he’ll take the compliment

Keith Olbermann’s pompous, childish, outrage-filled “special comments” over on Countdown seem to have made him more popular, if you believe this incredible puff piece:

A little over a year ago, as the White House fumbled and botched the Hurricane Katrina recovery, Olbermann finally blew up.

He concluded a broadcast of his MSNBC cable news show, “Countdown,” with an indignant rant in the rat-a-tat-tat cadence of his idol, Edward R. Murrow. He called it a “Special Comment.”

And just like that, Olbermann found his voice — the angry everyman. He became a liberal counterpoint to conservative media ranters like O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, and an Internet star, too.

The result has been a cultural earthquake.

According to Olbermann, it’s because after 9/11, he was one of the few brave Americans who was willing to criticize the administration:

“Here’s what happened,” Olbermann said in a phone interview this week. “Five years ago (on Sept. 11), 50 percent of the country went quiet. There was this self-imposed censorship. Suddenly it became unimaginable to criticize the administration. And no one else was brave or stupid enough to say, ‘I don’t remember signing that document.’ ”

I don’t know whom to loathe more—Olbermann or the “journalist” who is the author of this celebrity profile. He is oh-so-impressed that Olbermann throws around some WWII buzzwords:

Conservatives may hate his attacks, but no one doubts that he comes across as one of the smarter guys in the room. When he laid into then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Aug. 30, he threw in references to Neville Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement. Let’s see NBC network anchor Brian Williams pull that off.

A long time ago, I wrote on this blog that you’ll never hear me complaining about the dumbing-down of the culture:

You will rarely hear me complain about the dumbing-down of culture. All that worried talk about the sorry state of TV, the movies, music videos, video games, hip-hop, whatever. My position on this is: that’s not culture–that’s pop culture. And it’s supposed to be dumb, or dumb enough for a mass audience to get it

In principle, someone who calls her blog Infotainment Rules shouldn’t complain about the dumbing-down of the news, either. Yeah? You think? Well, I’m complaining. But it’s not the infotainment format and packaging that’s the problem. It’s the fucking ignorance of our “journalists”—from Olbermann, who seems to be riding high (I’m doubtful) to the sycophants who profile him—that’s got me down.

Meanwhile, it appears I was wrong. I predicted it would be curtains at MSNBC for Olbermann, who was so grotesquely partisan for the Democrats. Instead, the cable network rewarded him with a seat at the anchor desk on election night. That counts as a trend I’ll have to watch.