five dollars. I gave her four hundred and thirty
seven dollars. Otherwise she goes to CNN and we never
see her again, at least at NBC anyway. Of two
thousand and eight, the Republicans were threatening Brokaw that if
(18:08):
he didn't get me fired or at least removed from
MSNBC's coverage of the presidential election, John McCain would not
show up for the debate that Brokaw had inherited from Russard.
So Tom went in and threatened, and that is a
nice euphemism for blackmailed NBC management on behalf of the
GOP just so he could host one more debate. Then
(18:31):
within a year it was Fox blackmailing the executives at
GE actually getting the chairman of ge Jeff Immelt, to
threaten to take MSNBC off the air if Fox continued
to criticize him and hound him because Emmelt's mom was
a Bill O'Reilly fan, and O'Reilly kept claiming her little boy,
Jeff was producing weapons used to kill Americans in Iraq.
(18:57):
There was a big meeting at which we were told
the network might be going off the air in six hours.
That meeting kind of summarized the MSNBC NBC corporate tension
that exists to this day that opens the door for
Elon Musk buying it. It could and would get meaner,
(19:17):
and it could and would get easier from time to time,
from year to year, but it's always there, and it
is there to this day. As the spinning off of
the network into part of a new company called Spinco
suggests that meeting, by the way, from two thousand and nine,
the We're All going to Die meeting, that is worthy
(19:37):
of its own lengthy recap, which I will give you shortly.
But anyway, back to the main part of this story,
the current part of this story. Back then, it was
still getting worse and worse. Zucker and Roger Ayles wound
up meeting inside thirty Rock No Less to decide what
I could and could not say on MSNBC about Fox,
and what Fox would and would not say about Ge
(20:00):
negotiating what could be in the news on two of
America's three cable news channels. By twenty ten, NBC started
suggesting we put Republicans on Countdown. They wanted me to
have Scarborough on every night. Nobody ever asked me a
direct question as to how. In January twenty eleven, I
(20:24):
wound up leaving this mess of MSNBC and leaving the
highest rated cable news show that was not on Fox.
And I left because they were beginning to throw up
roadblocks to my commentaries and mess with my producers, and
most importantly because twice they breached my contract. And again,
this is all about the conflict that exists to this
(20:44):
moment between the idea of NBC News and the false
god of neutrality and both sidesmanship and Chuck Todd's and MSNBC.
They suspended me once from making campaign donations. Donations I
(21:05):
made after our election coverage had concluded to acquaintances like
Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who had gotten death threats who had
run out of money to pay for more security. NBC
said I had violated the NBC News employee rules and
really publicly slammed me, which was kind of unfortunate for
(21:25):
them in so much as two years earlier, they had
written up and demanded that I sign a new contract
that specifically said I was not an NBC News employee.
This had saved them thousands of dollars because if I
wasn't an NBC News employee, they didn't have to pay
for my dental care. I swear that was part of it.
The other part of it was if I was not
an NBC News employee, when the spit hit the fan,
(21:48):
they could say, well, he doesn't work for NBC News,
he worked for MSNBC. The sad thing was the original
solution to the news of my campaign contributions had been
president of MSNBC calling me and saying, well, this looks bad.
I mean, I know it's your right to do it.
It's not like going to suspend you or anything stupid
like that, and this is sort of our fault, but
(22:10):
this just looks bad. Can you can you think of
is there anything you can do to make this look better?
And I said, no, you're right, it does look bad.
I'll apologize on the show tomorrow. And I don't have
to do this. I want that it made clear, but
I will voluntarily stop any campaign contributions as long as
(22:30):
I am doing this show. And the president of MSNBC
said great, and I said great. And I wrote the
apology that night and I sent it to him that
night and he said great. And I said great, and
I said great, I already have part of tomorrow's show
written and that was it. And the next morning, without
a hearing, without a phone call, without an email, without
any warning, this hysterical teenager named Steve Kappus, President NBC News,
(22:54):
puts out a press release in which he angrily suspends
me indefinitely without pay for violations of the NBC News
employee rule book that says NBC News employees can't make
donations to political campaign except oops, I'm not an NBC
News employee. Because they wanted to give themselves distance between
NBC News and MSNBC and not pay my dental And
(23:15):
within hours there was a petition on social media demanding
my reinstatement, with two hundred and fifty thousand signatures on it,
plus at NBC there was a lot of shushing and
worrying because everybody at NBC News made donations to political campaigns,
they just hid them. They donated in their wife's name,
or their kid's name, or whoever. I was the only
(23:37):
one who admitted it. Joe Scarborough went on the air
and complained about my donating to campaigns, and two days
later they suspended him for donating to campaigns because he
still was an NBC News employee. And this guy campus
(23:57):
dug in again NBC News versus MSNBC, and demanded that
I be suspended for a month without at least and
all of this was public. In the short term. What
happened was they told me on a Friday, I was suspended.
On Tuesday, I was back on the air. They couldn't
even dock my pay. They couldn't even charge me for
(24:19):
any days off. In the long term, right after I
was suspended, were actually not suspended. Al Gore phoned me
and he offered me a fortune to take countdown to
his struggling network called Current TV. Brain Countdown to Current
TV will give you fifty million dollars, he said, plus bonuses,
plus a piece of the network you'll be an owner. Anyway,
(24:42):
the current thing turned out to be a scam. It
blew up rather quickly. On the other hand, I got
enough money to literally never have to work again for
the next decade. Again touching on this subject of NBC
News and its interests versus the interests of the corporate
entities that owned it and MSNBC. NBC News and ms
(25:04):
NBC and I flirted with a reunion for the next
ten years. Comcast asked as far back as September twenty
eleven if I would consider going back. Then came the message,
we can't do it. We found out that too many
people at NBC News wouldn't like it, although everybody at
(25:25):
MSNBC would like it and we would like it. So
now it was the corporation at MSNBC versus NBC News.
In twenty fourteen, I actually met with the new NBC
News executives for two hours and they wanted me to
bring countdown back and we started the process. And then
the Brian Williams scandal broke and those news executives got
fired because they ignored the Brian Williams scandal. In October
(25:48):
twenty fifteen, I met with the new new executives who
replaced the ones who got fired. They wanted me to
come back. They made an actual offer, and it was stupid,
and it was predicated on having me not do any commentaries,
like what was the point of countdown without the commentaries?
What did you want me to do? Draw pictures? Teach
people to paint? And then that guy got fired in
(26:12):
twenty nineteen, and the new chairman of the entire NBC operation,
Jeff Shell, was an old friend of mine from Fox Sports,
and he wanted to bring me back, and then Matdow
said no, and then Shell got fired and that was
the final stake in what would have been my third stint.
So now, after twenty eight plus years on the air,
(26:34):
they have done something to separate MSNBC from NBC News,
but not really. They still haven't changed the name, and
it may wind up being nothing more than an official
new route of who's in charge and having distinct on
air staffs. Even that could allow Comcasts to continue to
(26:58):
own MSNBC and for it to remain vigorous and liberal
and useful in a time of crisis that we are entering,
or it will allow them to sell it to Elon Musk,
who will change it to musk x TV. Also of interest, here,
(27:29):
MSNBC is experiencing the proverbial existential crisis again, that little
one I mentioned just fifteen and a half years ago.
That one escalated even faster than this one has. And
corporate was so mad back then. They were not talking
about selling it. They were just going to push the
(27:51):
off switch, and I helped. There is instruction for the
future in that part of the past. Let me go
into great detail about the meeting on the mount of
Jeff Zucker's office in two thousand and nine. That's next.
(28:11):
This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Olboman hell
ahead of us here on countdown. Quote, I don't want
to see your botched chief hooker inspired boob job on
my television. Can we introduce a bill to bar that? Unquote?
(28:33):
Which former woman staffer of which current member of Congress
said that about which current member of Congress? Next in
the other worst persons in the world. First, to complete
my theatrical promise from before the break insigne the last
time MSNBC was on the verge of extinction June two
thousand and nine, My executive producer is Epovich and I
(28:55):
are summoned to the fifty second floor office of NBC
president Jeff Zooker. This is at thirty Rock in New York.
It is, in fact a top three rock in New York.
The only other thing on the floor is the private
dining room for Zooker and the other executives of his
corporation and ge which owned us. It's kind of like
Zucker's office, kind of like the Los Angeles Coliseum, only
(29:19):
with floor lamps. Anyway, already in the room MSNBC president
Phil Griffin, a producer from Hardball with Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz,
his producer, some goon from Morning Joe, but not Scarborough
or Brzhinski themselves, and from the new show that had
been spun off from mine, Rachel Maddow and her producer
(29:41):
Bill Wolf. Basically everybody with any chops at MSNBC. And
the message from Zucker, who was bright red and sweating
for the only time in his life, was so existential
that he thought he had to repeat it to me.
I said, Jeff, imilt is going to take MSNBC off
(30:01):
the air. I didn't need any of my over wrought
visions from two years earlier of the future of liberal
news commentary falling out the NBC window to its death
on the rink. This was the real thing. The chairman
of General Electric was threatening to open the window himself,
throw us out the window himself, and then race down
(30:22):
to the pavement to stomp on our dying remains himself.
Poor Ed Schultz heard Jeff Zucker say those words, and
he had screwed up his face and tilted his head
like a puppy hearing a car crash. He had not
believed it the first time. He had not believed it
the second time. Zucker said it a third time. Immelt
(30:42):
is going to take MSNBC off the effing air at,
Schultz groaned. After weeks of Griffin's coaxing, he had finally
just moved from Nebraska to New York the preceding weekend,
Yet he was still, somehow only the second most strung
out person in the room. You, Zucker shouted at me,
You're the smartest one in the room. What do we
(31:05):
do now? I'll confess I was shaken by this because
it appeared for once that Zucker was not being sarcastic.
I had never before seen him flush nor flustered. This
was a guy who wore fleece in July. Now he
was beat red and sweating. Sometimes he knew what he
was doing, and, as his opposition to hiring Matdow had proved,
(31:26):
sometimes he didn't know what he was doing, but he
always acted as the most confident man in the galaxy.
But now he literally had no clue what to do next.
And he not only could not ignore my advice, he
desperately needed it. This situation and that color on his
face were almost worth watching the corporate fascists nuke my network.
(31:48):
I asked Zucker to explain what happened? You got Dan, Well,
know what happened. Zucker moved towards me, and I stood
up and I told him I would see myself out.
He stopped, remembering that he did indeed actually need my help.
I'm sorry. I apologize. This isn't Rachal, this is Melt.
Last week sometime Bill O'Reilly snapped. He told Murdoch he
(32:09):
wasn't gonna take any more of what you were saying
about him on the air. So he did a piece
last night accusing Ge of manufacturing the components that have
been used in roadside bombs that were built in Iran
to kill Americans in Iraq, which is true. Legally, that's
legally true. They found roadside bombs that had like thirty
year old GE transistors or TV tubes from nineteen fifty
(32:31):
four or something in them. Legally, GE did manufacture components
that were used in roadside bombs that were built in
Iran to kill Americans in Iraq. So O'Reilly puts this
on his effing show as a lead story, and then
Fox sent two camera crews in this little crap producer
from o'reiley show, Jesse Waters something to stake emmelt out
(32:52):
and chase him around the GE shareholders meeting in Charlotte.
Zucker finally came up for air, and I jumped in,
Why didn't emmelt have six camera crews to stake out
the two Fox crews and chase them around in Charlotte?
I mean, isn't that one of our news hubs Charlotte.
Doesn't emmelt own like twenty camera crews? There? He bring
a camera crew, you'll bring two camera crews. Zucker started
(33:16):
to not like me again. Now you suggest that where
were you when? All right, never mind, it doesn't matter,
Emmel says, if there's one more story on Bill O'Reilly
about GE manufacturing components for roadside bombs in Iraq. He's
taking MSNBC off the air immediately. It'll just be twenty
four hours of lock up. And I'm fired, and you're fired.
(33:37):
And then he pointed at Chris Matthews, producer, and Matthews
is fired. And he pointed at poor Ed Schultz and
you're fired, and Ed whimpered, So smart ass, what the
F do we do? I feigned all the nonchalants I
could feign. If I could have lit a shroot by
striking a match on the sole of my boot, I
would have. It's manageable. But Jeff, why is Emmelt so
(34:02):
worked up about what O'Reilly said about him? Only O'Reilly's
nutjob viewers actually believe any of that crap. Nobody at GE,
nobody investing in GE, could possibly believe we're building components
for roadside bombs. Zucker inhaled deeply. Emmelt's mother believes it.
All the heads in the room turned toward the president
(34:24):
of NBC. Missus. Emmelt back in Cincinnati is a devoted
Bill O'Reilly viewer watches him every night, sees this, calls him,
says Sonny, why are you manufacturing components that were used
in roadside bombs built in Iran to kill Americans in Iraq?
I had not expected that, I said to Zucker. So
(34:47):
he'll really burn what two hundred million a year in
profits just between Rachel and me? Because his mom watches
Bill O'Reilly. Zucker got angry again. You bet your effing
assi will. Now you said it was manageable. How how
the hef do we manage it? Ulberman? Just a minute?
How old is she? Zucker summoned all his annoyance. How
(35:10):
old is who ML's mother? How old is she? Jeff
Zucker was really annoyed. How they should? I know you're
missing the point. I had him really worked up, nearly
to the boiling point. It was great, guess, Zucker spluttered.
I don't know. He's in his mid fifties. She's got
(35:30):
to be eighty ninety something. I stifled a fake yawn. Yeah,
you're right, probably closer to ninety now that I think
of it. So the problem is she watches O'Reilly. She
tells him what's on Fox, what O'Reilly's saying about Ge. Well,
I think you have a simple solution. I'd say the
first thing you do is you send over a couple
(35:51):
of big guys to her house and you pull the
freaking cable out of the wall. Zucker actually gasped, my producer,
is he Povich unsuccessfully stifled a laugh, and I saw
Rachel crack a smile. Zuke regained himself. This isn't funny, Olderman,
I crossed my legs. Oh, it's a little funny. And anyway,
it's not essential if the problem is emailed is threatening
(36:14):
to take the network off the air because O'Reilly is
avenging himself against me by attacking him and attacking ge.
The short term solution is easy, and in fact it
is manageable. The long term solution that's not easy, and
that's not manageable. But the short term one that's simple.
Rest of this week, next week, maybe the week after that,
even we just don't mention Fox News on MSNBC. Something
(36:39):
resembling a smile crossed Zucker's face. It made him look
a little less like a lizard person and more like
a monkey with glasses. You do that forever? No, not forever.
I would not do that, I said to Bias time. Yes,
but remember who was it who was in my office?
(37:00):
Last winter telling me that I should go on the
air and just to f with Fox. I should ask
why Rupert Murdoch was still running a huge international media
company like News Corp, despite all the reports that he's
suffering from dementia, even though there haven't been any reports
that he's suffering from dementia. For everybody's sake, here, who
was that again who told me to do that? Zucker's
(37:22):
goodwill was gone again? Obviously that was me. What's your point?
My point is, we built this new brand of ours
organically on a couple of themes, a couple of statements
of principle, and one of them is to use your
words just to f with Fox. If we don't f
with Fox for a couple of weeks at the start
of the summer, who's gonna care. Who's gonna notice? But
(37:45):
like after two weeks, three weeks, our viewers are gonna notice,
and the TV writers are gonna notice, and then the
crap will hit from every direction. You can think of.
Temporary freeze on mentioning Fox and mentioning O'Reilly and mentioning Murdoch. Fine,
permanent freeze. Might as well let iml turn us off
in the morning. After all, I don't think Zooker actually
(38:07):
heard the last part about Emil turning us off. After all,
the lack of color was returning to his face. Okay, breathe,
he kept saying to himself. Breathe, breathe, Okay, breathe. He
looked at me and nodded. He pointed at Izzy and
at Phil Griffin and me, You and you and you
and I. We will talk tomorrow, maybe tonight, and we'll
(38:28):
all meet again next week. Until then, nothing about Fox, anybody,
are we clear? Nothing on the air about Fox. Silence
in the room. Then the assorted noises of people rising,
mixed with attempts to resuscitate poor Ed Schultz. Somebody Matthew's guy,
Harson I think, was almost at the door out of
Zucker's office, an office so big that it was to
(38:49):
steal the Ring Lardner line, the size of the Yale Bowl,
but with lamps. And then a voice spoke up, quietly
but firmly. Excuse me. It was Rachel Maddow. Excuse me.
I will not have the content of my show dictated
by any corporations, including the one I work for. Remember
(39:11):
this is June two thousand and nine. She still felt
that way then, and especially one I don't work for,
I will walk out first. I cannot have the audience
wondering what else I have not told them. I don't
do a lot about Fox on my show. But if
there is a story about Fox, I will not honor
this freeze. I will report that story. And if I'm
prevented from reporting that story, I will leave. Whereupon she left,
(39:33):
Zucker barked Phil Alderman, is he stay? When the rest
of the room had cleared, Zucker blew air out of
his mouth as if it were smoke. He gestured violently
at me with his right arm. I told you she
was a mistake. You didn't listen to me. I told you.
Now she's your problem. All this is your problem. Get
her back on the reservation or else. Now I had
(39:55):
run out of goodwill and jokes. Oh, I'll get her
back on the reservation, Jeff. But if you think this
is my problem, just think about what happens if he
really does take us off the air, or if it
just gets out that he threatened to take us off
the air because his mother didn't like what Fox said
(40:16):
about him. That's my problem. Uh uh, that's your problem.
And it's the problem of the CEO of the fricking
sixth largest corporation in the world, who makes his business
decisions involving hundreds of millions of dollars of profits based
on what his mother says. At this point, Phil Griffin
(40:39):
managed to pull Zucker away and Izzy and I made
for the door, saying nothing until we were in the elevator. Finally,
she asked, what are you going to do about Rachel?
I look straight ahead. I have depth perception issues while
traveling forward, backwards, up or down. Yeah, if I know
what I'm gonna do about her. But I got an idea.
I mean, the only person she was really talking to
(41:00):
in there was herself. This isn't a brand new Surprise
six success for her anymore. This is successful. This is
what nine ten months she's successful. She said she was
once a dancing cell phone outside of a cell phone
store outside of Boston. She ain't going back to that.
I went to talk to Rachel about an hour later
(41:20):
and reassured her. I mentioned that powerful as Fox was,
they were not going to be able to re invade
Iraq by themselves, and unless she moved it way closer
than it had been, nobody would cross her censorship line,
and I said, just give me as much time as
the French government took before fleeing during the Nazi advance
in nineteen forty. I said, give me, what was it,
(41:42):
thirty three days? Give me thirty three days. If we
aren't back where we were this morning, we can both
quit on the air. I mean that'd be fun, right.
Three nights later, well after midnight on a Friday, my
NBC issued BlackBerry buzzed with a quick email from Rachel
madow Hey. She wrote, don't necessarily quote me because I'm
(42:02):
really drunk, but just make the deal you can for us.
I trust you. We don't need to do Fox all
the time. I never do Fox stories anyway. I just
had to say that, and this is the best platform
we will ever have. Well she was right, at least
for the time being. A couple of weeks later, I
had to sneak in a script that blasted Fox, and
at ten thirty at home that night, I got a
(42:23):
call from a drunken Phil Griffin shouting into the phone.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
I have a family.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Zucker had to go meet with Roger Ayles secretly inside
thirty Rock, and I hope they remember to clean the
room afterwards, and mlt even had to meet with Murdoch.
And then, happily, some idiot Ge executive decided to boast
to The New York Times about getting us little talent
children under control and a big deal with the executives
(42:51):
over at Fox and how they'd settled everything, which blew
up the whole deal instantly, because the moment the deal
went public, NBC looked so stupid, and even NBC News
was now risked. The only point of the whole thing
was to keep the Immelts and the Zookers and the
Griffins and the ales Is from throwing us and our
little island of liberal commentary out of that window at
(43:14):
thirty Rock. But as Rachel Mattow and I would be
constantly reminded in the ensuing years, thirty Rock has a
lot of freaking windows fiddling around with the format. Believe
(43:48):
it or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about,
the daily roundup of the misgrants, morons and Dunning Krueger
effects specimens, who constitute the other worse persons in the world,
the Brons worse. Why for change of top it's NBC News. Well,
this has nothing to do with MSNBC. Why is it
(44:09):
in the show? My pal Will Bunch pointed this out
because it was a story about a fire in his
hometown of Philadelphia. The headline on the NBC News website
US news man's burning body found in driveway of Philadelphia home.
Police call death suspicious. A gas can instruct matches were
(44:33):
found near the body of the man who was found
with severe burns laying in a driveway shortly after three
am Tuesday. Police said suspicious. You say, man's burning body
found in driveway of Philadelphia home. Police called death suspicious suspicious?
Why on earth does that make you think that suspicious
(44:53):
spontaneous combustion is a real thing. This flashed me back
to my youth as a Los Angeles sportscaster not long
after I left there. This is April of nineteen ninety two.
The following appear in the Los Angeles Times. Unfortunately, it
was about a reporter I knew from my old station.
Just the Facts reads this blurb. Last week, when the
(45:14):
severed arms of a woman who has since been identified
washed ashore at Venice Beach and Marina del Rey, Channel
two sent Jody Baskerville in pursuit of the story Baskerville
to a police official. Quote, do you suspect foul play? Unquote? No, no,
of course not. The woman just stayed too long in
(45:36):
the Pacific Ocean. Her arms melted off. The runner up
worser Pete hegseeth the creature Trump wants running. You know
all of our military popular information dug up a piece
that Pete Hegseth published in college, a bemusing yet mandatory
orientation program, revolved entirely around whether an instance of sexual
(45:58):
intercourse constituted quote rape unquote. He wrote, The actual instance
portrayed in the kit was in fact not a clear
case of rape, at least not in my home state.
In short, though intercourse was not consented to, there was
no duress because the girl drank herself into unconsciousness. Both
criteria must be satisfied for rape. Unfortunately, the panelists never
(46:21):
cited any legal definition of rape. Yet the panel, all
females in the session I attended, claimed that rape it waste.
In case you're thinking, well, everybody who writes anything in
college writes something stupid, and this is, you know, nineteen
fifty six or something. This thing from hegseith. You can't
rape an unconscious woman because she's incapable of saying no right,
(46:44):
no duress because she's unconscious. This scumbag graduated college in
two thousand and three. But our winner the worst, Nancy Mace,
the ex Republican gadfly ron Philip Kowski says by his
count in just thirty six hours, crazed Republican congress woman
(47:05):
Nancy Pace posted just a few times on the subject
of barring transgendered congress women from the women's bathroom in Congress.
Just a few times, just two hundred and sixty two
times in a day and a half. This is because
Mace was also trying to fund race off of it.
She text bombed all supporters and some non supporters too.
(47:26):
Natalie Johnson had been Mace's communications director and was so
embarrassed she not only quit, she left Washington. She left
politics to go to Utah to become a skiing instructor.
She got one of the Mace fundraising texts, and her
response was to nuke her ex boss. She posted a
screenshot from Mace's text, I don't want to see your
(47:48):
junk in my bathroom. It's representative Mace. The trans mob
wants to kill me, but I fought back and won,
and then there's a link to making a donation. This
is one of the two hundred and sixty two times
that she I guess text and posted about it, according
to Philip Kowski. Natalie Johnson put out this screenshot and added,
(48:12):
I don't want to see your botched, cheap hooker inspired
boob job on my television? Can we introduce a bill
to bar that kinda say? Cheap hooker inspired boob job
is one of my new favorite all time insults, up
there with pine Cone. I don't want to see your
cheap hooker inspired boob job you pine Cone? Well done?
(48:36):
Ms Johnson, Nancy cheap hooker inspired boob job? Wait, aren't
the terms boob and Nancy Mace redundant? Mace Today's other
worse person in the world. I've done all the damage
(49:05):
I can do here. Thank you for listening. Follow me
for the podcast promo videos on Blue Sky, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter,
x if it's still there, Instagram, threads, and you twit.
Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass, and drums.
(49:29):
It was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy
musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olderman theme from
Me ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of
ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group
No Horns Allowed. My announcer was my friend Larry David,
and everything else was as ever my fault. That's countdown
(49:52):
for today, just one five hundred and eighteen days until
the scheduled end of the lame duck presidency of Trump.
Probably I'm going to try to take the holiday off,
but I suspect there will be a second podcast at
some point this week. I will alert the media the
next scheduled countdown is next Monday. As always bulletins as
(50:14):
the news warrants till the next one, whenever the hell
that is. I'm Keith Olremman. Good Morning, good afternoon, good night,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production
(50:43):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts,
Host
Keith Olbermann
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