Three, Two, One, Olbermann

MSNBC's 'Countdown' Host Puts News on the Fast Track

The MSNBC anchor says he is tailoring his show to an audience whose attention span has shrunk. (Msnbc)

After an hour-long buildup on MSNBC's "Countdown," Keith Olbermann got to his No. 1 story for the night: "Britney Spears says she is not a virgin."

The "gyrating pop princess," it seems, had told W magazine that she had succumbed to the charms of Justin Timberlake, prompting Olbermann to ask: "How will this news affect life on our planet and the evolution of mankind?"

Asked about the story selection, Olbermann says he and his "Committee of Irresponsible Persons" hunt for such offbeat topics, adding: "You can't argue that it's something people were not talking about."

In his second incarnation as an MSNBC anchor -- after he famously quit over a show that turned into a Monica Lewinsky talkathon -- the former sportscaster is trying to assemble a new kind of nightly program: "a newscast that moves very quickly and does a lot of silly things in it," he says.

Not that Olbermann ignores serious news. Far from it. On any given night, he'll be talking about Iraq or Liberia -- along with cleavage-baring deodorized bras, scientist Stephen Hawking going to a strip club, topless photos of Cameron Diaz, and Snoop Dogg quitting as host of the raunchy "Girls Gone Wild" videos.

"The traditional hour of news that the networks have tried to do for 50 years just is not going to sell real well with an audience that's gradually had its attention span shrunk over the years," Olbermann says. "They're used to quicker cuts. The in-depth approach is not going to compete. That's what the ratings are showing, unfortunately."

The wry anchor manages to wink at the audience while dipping in and out of the tabloid netherworld. The Hawking-at-a-strip-joint photo, from the London Sun, "justifies a discussion of whether or not pornography has become unbelievably mainstream in the last few years," he says.

As for the "Countdown" concept -- picking the day's top five stories, even if the winning piece involves sex or sleaze -- Olbermann notes that the top-rated subject still airs last. "The Number 1 song on a Top 40 countdown could be 'Yummy yummy yummy, I've got love in my tummy.' It's not necessarily Brahms."

He makes no apologies for kissing off many stories in three or four minutes; PBS this is not. "I'm more useful to the audience helming a ship in which you're going past the topics pretty quickly. My attention span has been shortened like everybody else's."

So a single program skips merrily along from American soldiers killed in Iraq to a missing Baylor basketball player to the chart-topper: "What's the point of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships? Dude."

All this requires a slightly crazed staff. "It's 100 miles an hour," says producer Denis Horgan Jr., who once worked with Olbermann at ESPN. "He's so much smarter than me that no matter what I do, it's hard not to feel stupid."

Not that Horgan doesn't play a valuable role: "I try to find the goofy stuff that people will remember and talk about the next day."

In one instance, the host debated himself in a sports segment, with the left-screen Olbermann telling the right-screen Olbermann: "You pompous, condescending hypocrite."

He also zings his targets, such as radio talker Tom Leykis, who named the accuser in the Kobe Bryant case: "Given that he would reveal this woman's identity to try to save a dying radio show, his qualifications to speak for men or qualify as one of them seem highly suspect."

Olbermann has bounced back and forth between news and sports so many times that followers have gotten whiplash. He joined Fox Sports after declaring that his own Lewinsky-saturated MSNBC show was giving him "the dry heaves in the bathroom."

"My main complaint was that there wasn't anything happening most of the time," he says of the Clinton impeachment saga, an experience that has led him to ban guests from shouting and interrupting. "It was making up news because you had a story people would pay attention to. That to me is a form of fraud. There should be indictments when you do that."

His Fox deal fell apart in 2001, and the network wound up paying him more than $1 million to do nothing. Then came 9/11, which affected Olbermann so deeply that he volunteered to cover it for a Los Angeles radio station.

He had worked in the World Trade Center. He had friends on three of the four planes hijacked by the terrorists. He had two friends who died at the Wall Street brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald. And he decided he should come back to news. "It's the closest thing I'll ever do to serving my country," he explains.

Olbermann has been slowly building an audience, rising from 234,000 viewers in May to 299,000 in June. But he still badly trailed Fox's Bill O'Reilly (2.5 million) and CNN (673,000) at 8 p.m.

As for the wackier stories and items, he says: "I expect the audience to be smart enough to hang in there and not be insulted."

Breaking New Ground

The Washington Post published its first gay-marriage announcement last week, that of Detroit News columnist Deb Price and National Journal editor Joyce Murdoch, both former Post staffers.

The paper has been accepting the paid ads for civil unions such as those granted in Vermont, but Canada's recent legalization of gay marriage -- Price and Murdoch tied the knot in Toronto -- confronted The Post with a new issue.

"It seemed to us if they can get married in Canada, they ought to be able to announce it in The Washington Post," says Post Co. counsel Mary Ann Werner. Spokesman Eric Grant says the paper will probably accept such ads in the future if they involve "a legal marriage."

Getting the Hook

The plague of plagiarism continues. The Salt Lake Tribune says the writer of its fishing column "The Hook" -- Skip Knowles, who for some reason was not named -- has been fired for using someone else's material for his July 16 column without attribution. "We do not tolerate such lapses," an editor's note says.

Blair's Comeback

Esquire has asked fallen New York Timesman Jayson Blair to critique the forthcoming movie about another serial fabricator, Stephen Glass. "What better way to review it than to have Jayson Blair review it? I just thought it was a clever idea," says Esquire Editor David Granger. He says the makers of "Shattered Glass" insisted that Blair donate the modest fee to charities of his choosing.

The New York Post, which first reported the Blair news, says he's also nabbed an assignment with Jane magazine. His topic: pressures in the workplace.

Indigestion

So a guy walks into a restaurant -- Graydon Carter, as it happens, the editor of Vanity Fair -- and doesn't like the service. In fact, he walks out.

Cut to Vanity Fair's latest issue, which contains a devastating review of the very same Chinese eatery, named 66 -- this in a magazine that doesn't usually run long restaurant reviews. As noted by the New York Observer, writer A.A. Gill barbecues the place:

"The greeting-and-seating procedure at 66 is modeled on the aliens line at Immigration -- just after the Friday-night flight from Khartoum has landed. . . . They treat you like deaf cretins with learning difficulties." As for the shrimp-and-foie gras dumplings: "Fishy liver-filled condoms . . . properly vile."

Carter's revenge? "There was absolutely no attempt at payback," says spokeswoman Beth Kseniak. Carter told an editor that "if A.A. Gill likes the place, he can write whatever he wants."