Olbermann: Truth and consequences

Keith Olbermann Anchor, 'Countdown' • Profile

In Truth and Consequences, Keith Olbermann collects the best of his Special Comments, presented with additional observations and other new material.

Below is an excerpt:

David Bloom was dead.

It was Sunday morning, April 6, 2003, and, as in the stuff of nightmares, somebody woke me up with the terrible news. He’d been on my old MSNBC show nearly every night in 1998, and in the week since we’d premiered Countdown, we’d spoken, via satellite, several times. And now he’d died from a blood clot in the middle of this new war.

I did what many of us do in times of crisis: I went to the ballpark. There was ineffable value in the chilly first weekend of the season at Shea Stadium in New York, where there would be at least a hint of spring and hope and the easing of mourning; where I could commiserate with news-savvy friends on the field like the Australian-born pitcher Graeme Lloyd, who’d wanted to know every detail I had about David’s passing; where I could share the shock with friends in the press box; where I could dial back the pain through the simple ritual of folding up my scorecard and then filing out of the ballpark to the subway.

“Hey,” one evidently drunken twentysomething fan said to his cohort just as I crossed through the press box hallway toward the exit ramp. “It’s Keith Olbermann.”

“Hey, Keith,” his fellow staggerer began. Then a thought bounced across his brain like a shiny red ball skipping down the driveway toward traffic, and he stopped short. “Nah, forget him,” he said to his pal. “He’s a liberal.”

I had been back at MSNBC for less than two months.

We had only launched Countdown six days earlier.

We had put virtually nothing on the newscast except reports from Iraq and Washington.

We had equally bashed Geraldo Rivera for giving away American troop positions on Fox, and Peter Arnett for giving an interview to Iraqi state television while also working on MSNBC.

We had sent David Bloom into harm’s way and he wasn’t coming back.

And I was not to be talked to because somehow I was a liberal.

Barack Obama called it “9/11 fever” and we all had it, to some degree or another. The winter before, I’d actually kept a notebook with me in which to jot down the numbers of the subway cars I’d ridden in, just in case there was a biological attack. I could stagger into an emergency room one day and at least hand somebody a numerical trail of where I’d been. Maybe that could mitigate the impact of the terror. Even at the time I realized it was a psychological trick I was playing on myself to regain a false sense that I could control something in a world in which somebody had suddenly switched off the law of gravity. But as psychological tricks went, it was damned effective.

We played other tricks on ourselves in the eighteen months after the attacks. We, as the playwrights used to ask us to, suspended our disbelief.

As the naturally dubious, we reporters had severe doubts about the efficacy of blowing Iraq to hell. I even voiced them in my radio commentaries, couching them as gently as I possibly could. Others weren’t so gentle and wound up losing their programs or getting death threats or having their wives’ secret and truly patriotic careers exposed and ruined by those to whom patriotism is just a brand name.

Then the plotline in Iraq turned out to be not just phony, but also ridiculous. Not only were there no weapons of mass destruction, but the chemical warfare the generals and ex-generals nightly told us to expect also never materialized. Saddam Hussein not only had no offensive weapons, he didn’t have many defensive ones. That summer, when it turned out our troops had staged a lightning raid to “save” Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi “military hospital” that didn’t even have a Nurse Ratched in it, we broadcast the revised history as reported by a Canadian newspaper—the first TV news outlet in the country, I think, to do so. The right-wing water-carriers buffeted our management, and our management buffeted me.

But to that management’s credit, the truth rapidly gathering behind the Hollywood story of “Saving Private Jessica” was sacrosanct to them.

They smelled the rats as surely as did I. Management only wanted to make sure I clarified that I wasn’t attacking the heroism of the troops who broke into the hospital. Of course I wasn’t, I thought to myself, they were just as sincere as I had been. Just as patriotic. Just as much—what was that other word beginning with “pat”—oh, patsies.

That was the day my last symptoms of 9/11 fever disappeared.

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