Keith Olbermann Struggles For Staff At New Gig
That was the New York Post's headline this morning for what might have been – even for them – a record-setting amount of lies and falsehoods in a story about me.
This one is, in fact, almost completely fabricated. And worse yet, they knew it was when they printed it. One of the junior sleazebags over there, somebody named Tara Palmeri (she's @tarapalmeri, tweeters) ran her steaming load of crap past the media relations department at Current on Friday. The appropriate correction (and proof) was emailed back, same day. Yet her item published in the "newspaper" today she lied and claimed a "representative" did not "get back" to her.
Let's look at this line-by-line, so you can enjoy each of her other lies and the embarrassing result when a little truth is applied:
Gasbag Keith Olbermann can't seem to wrangle staff for his Current TV show, "Countdown."
We have ten full-time editorial staffers, plus two consultants. I think on Countdown we had fourteen or fifteen editorial full-time staffers. Gosh, this only gives me six weeks to line up the last couple.
Still in need of an executive producer and other staff, famously difficult Olbermann has crawled back to his contacts at MSNBC, many of whom he offended while there, to beg for staff.
Wow. Just wow. This moron is going to look, well, moronic, when we announce the identity of the Executive Producer. That deal may get wrapped up this week. Also there is this phrase "beg for staff." I only asked about half a dozen of my former staffers to join me, largely because most people in television have contracts and can't just pick up and leave – now. And if we want to debate "famously difficult" we can, but I'll take what my ex-colleagues thought of me as my epitaph. I wonder if Rupert Murdoch would dare do the same.
"Everyone is laughing," said a source. "They would never leave the network to work for him."
If they're laughing over there, it must be because they're reading The New York Post. Three of the new staff of Countdown on Current are from the old staff of Countdown on MSNBC. A fourth staffer came in from another show. One of the consultants is from MSNBC. And we've engaged more than a dozen people, familiar to you from the old show, as formal Contributors to the new one. So if you'd like to add that all up, in point of fact around 20 people have done what the Post's made-up source claims they'd never do.
And I say made-up source because it goes without saying that I won't believe anybody at NBC would actually feed them false information in an attempt to damage Countdown on Current.
A witness recently saw him hobbling around the Upper East Side with a stick in his hand. Olbermann is recovering from a foot injury.
This was the only part the unfortunate and professionally doomed Ms. Palmeri even bothered to alter even though she was corrected on all this more than 72 hours ago. Her original version had me 'walking around the Upper East side with a walking stick' as if I should have also had a top hat and tails and been singing 'Sooopa Dooopa.'
The Post is bizarrely interested in how I dress. In 2002 it breathlessly reported that I had attended a Mets game and sat in the press box 'wearing shorts.' They were cargo pants, and it was 90 degrees, and that day about half the media were wearing them.
And so another Page Six staffer begins her inevitable descent out of journalism. The internet doesn't tell us much about Tara Palmeri, except that she used to work for another bastion of reporting, the DC Examiner, and that she has appeared on the unintentionally hilarious "Red Eye" show on Fox, and that she was once expelled from a benefit for Haitian earthquake relief because she chose that somber and important event to badger Sean Penn about a tasteless remark he'd made about cancer. She appears to have begun what must have seemed to her to be a career, at CNN. So it's CNN to DC Examiner to Page Six. The next step in that progression would be writing graffiti on the wall of a men's room at New York's Penn Station.
UPDATE POSTSCRIPT: The thing was immediately picked up by the myna birds of the right wing media. A website called Pajamas stepped in it up to its neck with this gem:
"...(he) is legendary around Washington for his awful treatment of everyone who works for or near him."
I've never worked full time in Washington. Another fine, accurate news source.