'Knock them out cold': Ex-MSNBC host says network must embrace anti-MAGA identity to survive

17 December 2024

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann once hosted the network's highest-rated show, peaking at 1.3 million viewers in 2008, which is on par with Fox & Friends' 2024 Q3 ratings. Even though he's no longer at the network, he's now offering a few ideas for his former employer to stay afloat in the coming years.

In a Tuesday column for entertainment news site Variety, Olbermann opined that MSNBC was having an identity crisis in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's 2024 election victory, and needed a change amid a hemorrhaging of viewers. As the Wall Street Journal reported, MSNBC has seen its primetime ratings crater from more than 1.3 million leading up to the election to roughly 600,000 in the following weeks. Olbermann argued that the network should "obviously" begin its turn-around by firing "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who he derisively referred to as "Mr. and Mrs. Scared-Bro."

"Continue their banal but largely benign political coffee klatch show without them and their insistence we all join their MSNVichy," Olbermann wrote, referencing the infamous French state that collaborated with Adolf Hitler's regime. "Nobody will remember they were ever there."

As Olbermann noted, Scarborough and Brzezinski saw their viewership plummet after announcing that they went to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after the election to meet with the president-elect, which CNN later reported was out of fear of retribution. When anti-Trump conservative David Frum made a quip about Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth's reported alcohol abuse, he was dismissed from the show and Brzezinski apologized for his remarks. This resulted in Frum criticizing both Scarborough and Brzezinski in an essay for the Atlantic, which prompted a 20-minute tirade from Scarborough the following morning.

According to Olbermann, MSNBC should learn a lesson from the "Morning Joe" debacle. He argued that "the next money is coming from more fervent opposition to MAGA, not less," and listed several examples of shifts in the media landscape in response to news outlets caving to Trump.

"Wasn’t the Scarborough disaster (60% of the demo audience gone in three days) instructive enough? Did you not notice CNN going from fact-based criticism of Trump’s madness to hours of cacophonous shouting, and sinking to whatever is the next level down from irrelevance?" Olbermann wrote. "Did the quarter of a million canceled Washington Post subscriptions not tell you something? Or the exodus from Twitter/X?"

The former MSNBC primetime host went on to point out that his show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, netted $100 million in profits during its eight-year run between 2003 and 2011 and helped prevent eventual star MSNBC host Rachel Maddow from leaving the network for CNN. He then suggested that the network could repeat the success of the Bush and Obama years by embracing its brand as a bastion of anti-Trump politics.

"Your primetime audience doesn’t want new faces; it wants comfort food — so refresh the menu and decor," he wrote. "Try outsider, big personality hosts like Elie Mystal and Pablo Torre. You could even try for a truce with your prodigal anchor so he’ll be inside the tent peeing out for a change. And now you can finally do something I first suggested in 1998: Change the damn name of the network! Use the acronym 'N.E.W.S.' Or 'American News Network.' Or how about a nice, self-explanatory 'F Trump TV'?"

"You may now be the last line of defense for the free press and thus the future of representative government in this country," Olbermann continued. "The bullies don’t stop hitting you because you’re nice to them. They stop hitting you when you knock them out cold."

Click here to read Olbermann's full column in Variety.

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