Keith Olbermann Does The Impossible: Admits He Was Wrong
January 18, 2008 -- 4:02 PM EST // //
Keith Olbermann made a big boo-boo on MSNCB last night. When he learned of it, he had a deeply bizarre, almost-unheard-of reaction:
He admitted he was wrong and apologized.
One thing this blog can't fathom is why this is such a rare occurrence among your top media stars. When Joe Klein made a hash of things with a piece on FISA, he dragged his feet about it for weeks. When The Washington Post took a big hit for front-paging the scurrilous Obama Muslim smears without declaring them false, the paper's editors dug in.
This blog doesn't make a regular practice of linking to Olbermann stuff, mainly because so many other folks do it. But this episode is worth flagging, because Olbermann really did handle this in a way that other top-shelf media figures might consider emulating.
Here's what happened. Yesterday Olbermann had writer Lawrence O'Donnell as a guest on his show. They talked about Edwards, Obama, and Reagan.
But then some people pointed out that Olbermann shouldn't have done this. Why? Because just a few days ago, O'Donnell wrote a piece for The Huffington Post called "John Edwards Is A Loser," which suggested that perhaps he just might harbor a bit of animus towards the guy and might not be equipped to discuss Edwards fairly.
When Olbermann learned what happened and heard that people were griping, he did a funny thing: He actually weighed the criticism on its merits. And he admitted that he'd screwed up:
His HuffPo piece was news to me.It's almost too obvious to bother pointing out, but doing this won't hurt Olbermann in the slightest, of course. If anything, it will only help him.Shouldn't have been, obviously, but it was.
...the point about this appearance, especially in the wake of such a freshly-written piece, is well-taken and I'm very sorry.
It will be addressed tonight on the show.
The comments section is temporarily disabled and is currently undergoing repair. This blog's homepage is here.