Keith Olbermann Popular Books

Keith Olbermann Biography & Facts

Keith Theodore Olbermann (; born January 27, 1959) is an American sports and political commentator and writer. Olbermann spent the first 20 years of his career in sports journalism. He was a sports correspondent for CNN and for local TV and radio stations in the 1980s, winning the Best Sportscaster award from the California Associated Press three times. He co-hosted ESPN's SportsCenter from 1992 to 1997. From 1998 to 2001, he was a producer and anchor for Fox Sports Net and a host for Fox Sports' coverage of Major League Baseball. From March 2003 to January 2011, Olbermann hosted the weeknight political commentary program Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. He received attention for his pointed criticism of American conservative and right-wing politicians and public figures. Although he has frequently been described as a "liberal", he has often rejected being labelled politically, stating, "I'm not a liberal. I'm an American." From 2011 to March 30, 2012, Olbermann was the chief news officer of the Current TV network and the host of a Current TV program also called Countdown with Keith Olbermann. From July 2013 until July 2015 he hosted a late-afternoon show on ESPN2 and TSN2 called Olbermann, as well as TBS's Major League Baseball postseason coverage. From September 2016 until November 2017, he hosted a web series for GQ, titled The Closer with Keith Olbermann, covering the 2016 U.S. presidential election, later renamed The Resistance with Keith Olbermann after the victory of Donald Trump. In January 2018, Olbermann returned to ESPN's SportsCenter program, expanding in May to some baseball play-by-play work. On October 6, 2020, he again resigned from ESPN to start a political commentary program on his YouTube channel. On August 1, 2022, Olbermann relaunched Countdown with Keith Olbermann as a daily podcast with iHeartRadio. It is described as a news-driven show featuring his trademark "Special Comment" political analysis, "The Worst Persons in the World" segment, and readings from the works of the humorist James Thurber. Early life Olbermann was born January 27, 1959, in New York City, the son of Marie Katherine (née Charbonier), a preschool teacher, and Theodore Olbermann, a commercial architect. He is of German ancestry. Olbermann and his younger sister Jenna (b. 1968), were raised in a Unitarian household in the town of Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester, New York. He attended the Hackley School, a private Ivy League Preparatory school in nearby Tarrytown. Olbermann became a devoted fan of baseball at a young age, a love he inherited from his mother, who was a lifelong New York Yankees fan. As a teenager he often wrote about baseball card-collecting and appeared in many sports card-collecting periodicals of the mid-1970s. He is also referenced in Sports Collectors Bible, a 1979 book by Bert Sugar, which is considered one of the important early books for trading card collectors. While at Hackley, Olbermann began his broadcasting career as a play-by-play announcer for WHTR. After graduating from Hackley in 1975, he enrolled at Cornell University at the age of 16. At college Olbermann served as sports director for WVBR, a student-run commercial radio station in Ithaca. Olbermann graduated from Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 1979 with a BS in communication. Sports broadcasting Olbermann began his professional career at UPI and the RKO Radio Network before joining then-nascent CNN in 1981. Among the early stories he covered was the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, including the "Miracle on Ice." In the early-to-mid 1980s he was a sportscaster on the old WNEW 1130-AM radio station in New York City. In 1984, he briefly worked as a sports anchor at WCVB-TV in Boston before heading to Los Angeles to work at KTLA and KCBS. His work there earned him 11 Golden Mike Awards, and he was named best sportscaster by the California Associated Press three times. ESPN In 1992 Olbermann joined ESPN's SportsCenter, a position he held until 1997 with the exception of a period from 1993 to 1994 when he was at ESPN2. He joined ESPN2 as its "marquee" personality to help launch the network. He often co-hosted SportsCenter's 11:00 p.m. show with Dan Patrick, the two becoming a popular anchor team. In 1995 Olbermann won a Cable ACE award for Best Sportscaster. he later co-authored a book with Patrick called The Big Show about their experiences working at SportsCenter; he also said that the short-lived ABC dramedy Sports Night was based on his time on SportsCenter with Patrick, ABC having been co-owned with ESPN since 1985 (ESPN now produces all sports coverage on ABC, which is branded ESPN on ABC). In his last year with KCBS before moving east to work for ESPN, Olbermann's salary was $475,000 but started at "just over $150,000" with ESPN. He made $350,000 at the end of his tenure at ESPN. Early in 1997 Olbermann was suspended for two weeks after he made an unauthorized appearance on The Daily Show on Comedy Central with then-host and former ESPN colleague Craig Kilborn. At one point in the show he referred to Bristol, Connecticut (ESPN's headquarters), as a "Godforsaken place". Later that year he abruptly left ESPN under a cloud of controversy, apparently burning his bridges with the network's management; this began a long and drawn-out feud between Olbermann and ESPN. Between 1997 and 2007 incidents between the two sides included Olbermann's publishing an essay on Salon in November 2002 titled "Mea Culpa", in which he stated, "I couldn't handle the pressure of working in daily long-form television, and what was worse, I didn't know I couldn't handle it." The essay told of an instance when his former bosses remarked he had "too much backbone", a claim that is literally true, as Olbermann has six lumbar vertebrae instead of the normal five. In 2004, Olbermann was not included in ESPN's guest lineup for its 25th anniversary SportsCenter "Reunion Week", which saw Craig Kilborn and Charley Steiner return to the SportsCenter set. In 2007, ten years after Olbermann's departure, in an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, he said, "If you burn a bridge, you can possibly build a new bridge, but if there's no river any more, that's a lot of trouble." During the same interview Olbermann stated that he had recently learned that as a result of ESPN's agreeing to let him return to the airwaves on ESPN Radio, he was banned from ESPN's main (Bristol, Connecticut) campus. Post-SportsCenter In 1999, Olbermann joined Fox Sports Net to be the star anchor for their sports news show Fox Sports News Primetime, which was an ill-fated competitor to SportsCenter. Olbermann later left that show to be an anchor and executive producer for The Keith Olbermann Evening News, a sportscast similar to SportsCenter that aired weekly on Sunday evenings. While at Fox he hosted the 2000 World Series as well as Fox Broadcasting's baseball Game of the Week. In May and J.... Discover the Keith Olbermann popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Keith Olbermann books.