The Most Honest Man in News

An unfamiliar viewer tuning in to Keith Olbermann's prime-time news program on MSNBC, Countdown, might, at first glance, assume he was watching a highly traditional broadcaster. Olbermann has a long, sober face and trim hair that's going gray. With his glasses, he looks like a Fifties newsman -- Clark Kent behind an anchor's desk -- while his stentorian delivery can sound almost self-consciously retro, the sort of voice (of God or your high school principal) mocked nightly by Stephen Colbert.

But there's a sharp contrast between the way Olbermann looks and sounds and what he's actually saying. After President Bush recently called for a troop escalation in Iraq, for example, Olbermann described the strategy as "absurd" and "childish," then added, "Mr. Bush, the question is no longer 'What are you thinking?' but rather 'Are you thinking at all?' " He has described Fox News anchor Chris Wallace as "a monkey posing as a newscaster" and begged Rush Limbaugh to "Please, go back on the drugs." His nightly "Worst Person in the World" feature has honored, among others, Dennis Miller, John McCain and former first lady Barbara Bush. Then there is Olbermann's favorite target, Bill O'Reilly, known on Countdown as Bill-O, "the Sisyphus of morons" and "the Big Giant Head." The persistent needling has so irked O'Reilly (who refuses to mention Olbermann by name on his own show) that the Fox host regularly rants about the "liberal bias" at NBC and started a Web campaign to have Olbermann replaced with Phil Donahue.

"I'm not declaring victory in that war," Olbermann tells me, "but I think the point that Jonathan Alter of Newsweek made on the air the other day was pretty solid -- that if my goal was to make O'Reilly go nuts, I have succeeded."

All of this has turned Olbermann, previously best known as the wisecracking host of an ESPN sports-highlights show, into an unlikely hero of the left. While O'Reilly's puffed-up sense of outrage quite often plays like a performance -- you could easily imagine him leaving his persona at the office and spending his evenings as a happy rich guy -- Olbermann comes off as someone speaking out of genuine anger. His ability to tap into a very dark place has inspired a number of comparisons to the 1976 film Network, in which a television news anchor goes insane on the air and, to the shock of management, becomes extremely popular, largely because he is seen as telling the truth. Olbermann has hosted Countdown since 2003; he spent the six years before that bouncing around various networks, in danger of becoming a second-tier cable-news fixture like Tucker Carlson. His mad-as-hell Network moment came last August, when he was stuck in a plane on a runway and happened to read that Donald Rumsfeld had compared war critics to Nazi appeasers. That night he ended Countdown with a furious six-and-a-half-minute attack that began, "The man who sees absolutes where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a prophet or a quack. Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet."