MURDOCH SECRETLY SHOWED BIDEN'S ADS TO KUSHNER 2.28.23

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. I
will say it just once about Fox News. I told

(00:26):
you so pretty much NonStop since the end of nineteen
ninety seven. Quote during Trump's campaign begins one of the
items in the new court filing from the second trove
of documents from the Dominion Voting System's defamation lawsuit against
Fox News and News Corp. Quote, Rupert Murdoch provided Trump's
son in law and senior advisor Jared Kushner, with Fox

(00:49):
confidential information about Biden's ads, providing Kushner a preview of
Biden's ads before they were public. End quote that disclosing
secret proprietary information about advertising by one presidential campaign to
the other presidential campaign may not just violate ethics and laws,

(01:13):
it should also mean the death penalty for an alleged
television news operation. Quote, as Rupert testified, the man Mike
Lindell is on every night pays us a lot of money.
When asked why Fox continues to give a platform to Lindell,
who continues to this day to spout lies about Dominion,
Rupert Murdoch agreed that it is not red or blue,

(01:37):
it is green. End quote that which is in essence
influence peddling. You buy advertising from us, We give you
time within our shows to lie and to defame and
to try to destabilize the United States of America. That too,
should mean the death penalty for an alleged television news operation. Quote.

(01:59):
Rupert confirmed that they discussed how Fox should react to
the fact that Trump was not seating, and Rupert confirmed
that the decision was to allow these wild claims on air.
Question and were you aware that Fox News was having
these people appair on the television under Fox's banner to
spread these charges? Answer? We report the news, and we

(02:22):
have dozens of people a day on the channels that
are talking about the news. And this was big news.
The President of the United States was making wild claims,
but that is news. End quote. That not knowing the
difference between fact and truth. Yes, it was a fact
that the President of the United States was making wild claims,

(02:43):
but nothing about it is truth. That too, should mean
the death penalty for an alleged television news operation. Quote.
Rupert confirmed that he could have told News CEO Susanne
Scott stop hosting Sidney Powell. Question and you could have
said to Susanne Scott or the hosts stop putting Rudy

(03:05):
Giuliani on the air. Answer. I could have, but I
didn't end. Quote that choosing to turn over your supposed
newscasts to a paid employee of the president who is
trying to alter the election and overthrow the democracy, who
will say anything for money, That too, should mean the
death penalty for an alleged television news operation. Quote Shaw's

(03:30):
November thirteenth Brand Protection Unit roundup to Lachlan Murdoch continued
to show strong conservative and viewer backlash to Fox. That
we are working to track and mitigate positive impressions of
Fox News among our viewers dropped precipitously after election Day
to the lowest levels we've ever seen. We are now

(03:51):
underwater with our viewers. And quote that looking at the
reality you are supposed to cover and saying, if you
do cover it, you will lose some of your viewers,
so naturally you must change the reality. That two should
mean the death penalty for an alleged television news operation. Quote.

(04:11):
Fox board member Paul Ryan believed that some high percentage
of Americans thought the election was stolen because they got
a diet of information telling them the election was stolen
from what they believe were credible sources. Rupert responded to
Ryan's email quote, thanks Paul, wake up call for Hannity,

(04:31):
who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks but
was scared to lose viewers. End quote that a show
host a veteran of the entire history of the channel,
consumed by his own conscience and fully aware of the
damage his show and his network and his president were

(04:52):
doing to the future of the country, and deliberately suppressing
the truth anyway rather than risk a drop in his
audience ratings. That two should the death penalty for an
alleged television news operation. Quote. Lochlin Murdoch continued to advise
on how Fox should cover the news. He told News

(05:15):
CEO Suzanne Scott on November fourteenth, during Fox's coverage of
a rally and support of Donald Trump. Quote, news guys
have to be careful how they cover this rally. So far,
some of the side comments are slightly anti and they
shouldn't be. The narrative should be this is a huge
celebration of the president. End quote that a senior executive

(05:40):
telling newspeople that the importance is not the news, but
his narrative flashes me back to a day at MSNBC
in two thousand and three when the first executive producer
of my show Countdown sent me a message in the
in house computer insisting that this is George Bush's day,
No criticism allowed. Got it? My response was to organize

(06:01):
a structure which bypassed him on all show content and
was designed to get him to quit, because he had
been trained in such a way that we would never
break him of this habit. We had hired him away
from Fox News and narrative over news that two should
mean the death penalty for an alleged television news operation. Quote.

(06:24):
Bill Salmon presided over the deeply unpopular Arizona call for Biden. Thus,
despite the call's accuracy, Rupert suggested, maybe best to let
Bill go right away, which would quote be a big
message with Trump end quote that firing an executive not

(06:45):
for malfeasance, misfeasance, or nonfeasance, but for actual, plain old feasance.
That two should mean the death penalty for an alleged
television news operation. Quote nineteen of the twenty accused statements
defaming dominion voting systems. Occurred at your Multiple government agencies

(07:06):
had debunked the charges, and eighteen of the twenty accused
statements occurred after Fox's own research department, the brain Room,
had fact checked the allegations and debunked the charges and quote.
And that though nothing more than run of the mill
journalistic self defenestration at Fox News at any point in

(07:27):
its history, might in fact be the death penalty for
an alleged television news operation that not only defamed dominion
voting systems, but had internally already proved that they Fox
were wrong and lying and defaming. So naturally after that
they went into the so called brain room and fired
all the people who worked there. Reading these newly released

(07:53):
documents last night, I was shaking. And I have believed
for literally a quarter of a century that I knew
exactly how malicious and non journalistic and actively evil Rupert
Murdoch and his minions were, and I would laugh at
whatever calamity might ever befall them. But even I had
no idea that it was this bad, and more importantly,
that it was this documented. The Court should not only

(08:17):
find four dominion, It should not merely give dominion. The
one billion six hundred million dollars in damages. Dominion seeks
it should calculate how much in damages would bankrupt Fox
News and the Murdochs, and then double that figure and
award that to Dominion. Because either Fox News can continue
in this country or democracy can. We do not have

(08:38):
room for both. They cannot coexist. The network must be
deep platformed and boycotted, and those companies that will not
participate in that deep platforming and boycotting must themselves be
deep platformed and boycotted. Because the only solution here is
the journalistic death penalty. Oh, when there is another obvious

(09:00):
solution to revoke the American citizenships of Rupert Murdoch and
Lachlan Murdoch and the other emigres in their family, we
mistakenly welcomed here because either it is also true that
they can continue in this country, or democracy can continue
in this country. We do not have room for both.

(09:22):
Because I have one more quote to read. This is
not from the tranch of Murdoch deposition and related documents
released last night. Quote. It is galling to be lectured
about democracy by a man who took power in an
election so sketchy that Americans don't believe it was real.
Biden is far less popular in the US than Putin

(09:44):
is in Russia. That is not an endorsement of Putin.
It's just true, and it says everything about Joe Biden's
tenuous legitimacy democracy. Please end quote. That is not something
that was said in twenty twenty or twenty twenty one,

(10:04):
and it's not something it was said about dominion voting systems,
and it is not part of this lawsuit, and nor
is it part of the past. That was said by
Tucker Carlson on Fox News last Friday night, everything that
should mean the death penalty for an alleged television news

(10:27):
operation is still being churned out by Fox News last
Friday last night, an hour ago, an hour from now,
a decade from now, unless we end this still ahead

(10:59):
of us in this edition of Countdown. Of course, I
have been saying all this for literally more than twenty
five years. My enmity is not personal, although I have
expressed it personally. It is based on the danger this
man Murdoch represents to the rest of us and the
people he gets to work for him, some of whom
are just as evil, some of whom are just stuck

(11:20):
for any other kind of paycheck on television. On MSNBC,
I used to attack and mock and most importantly and
most damagingly quote Fox News on almost a nightly basis.
I was in turn attacked and mocked, and my complaints
were dismissed as bids for ratings and stature. I faced

(11:41):
a lot of opposition to my criticism of Fox News,
and once that opposition came from inside my own proverbial house.
I make no undue comparisons here, but it was Edward R.
Murrow's producer Fred Friendly who observed that when you are
in what you perceive as a battle between good and evil,

(12:03):
it is surprisingly easy to take all the incoming fire
and flak that evil can provide you. It is quite
a different thing, though, Friendly said, when the shooting is
coming from your side, when it's coming from behind you.
In two thousand and nine, after six years of my
attacks on Fox News, in my second incarnation at MSNBC,

(12:27):
Rupert Murdoch struck back not at me, but at the
chairman of the multinational corporation that owned NBC at the time.
Ge It accused the CEO, Jeff Immelt, of manufacturing parts
used in roadside bombs that were killing Americans in Iraq.

(12:49):
In fact, this was a perverse but clever way of
noting the fact that these IED's in Iraq often included
old television tubes and other used equipment that you could
buy in any old electronics shop from Brooklyn to Dad.
But unbelievably, Jeff Immelt's mother was a fan of Bill

(13:10):
O'Reilly's and she watched him nightly, and she saw his stories,
and she called her son up and complained. And between
that fact and a Fox News crew stalking Immelt at
the GE shareholders meeting, one day in June two thousand
and nine, all of us lead producers and talented MSNBC
got calls from the office of NBC president Jeff Zucker,

(13:31):
summoning us to an emergency meeting. Immelt had just called
Zucker to tell him he'd had enough and he was
going to take MSNBC off the air and close it
down and fire everybody. If we stopped talking about Fox News,
Immelt might let MSNBC stay on the air. I have

(13:54):
detailed this extraordinary meeting on this podcast previously. If you
want to hear about it in full, check out the
January eleventh episode. What I have not to tail previously
is what followed that meeting. NBC and NBC News and
GE became part of the power structure defending Fox News,

(14:16):
enabling Fox News, protecting Fox News. That Jeff ML's instructions,
Jeff Zucker personally negotiated with Roger Ailes of Fox in
a meeting inside thirty Rockefeller Center, negotiated with him what
Fox could say about NBCNNGE on its air, and what
NBC and MSNBC could say about Fox on its air.

(14:39):
My bosses were negotiating with Fox as to what the
news could be. I proposed to spend the rest of
this edition of Countdown going through just some of the
records of those extraordinary days in the summer of two
thousand and nine, in which I tried to prevent two
of the nation's three cable networks from colluding and conspiring

(15:00):
over what they would and would not report. Going to
preface this by noting two things for context. For the
length of my time at MSNBC, I would get phone
calls and emails from the president of NBC News, Steve Cappus,
detailing whatever journalistic horror he had just seen on Fox,

(15:20):
and pleading with me to do a segment about it
on Countdown, and earlier in that year, in two thousand
and nine, in April, I had gotten a call from
Jeff Zucker. Hey, I had an idea. He began, what
do you think about going on and asking how bad
is Rupert Murdoch's dementia? I mean just going on and saying, obviously,
Bill O'Reilly is totally out of control. Murdoch has no

(15:41):
control over Fox anymore. There are reports about his dementia.
What do you think? I suggested to Zucker that while
I was appreciative of his intent, I had not heard
anything about Murdoch's suffering from dementia and had no indication
that he was. Zucker was actually mildly offended. So what
have you ever had any FFing indication that ge was

(16:02):
selling FFing parts in Iran? Make ied s out of No,
you effing haven't, now, he laughed. You could just say,
Countdown promises it will be investigating how bad Murdock's reported
dementia is and how out of control O'Reilly is. Just
a thought. That is where we started, Jeff Zucker and

(16:23):
Steve Kappus, and that is not where we finished. On Monday,
June fifteenth, two thousand and nine, at one pm Eastern
daylight time, I met Jeff Zucker for lunch at the
Sea Grill next to the Rockefeller Centers skating rink. After
pleasantries and a baseball discussion, Zooker offered his thanks for

(16:43):
my cooperation in the Fox matter for the weeks since
the emergency meeting in his office. You've done everything we
could have asked. I appreciate it. MLD appreciates it. The
company appreciates it. Will not be forgotten. You could not
have done it better. He then explained that he knew
I was still deeply concerned about the resolution of these issues,
and he said he wanted to hear my concerns and ideas.

(17:06):
I told him I had brought notes to begin with.
I told Jeff that my cooperation with Jeff mmelt's original
request that I refrained from referencing Bill O'Reilly or Rupert
Murdoch or Roger Ales or News Corp. Was half out
of empathy for the position that he's Zooker and the
president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin found themselves in, and half

(17:29):
out of the belief that such an outrageous resolution a
secret bartered agreement between two rival corporations to circumscribe what
news each could cover. That that could never be kept
quiet very long, and it would have certainly leaked by now,
and by some mechanism or another would have certainly long
since ended by now. I then assessed for Jeff Zucker

(17:51):
where I thought we all stood at that moment. I
began by noting that in conversation about this in the
previous week, Rachel Maddow and I had both concluded that
we could not really do our jobs under such restrictions
for very long. Rachel's primary issue was the impact on
her credibility once the story of this extraordinary agreement between

(18:11):
Fox and NBC became public, that she had in effect
collaborated with the suppression of the news. I said, my
main issue is that while nearly all of Fox's attacks
on NBC and GE were ad hominem their liberals or
there are reports GE parts have been found in IDs
in Iraq made and Iran, our coverage of Fox News

(18:33):
and Fox and News Corps and Murdoch and O'Reilly that
was always supported by direct quotation and supplementary on the
record sources and videotape wherever possible. They were reporting rumors.
We were showing clips of Fox News. But you can

(18:53):
still do that, Zooker replied, you can still quote Fox News,
quote them, chapter and verse. I want you to quote them.
I want you to be critical of them. It's right,
it's what you've been doing. It's what made you and
what's made ms you see and therefore us successful. All
I want you to do is not quote any individual
by name, say Fox News said this, and Fox News

(19:17):
reported that I nearly choked on my tuna. I asked
him if he meant that literally, since a script so
constructed had been in fact removed from the previous Wednesday's
show at Phil Griffin's request. Well, we had a confluence
of three unforeseeable events. First the George Tiller murder, then

(19:37):
the shootout at the Holocaust Museum. Then Joe Scarborough unknowingly
exascerbating this situation when he compared Bill O'Reilly to John Stewart.
We needed to not provoke Fox further last week. I'm
just hoping to go two weeks, Zucker said, without anything
extraordinary happening, so we can get this all settled down
and gradually get this back towards where we were. I

(20:00):
asked Zucker if that meant again going back to criticizing
other figures, if not O'Reilly, Murdoch or Ales anytime soon,
as we had agreed in May. No, I don't see
that happening in the near future. I see this if
I can go back to baseball for a moment, as
being analogous to a game in which we're only in
a say the top of the second inning, we're still

(20:22):
feeling out each other's pictures. I said, I was not
sure if I could make it to the bottom of
the second inning. He said, well, then if you feel
like that again, we have another one of these lunches
and hash it out. I asked him what he was
doing tomorrow. He laughed, thinking I was kidding, He asked
me to resume my assessment. I pointed out that to
some degree, CNN had realized that we at MSNBC had

(20:46):
begun to abstain from criticizing or even referencing Fox, and
some people at CNN and on CNN had decided to
try to steal our act. Rick Sanchez, who was on
the air and CNN in those days, had attacked O'Reilly
and last week their eight PM host, Campbell Brown, had
begun her newscast with clips that we at MSNBC were

(21:10):
specifically prohibited from running. Fox's Shepherd Smith discussing the increasing
craziness of the emails he had gotten. I also told
Zooker that while we had been virtually silent about Fox,
they had hardly been so about us. That O'Reilly had
attacked a surrogate, the Salon editor and frequent Matto and
Chris Matthew's guest Joan Walsch for fifteen minutes last Friday

(21:34):
over the Killer the Tiller, criticisms of O'Reilly, and that
Chris Wallace had said that his tiff with the Fox
Morning Show was an indicator of how much better Fox
was than NBC, because if he'd said something similar about me,
they would have shown him the door. I told Zooker
that ordinarily I would have pointed out that NBC had

(21:54):
already shown Wallace the door over here, and I was
denied a pretty good line. I suggested to Zooker that
we would be spending all our time either defending ourselves
from Fox charges of violating the deal, or making sure
we had not violated the deal, or absorbing hits from
O'Reilly in his belief that he had won in this deal.

(22:16):
I noted that when Scarborough had referenced O'Reilly, Phil Griffin's
reaction had been to call Gary Ginsburg at Fox to
make sure the treaty had not been broken, and his
action had been to make sure I did not criticize
Fox that night. In short, because Scarborough had made a
reference to Bill O'Reilly on the air, I was the
one punished by having my editorial breadth circumscribed even further. Well,

(22:41):
I really scared the blank out of Phil, Suker said,
maybe too much in this case. Finally, I got to
the ultimate point of the lunch, which was to Warren
Zooker that I did not think anybody at NBC realized
how perilously close we were to having the entire story
of the immult Murdock deal leak out. I produced for

(23:04):
him printed out versions of the tweets of the blogger
known as Spud from Inside Cable News. Spud had been
tipped to this story the previous Sunday, and he had
set out a few messages about the rumor, but he
had ultimately decided that the whole thing was too far fetched.
To be true, but Spud had noted that there was

(23:27):
an easy way to check that if O'Reilly did indeed
stop making references to NBC or GE or Immelt or Iran,
maybe it was true. I pointed out to Zucker that
not only did we have a frozen tsunami in front
of us or a ticking time bomb, whichever he preferred,
but we had an exact timeline of when the wave
would break or the bomb would explode. I noted that

(23:49):
even though this pro Fox blogger had been too blind
or too pigheaded to realize what a story he had
in his hands, he had also provided himself with a
way back from his own stupidity. I then asked Zucker
what NBC's plan was if the story leaked. Zucker said
it was simple. We would say that for weeks things
had been escalating beyond all reason, and now, with death

(24:12):
threats involved, things needed to cool off, and that's all
we had been trying to do death threats. I pointed
out that this ran contrary to all the rules of
threat management that I had ever been exposed to, In fact,
most of them ironically learned from Fox's security people when
they helped me with a stalker I had when I

(24:32):
worked at Fox Sports. I said that the last thing
we wanted to do was add another headline to the
mix Immelt buckles to death threats. I warned Zooker, we
would be up to our fannies in death threats if
that happened, and people would be trying to get Immelt
then to change everything from the content of NBC Nightly
News to the shape of ge lightbulbs. I also told

(24:56):
Zooker that there were few ways out of this that
would not bring Immelt more trouble than he already had.
A leak, and we now knew the mechanism by which
a leak might come. Or it might be ascertained by
somebody analyzing my scripts suddenly devoid of all references to
Fox and its personalities, or it might result from the
publicity that would necessarily follow any punishment by Immelt of

(25:17):
any of the NBC or MSNBC principles like me or Madow,
that that would be greeted on the left by charges
of Immelt muzzles MSNBC. Meantime, the right would react by
recognizing that it could now get whatever it wanted out
of MSNBC or NBC or ge for that matter, by
simply threatening MLT again. I warned Zooker that mentioning the

(25:41):
death threats would not tap down the situation but make
it explode. Additionally, no matter what happened in politics, the
credibility of everybody involved was at stake. NBC News MSNBC
and the individuals involved who worked for both were all
suddenly available for a price journalistically, even if that price
was blackmail or corporation to corporation illicit deal making. And

(26:06):
I also told him that the simple wear and tear
of now having to get virtually every piece of show
script that did or might relate to Fox vetted was
causing it to take twice as long for me to
prepare the show, and that the results were making the
job decreasingly pleasant for me, and we're beginning to show
up in my on air performance. Zucker told me that

(26:28):
that might be true, but fortunately the ratings had not suffered,
and I was obviously doing an excellent job because last
week's ratings were actually higher than those of two or
three weeks previously. Zucker was calling for the lunch check
by this point, and he asked to review the rules
for referencing Fox once again. Before we left, I told
him that he had just told me that we could

(26:49):
get back closer to the original request, that I could
once again reference Fox News on countdown, in segments or
within features like Worse Persons in the World, but that
while I could use full quotes from their network, I
could not identify which individual jewel human being had said
those quotes. Yep, and don't try to go up the line,

(27:11):
not this week anyway. Don't push the line. Don't try
to live up just to the literal rule, but also
the spirit of the rule, he said, enthusiastically. I said,
the furthest I would push it would be too occasionally
refer to Fox News not as Fox News, but as
fixed News or Fox Noise Good. Zucker said, perfect, We're

(27:31):
on the same page. Turned out we were not on
the same page. None of us were not on the
same page, nor in the same book. The story of
my dinner with the Chairman of ge in the private
dining room at thirty Rock on the fifty second floor,
where As I told my agent that day, I could

(27:55):
easily fall from or be pushed to resume my story
in the wake of the newest Fox Dominion lawsuit, documents
being released last night. How in two thousand and nine,

(28:17):
NBC colluded with Fox to try to shut down my
criticisms and exposure of the harm Fox News was doing
to journalism and to America. Let me take it back
to Monday, June fifteenth, two thousand and nine, at four pm,
when the MSNBC president Phil Griffin walked into my office
and asked how I was, and I told him not

(28:38):
too well. That I had tried, without success earlier in
the day to get Jeff Zucker to see both the
seriousness and the imminence of the situation they had all
put us in, and to indicate that my ability to
continue to abide by these draconian measures while I continued
to fight within the system to roll them back, had
a very short self life. I said. I had done

(29:01):
my best to warn Zucker of what was coming, but
the image that would befall the reputation of both NBC
News and MSNBC did not seem to occur to him
as it did to me. But you got something, didn't you?
Griffin asked, he's back on board with you running actual
quotes from Fox right. I told him that was my understanding.
All you can't do is make it personal. You can't

(29:23):
quote anybody directly, or quote somebody saying I believe or whatever.
I said. The first part sounded familiar, but the rest
of it I didn't know what he was talking about.
Phil then explained that Zoocker had summed up the meeting
by saying, Zooker had told me I could not quote
any Fox person speaking about themselves, such as quote I

(29:44):
never referred to doctor George Tiller as doctor George Killer.
I told Phil that Zucker and I had never discussed
that it had not come up. I had not agreed
to it, and by the way, I would not agree
to it. How can I use, I said, a quote
from O'Reilly in which he lies about not calling him
doctor killer without quoting him using I or me or

(30:08):
some other personal pronouns. I can't use the tape of
him saying doctor killer. I can't even read the transcript
of him saying doctor killer unless I attribute it generically
to Fox and not to O'Reilly. Now you're saying I
can't even use an accurate quote. I have to wash
the pronouns out of it. Phil told me Jeff Zucker

(30:30):
had told him not an hour before that that's exactly
what it meant. I told Phil that that was enough,
and I was leaving. I went out to the men's
room and left him in my office. I then went
to Rachel Maddow's office. Yeah, I washed my hands and
dried them. I recounted the story of the meeting with

(30:53):
Zucker to her, and just when I got to Phil's
sudden addendum there about not using I or me in
any quote, Phil walked in. The three of us spoke
very bluntly is a good word for it. Matto pointed
out that, well, it was likely she would, even if
there were no rules about it, not have any reason
to mention Fox News before she left on her vacation

(31:15):
two fridays later. She could not abide by any rule
about it unless she were convinced that we were making
strides towards getting that rule repealed. She felt her personal
credibility would be irreparably damaged. It only takes one thing
you can't live with for you to be dead, she said.
She noted that NBC's credibility was on the line too.

(31:37):
I suggested again that there was a limited time in
which we were in the effort to undo this wrong
morally entitled to stay and fight rather than simply resign.
We reviewed the facts of the situation, and it was
then that Griffin explained a curious side angle to the
rumor placed on Twitter by the bloggers Spud eight days
ago that all this spud wrote was part of some

(32:00):
advertising Bye Bye Ge on Fox. It turns out, Griffin
says that may have been ML's first response to the
problems with Fox, that since Ge had never bought commercials
on Fox, that if he did do buy some ads
on Fox, maybe Fox would leave him and Ge alone.

(32:22):
I suppressed my desire to burst out laughing. I pointed
out the obvious. Not only was Immelt guilty of giving
into blackmail and threats, not only had he sold out
the journalism of MSNBC, n NBC News and the credibility
of all those he had already involved in this mess,
but now he was guilty of trying to bribe Fox
News and Rupert Murdoch into altering its coverage of him.

(32:47):
I think with that, Phil Griffin seemed to come around.
He agreed that there really was only one win win
outcome if somebody could convince Immelt to break the deal
with Fox. Before News of the deal with Fox leaked out. Otherwise,
no matter which way we turned, this would come crashing
down one way or the other. Phil said he was

(33:07):
going to the third floor, meaning to the NBC News
executive area, presumably to meet with Steve Kappus, the president
of NBC News, to figure out where to go next.
I returned to my office and I resumed preparing my show,
and just to see if it were doable, I tried
to take out all the quotes from my piece on
O'Reilly that contained him using personal pronouns. To my surprise,

(33:31):
it worked. The script still made some sense, and nowhere
in it was I quoting him by name or using
any quote in which O'Reilly said, hey, us were Later
the same day, at six o'clock, Phil Griffin returned to
my office and slumped into my chair. I don't know

(33:52):
what to tell you. I don't think anybody grasped this
until just now. You wrote the Fox thing for Worst
Persons the way Jeff wanted you to do it. He
rewrote it the way I wanted you to do it.
And still it's obvious what this is. It's obvious that
O'Reilly will hit the ceiling when this runs it's obvious
that there's just no way to write this in any
other way. You've deluded it as much as it can

(34:13):
be diluted. Phil looked spent campus and I were on
the phone with Zooker, and it just sort of hit
all of us at the same time. We can't do this.
Something has to change. Somebody has to talk Immelt out
of this. Maybe it's me, maybe it's maybe it's Zooker.
I don't know. There's got to be something else involved here.
I don't know about because Zookers just as fatalistic about

(34:34):
this as I am. I'm telling you, I don't know
what to tell you, and he was telling me I
don't know what to tell you. He didn't ask me
to take it out of the show. Keith, I'm not
asking you to take it out of the show. I
know what's going to happen. It's just going to collapse.
The whole thing, the whole thing we've worked so hard
to achieve for six years. You the tent pole, the
whole tent, the whole thing gone blown away, no more tents,

(34:58):
and I have no clue what to do next. He
was near tears. So I said to Phil Griffin that
one thing we needed here was a mutuality of interest.
Maybe I should go on and do the Fox piece
and precipitate the collapse he was afraid of because it
was unlikely that NBC could punish me in any realistic way.

(35:19):
And if Immelt sought to punish anybody else, Zucker or
Griffin or Campus, I could perhaps push him into withdrawing
such punishment by making it clear that I would not
continue at MSNBC unless each of them did. In other words,
he tried to fire one of them, I would quit.
Phil said he thought the unity might work, but not

(35:40):
the precipitent behavior. Then again, I don't know what to do.
I'm not going to have the goal to try to
tell you what to do again. You've done everything we've
asked of you, everything. I said to him that it
struck me that at least the point had gotten across,
that we were all facing that moment of Churchillian assessment
of Neville Chamberlain's deal with Hitler at Munich. He had

(36:00):
the choice of shame or war. He chose shame. He
will get war. Later, Griffin said that was in fact
his reading too, that neither Heen or Campus nor Zuker
were thinking any longer about how to live with these restrictions,
but only how to undo these restrictions. So I said, Phil,
I'll give you forty eight hours. Not I'm threatening you

(36:23):
do this in forty eight hours or else, but literally,
here here is forty eight hours. You geniuses, figure out
something between now and six o'clock Wednesday, or I'll do
whatever I think is appropriate. And in the interim, this
table this box piece about O'Reilly and Tiller. I'll table that.

(36:44):
Will that help at all? He nodded, and he said
at least it gave us a chance. And then I said,
now I get to say something I've been meaning to
say to you since nineteen eighty one when we work
together at CNN. Get the f out of my office.
Griffin laughed and left, and about a day later he said,
we have the solution. We're going to have you have

(37:08):
dinner with Jeff Immelt himself in the interim, Moving to Thursday,
June eighteenth of two thousand and nine, right after my
show ended, I wrote this in my diary at six
fifteen this evening, Phil Griffin came to my office to
report that after Wednesday Night's Worst Person segment in countdown.

(37:28):
Beth Comstock, who was the GE senior vice president and
chief marketing officer, received a call from somebody at Fox
or at News Corp. Complaining. Comstock called Zucker to ask
what's with this, and Zucker defended the segment, my segment
about O'Reilly, saying I approved it. Zucker had not even

(37:50):
known about it, so he had Griffin send him either
a link to the video or a copy of the
script or something, and Zucker said he did, in fact
improve it. It did not violate even his guidelines. He
called Comstock back and, as Griffin quoted him, if they
NewsCorp got a problem with it, it's the deal and
it's over. He's working on it. Griffin said, Zucker stood

(38:10):
up for us. That was a big thing. He also
reported that Zoocker was on board and doesn't want to
be the one who breaks the rule, but he gets it,
and that Zucker had spent Wednesday at GE headquarters in Stamford,
Connecticut and reported back to Griffin that throughout management there
were cracks in the willingness to keep the deal with
Fox in place, that it was just too risky and stupid.

(38:35):
I reminded Griffin that regardless of what incremental progress was
being made, we were still at imminent risk of the
thing leaking. He added that in a conversation with Alison Gallist,
NBC News media relations director and FOZ friend of Zooker's,
Griffin had asked about the idea of revealing the death threats,

(38:57):
and she said that, of course we couldn't do that,
that we would merely portray it as a temporary measure
of self restraint. In the aftermath of the assassination of
doctor George Tiller, that there was no deal. On June nineteenth,
Phil Griffin called me back to tell me that the
fox somebody who had called Beth Comstock was Roger ailes Now.

(39:18):
The next week, Monday, the twenty second after my show,
Phil Griffin asked me if I would meet him at
lunch to describe how a shift has taken place in
our favor. Griffin said he had spoken to Jeff Zucker
on Friday night, just before an MSNBC party in Washington,
and that Zucker had in fact buttonholed Jeff during the

(39:39):
day on Friday. I have nothing to tell you, Phil
quoted Zucker is saying, I don't think he gets anything's changed,
or that anything needs to change. Speaking of Mmelt, Phil
said that his mood had lightened. By Sunday night. Zucker
had called him to say that there had been positive
developments and he should meet him in the opposite nine am.
The gist of Zoocker's news was that Beth Comstock, the

(40:01):
GE second in command who had been so actively collaborate
in the negotiations with Murdoch, had suddenly realized that the
negotiation process had failed, that there would be no end
to the number of demands Fox would make, nor the
attempts of Ales, in particular to get around the rules
on his end over at Fox. Zucker claimed Comstock had

(40:22):
told him that she would be proposing to Immelt that
the agreement be reduced to manageable terms or abandoned. Comstock's
suggestion was that O'Reilly would avoid personal attacks on me,
would drop any references to GE or MLT or Zooker,
and in exchange for that, I would drop any personal
attacks on O'Reilly, Ales or Murdoch or references to NewsCorp.

(40:47):
Her suggestion would include that if there was any attempt
to go broader than this, she would tell Immelt he
had to get out of the process to protect his corporation,
his company, and himself better no rules than these rules,
she said. Implied in all this was that other people
issues would be fair game, like I could say Fox News,

(41:09):
and even some aspects of the O'Reilly Oberman feud could continue.
Zucker told Griffin that this was decisive. mL doesn't understand television,
Griffin said. He is, in Jack Welch's description of him,
a salesman who became a paper shuffler. He thinks Beth
Comstock does understand television. He relies on her based on this,

(41:32):
Griffin said. And Griffin said he had been specifically authorized
by mL to make these statements on behalf of Zucker.
They were promising me that any rules between ge NBC, MSNBC,
and News Corp Fox Fox News would be rolled back
to the point of my original one on one may

(41:52):
meeting with Jeff Zucker, or there wouldn't be any rules whatsoever.
What Zucker could not promise was when he was going
to do that, I need you to Keith on board
in whatever way you think best. Griffin quoted Zucker as saying.
Griffin said that these rules would be off the table
by the start of my next vacation. Next month in

(42:15):
July of two thousand and nine. He thought that delay
was only slightly predicated on convincing Emelt and more on
the fact that it appears Ales and Murdoch were both
traveling or off the current week, and that the next
week was going to be virtually lost anyway because it
was the fourth of July week. The hope, phil Griffin said,

(42:36):
was to get the principles meeting the other principles. No
more phone negotiations with people like Gary Ginsburg, but at
least with people of the Ales Griffin levels in a
room hashing it all out. Griffin went on to say
that Zucker was completely understanding of the draining impact of
this entire process as it entered its second month, and

(42:57):
that he was also aware of the fact that my
cooperation had a finite shelf life. Thus he had authorized
Griffin to make the following offer, but delay its availability
from immediately to next week, with the sales quarter ending
on the end of June. Tuesday, June thirtieth, What they
were asking was if I would stay on the air
and Fox Free through June thirtieth to assure a significant

(43:22):
ratings success. We clinched our various hourly and primetime victories
over CNN, but Nancy Grace on CNN Headline News was
still within distance of us, and if I were off
for a week, she might if she had a big
week herself, catch us for second place in the eight
to nine Eastern daylight time time slot after the following Tuesday.

(43:45):
They were saying, if you want to disassociate yourself from
this process until it all gets resolved, feel free to
take off all or the rest of the month of July.
Zucker also told Griffin that he Zucker would be happy
to go over this line by line with me directly.
To sum this up. The rules would at worst go

(44:07):
back to the old May rules by at the latest
July fifteenth, and to protect my reputation and my ratings,
I could take paid vacation for as much of the
month of July as I wanted to remember, television anchors,
particularly on cable, particularly in those days, we're told never
to take more than a week off. There were a

(44:31):
couple of additional details mentioned during the lunch. We acknowledged
worst case scenarios, and Griffin said he and Zucker were
well aware of the no win position. Gee he had
put itself in regarding my contract. There's no cause to
fire you. There couldn't be any cause to fire you,
Griffin said, if HIML really is that stupid, and Friday
night I thought he was. I thought he was willing
to blow all this up and fire everybody. But thinking

(44:52):
the guy who comes out of this the best is Keith.
If he got fired, we would owe him every last
dollar of his contract. Obviously the story would get out,
whether he told it or not. The place would be
a shambles. Keith would be a mar He could work
any place he wanted, or he could just sit at
home and count the money. Thank god, I no longer
think that's what's going to happen, because Beth Comstock has

(45:13):
changed sides. But you've done everything we asked you to do.
It's all been a favor, honestly, that there is a
chance this is getting better. That's because of the meeting
you had with Jeff and then the meetings you had
with me last week. Griffin also explained why IMLS had
not moved or intervened or even reacted to these recent developments.
Comstock apparently told Zooker, although Phil was a little vague

(45:36):
about this, that IML was convinced the deal was a
lot simpler than the rest of us knew. It was
that mL had told Zooker, dating back to the time
of the original IML. Zooker contact at the CEO conference
in Washington State in May, that he was to instruct
me and everybody else at MSNBC never to mention Fox

(45:56):
or Fox News or any of its personalities ever again. Well, now,
this story might be true, but it asked severely with
the fact that Zucker was negotiating details of a deal
with Gary Ginsburg at Fox, he certainly was not freelancing that.
And if ML's instructions to him were never mentioned Fox again,

(46:17):
why would you need to negotiate with Fox when you
could mention Fox again. There's one more vignette from this meeting.
At some point, Roger Ales complained to somebody at NBC,
presumably Beth Comstock, that we at NBC were nitpicking when
we pointed out that Bill O'Reilly had done a segment

(46:37):
about his ratings compared to MSNBC's ratings, that he had
used the MSNBC logo over his shoulder, that he had
mocked MSNBC. Ales was highly irritated that we brought this up,
quoting him, but those are facts. I left the meeting
with Griffin that day encouraged, undecided, but also not clear

(47:00):
on why Zucker was so convinced that this would be
resolved merely by the endorsement of this Beth Comstock. I
reiterated this with Griffin when he visited my office again
about six thirty. Phil said, we were on for a
meeting tomorrow with Zucker, and I'll let Jeff explain it.
And I don't know if he'll be this blunt, but
the essence is Beth Comstock probably dreamt up this deal

(47:21):
with Fox in the first place, and that's ultimately why
MLT went along with it, and now she's against the deal,
and that's why mL will oppose it. I worked the
next week, kept my mouth shut, and then took almost
all of July off, and then came dinner with Jeff
Immelt on July twentieth, a Monday. It was dinner with

(47:45):
MLT and unexpectedly with another Jeff Zucker. It was in
Immelt's private dining room at the top of thirty Rock.
The subject of the meeting, the exact subject, was a
matter of great anxiety. There were no clues forthcoming from
Phil Griffin, who was late as six pm that night
was in my office fretting. I had been in Maadows

(48:07):
office fretting half an hour earlier. A touch of burlesque
had been added to the proceedings went Upon my arrival
at my office at five, I reached down to plug
in a phone charger, only to hear the seam in
the seat of my custom Sacks Fifth Avenue suit rip
cleanly open. I managed to get an intern to go

(48:29):
back to my apartment Crosstown to get me one of
my other suits in time for dinner with the Jeffs.
How did it go from there? Let's just say ripping
my pants was the highlight of the night. The rest
of it. Next, I take you back now to July twentieth,

(49:01):
two thousand and nine, and dinner with the chairman of
GE Jeff Emilt, on the top floor of thirty Rock,
as he tried to persuade me that I should stop
criticizing Fox News so it would stop criticizing him, and
that I should participate in a deal between NBC and
Fox to decide what news they would cover about each

(49:22):
other and what news they would not. The amount of
small talk at this inner with MLT and Jeff Zucker,
the president of NBC at that point, was exceptional. After
a question from MLT about what our former host Rita
Cosby was then doing, and long after the entres had
been served fully forty five minutes into this Emmelt finally

(49:45):
and abruptly got to the point. You know, Keith, I've
never told anybody in the news division what to do
or say, and I've completely endorsed Jeff and Griff's strategy
on putting MSNBC on the map. So I'm completely all in.
I'm a supporter of yours. Do I agree with everything
you say? I can tell you no effing way, hey,

(50:05):
he laughed. But I want to win and I think
that in the end, that's what I get paid to do.
And I need your thoughtfulness. I need your help because
I don't really want to tell you what to think
or to say on the air. That's not the business
I'm in. We're up against guys that know how to
play this game, just like you do, just like we do.
These are tough guys. They bring the company into it,

(50:26):
which is my responsibility, and I need to kind of
just be on the same page with you and Jeff
and phil on ultimately how you deal with that, because
it's just not good for GE when they go after
us with lies, you know, the way they play. I
wanted to have the dinner not to say anything against you,
because I quite endorse what we've done here and having

(50:48):
you from eight to nine and trying to win. Like
I said, I'm all in and I'm never going to
back down from MSNBC. And I've had some tough phone
conversations with Rupert on this, but in this recession, I
can't afford to spend a lot of time on the
cleanup crew. So my question, and Melt continued to you,
is this, Can you help, what's the right way to

(51:09):
think about it? And how can I let you do
what you need to do without putting the company in
a pr jungle. That's what I wanted to reach out
to you about. I told him I was aware and
grateful for that as I tried to learn this language
that he spoke, that I was always aware this was
our collective success. And I told him I seeing them

(51:32):
all in heavy winds, and this was the one that said,
oh no, no, there are no heavy winds. It's our
job to deal with the heavy winds, and I appreciated it.
I asked him how much detail he would like an
answer to his question, and I pulled out my five
scenario note cards and I went into some detail about
the prospects awaiting us. Immelt and Zucker listened patiently and

(51:55):
virtually without interruption as I reviewed for about fifteen minutes
what I saw as the options. Imel did look a
little dubious when I told him that Urdock's ultimate goal
was to get me off the air here and that
only that eventuality would lead him to lose interest in
continuing to blackmail us or extort us. These words seemed
to surprise Immelt. Just as I came to my conclusion

(52:19):
about fighting, getting professional opposition research people, and bringing guns
to a knife fight, mL finally interjected something, I don't
disagree with what you've said. I really don't. I think
free means free. That's what we're supposed to do when
you own a network. I had this dinner with you
to ask you a favor, not to tell you what
to do. Suddenly, I was not certain that anything I

(52:41):
had said had registered at all with MLT, and if
he was still expecting me to say yes, I'll do
what you say, and I'll pretend you did not order
me to do it. To say, just know that there's
a bigger context. Know that a NonStop onslaught on ge
is painful and distracting for me. And I don't want
to tell you what to do. Immelt here returned to

(53:04):
a point that Zucker had made several times. I don't
think you need props on the show anymore. I think
the show stands on its own two feet, and I
think you could talk about anything you want between eight
and nine. Now do I think a hard and fast
deal can be struck with news Corp, with Murdoch, with Ales?
I don't. What I ask you is to use perspective

(53:24):
and judgment when you decide what to talk about. That's
bigger than just your show, which I think you do.
But I really don't want to tell you what to say. This,
of course translated simply as he sure as f wanted
to tell me what to say. I think we took
on a task of making MSNBC successful. I signed up

(53:46):
for it, Jeff signed up for it, Cappus signed up
for it, Griffin signed up for it. You signed up
for it. Suddenly I thought he was going to name
everybody in the building, and I've never effing blinked, and
I don't know where this thing goes. I don't ever
want to be in a position where you and I
are working on cross purposes. Every time that any of
the newsboys I've ever complained about MSNBC, I've told them

(54:08):
to shut the f up. My strategy has always been,
if you can put cable news together with network news,
you could beat everybody, and so far we are winning.
By this point, I had heard three remarkable historical revisions.
Zucker made it clear that mL had threatened his job

(54:29):
if anybody, and that would include me referenced Fox on
the Air after the coverage of the death of doctor
George Tiller, in that he had surely blinked, and he
had indirectly told me what not to say and asked
you his defense against the newsboys. When I had pleaded
to him the previous September that removing Chris Matthews and

(54:50):
I from the anchor desk over the debates was pure
capitulation to the Republicans. He had passed my letter directly
to Zucker, which enraged Zucker. Still, something suggested to me
that I should hold my tongue and wait to see
where redrawing of history would lead us. So he resumed,
I don't want to talk to you formally about it.

(55:11):
I want to talk to you informally about it and
ask you to do me a favor. Now, when O'Reilly
is in the news, when Fox is in the news,
you probably have to talk about them. I don't know
how often that is. Is it once a month, is
it once a day? He cracked himself up at the
looseness of his own estimates when they become the news.

(55:33):
I don't know where the deal stands. I just think
you've become a star. You don't need props anymore. I
don't want to be your censor. I don't want to
see MSNBC go backwards. I really don't want to draw
a line in the sand. I'm just asking you, guys,
I need your help. His tone here did not suggest

(55:53):
a threat nor a warning, but in fact a kind
of earnest wish to have his cake and keep it
on display under a glass case in the lobby too.
Immelt included Zucker for one of the first times in
the whole hour hour and a half. By this point, Jeff,
I know I've asked you to talk to Fox. I've
talked to Rupert just to say when it gets effing stupid,

(56:16):
when I get and Keith, I know you get it
all the time. When I got to put my family
in a hotel, then it's just crossed the line. And hey,
I'm a big boy and I'm in it to win.
But I guess more than anything else, I just wanted
to have dinner to ask you a favor. Use your judgment,
think about the broader context. I don't want to censor you,
and I won't censor you period, but I want you

(56:38):
to just use perspective. Isn't that fair? I mean, is
that too loose? I don't know a better way to
say it. It's not the last time I'll talk to
Ales or Rupert, But in the end, I'm for the
ge team and I'll fight for you guys, and I
think you know I will. I just need you to
kind of think it's through. Does that help you or

(56:59):
hurt you? I mean, when they're in the news, you
gotta do the news. I wouldn't tell Brian Williams what
to say. I'm not going to tell you what to say,
but day after day after day after day, after day.
It hurts the company, and I need you to know
that and think about that, and I need to let
you know that in a way that doesn't tell you

(57:19):
what to say, but allows you to see a bigger
perspective here. I asked Himmelt if he thought that whatever
my response on the air would be would ever be
sufficient for Fox. Oh, I think you're right about that.
I don't know that there's ever going to be anything
that's sufficient for Fox. I would just feel better about

(57:41):
my responsibility if I've had the conversation with you in
which I say, use your judgment that keeps the entire
company in perspective. Do I expect you to be able
to control what they do? I can't hold you accountable
for what that. I won't. If O'Reilly gets on TV
tonight and says Keith Olberman is the worst effing human
being that's ever lived, and he should die, we should

(58:04):
all fight back. Can you do a deal with these guys?
I don't think that much about it, but I don't
think we can do. I want MSNBC to coward versus Fox.
I've said to these guys, I'm not a TV person,
but I'm a student of business when we decided to
make MSNBC relevant, we studied Fox News. That's it, fam

(58:26):
My request to you is just be my partner. Suddenly
I began to feel that I was living out the
scene from the movie Catch twenty two, in which Buck
Henry and Martin Balsom is the evil captains who have
tried to destroy Alan Arkin now offer him a rotation
Stateside if he will be their friend, be nice to us,

(58:50):
tell the folks at home, what a great job we're doing.
Be our friend. Back to reality and immilt as he
began to sound like Buck Henry and Martin Balsom even more.
Don't listen to what I say, don't I don't want
to tell you what to say I can. I think
free means free. I don't want to change that about you.
I don't want to change that about MS I would

(59:11):
never ask Matt Lower or Brian Williams. But where as
big a hat as you can, That's all I ask.
Where as big a hat as you can. And if
you feel like you have to find, you have to
do what you have to do. And I don't want
to be on the other side of that one. I
just don't. In the end, I would like to protect
your journalistic integrity, probably above all else. But I'm a

(59:35):
GE guy. I'm responsible for GE and it's investors, and
I don't want those two things to come into conflict.
But I'm never going to ask anybody around this place
to do what they don't want to do. Happily, Zucker
chimed in. I guess the key message here is be
responsible and wear that big hat. I don't think anybody

(59:56):
wants to be in the position of laying out ten
point rules. It's impossible. And here mlt interrupted to echo impossible,
Zucker resumed to the degree you can, and I don't
want your spending your day thinking about it. Just keep
a balance that takes all this into account. Zucker now
said something fascinating. I think your biggest concern the last
two months is that a deal leaks out and this

(01:00:16):
damages your credibility. And the message about that is there's
no deal. You do what you gotta do, so that
takes the deal off the table. Now Immelt interrupted. I
don't plan on talking to Roger or Rupert. I know
these guys, I know him, so I'm not naive about
the world you're in. I just need your help Zucker blurted,

(01:00:38):
there's no deal. Immelt resumed again. I'm all in with you,
and I'm all in with Jeff, and all I ask
is that you make your judgment as broad as it
can be. And I'm not going to pick up the
phone tomorrow and call Roger Ailes and say I had
my guy in here last night. Did you have dinner
with Glenn Beck? I pointed out finally that whatever we

(01:01:01):
were talking about, I had to apply it practically, and
that this had been a great source of confusion at
my level. I asked Himmel if the last few months
of voluntary restraint, which I thought was largely unsustainable, and
he further had addressed his needs. I think it's been
directionally helpful, he said, You're my first responsibility, and whatever
I do with Rupert or Roger, I defend my own

(01:01:23):
team first, any person, any business, anywhere. So I think
it's been generally helpful. Is there a quantity metric? Maybe
I wouldn't know how to measure it or what it means.
I'm not going to give you an ultimatum. I'm not
going to give you a contract. I don't want to
go there. In the end, my appeal to you is

(01:01:44):
as a colleague, not as a boss, and it's just
to say I'm responsible for ge help me, help me,
help you. If O'Reilly's the news, cover the news. If
there's a story that needs to be told about Fox,
tell the story. Try not to be gratuitous. I watch
your show. I enjoy it, even the days when I
get bunches of e mails about it. I think you're

(01:02:06):
a commentator, You're smart, You're edgy. When I look back
on Phil Donahue when we were losing a couple of
hundred million bucks a year, I'm proud and where we've come.
I take personal pride and company pride and where we've come.
So I don't ever want to feel this about what
you've done. I just don't want to have to defend
the company every day. And it's just a fine line

(01:02:28):
that we walk. I just ask for your judgment, your partnership,
and your help, but I don't want to do it
at the expense of making you feel you're not being
as effective as what you need to be for MSNBC
to be effective. And if it goes the other way,
it goes the other way. But I'd rather have it
be because they've been outrageous rather than the other way around.

(01:02:51):
Can they control their guys. I'm not convinced, but I'm
only going to worry about us. I'm not a censor.
There's no ultimatum. I ask for your help. I told
him that under those terms, I could continue to provide
my help. My concern, I said, remained whether or not
it would provide him with what he felt he needed,

(01:03:12):
and whether it would be satisfactory to him. Let's see,
you will never get I will never do anything that
surprises you unless you really surprise me first. But I
don't want you to walk out of here tonight feeling
there's some sort of hidden agenda. I'm a countdown supporter.
I want MSNBC to win. I don't want to be
a censor. I actually think that's irresponsible and I shouldn't

(01:03:35):
do it. But I'm a GE guy. That's my alpha
and omega. I suggested that I was surprisingly corporate my
own self. I re recounted for him my adherents, even
to Murdoch's proprietorship when I worked for Fox, and my
fealty to NBC and GE, and even my guilt for

(01:03:57):
causing such disturbances at the company. When I left MSNBC
in nineteen ninety eight, but I added that I was
still worried about the banana appeals now spread in the
path in front of us, particularly what Fox thought they
were influencing here, and the likelihood that they would be
back for more on either pretext that they were influencing
nothing and needed to influence something, or that they were

(01:04:19):
influencing a lot and needed to influence even more MSNBC.
He said it was a complete piece of blank seven
years ago. It is not today. I was just talking
to Barry Diller, who is as shrewd to guys I've
ever met in TV, and he raved about it. So
I have pride in that I'm not going to back
off that. I think what you've done is very hard

(01:04:40):
and it's working, and I think if there can be
some kind of detante, fine, if they can't. In the end,
I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over it,
as long as I feel you trust me, and I
trust you that you're going to try to balance and
try to have as good a perspective as you can.
If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. You got to
cover what's in your gut. Is the News. If you

(01:05:02):
never mentioned Bill O'Reilly for a month, you're still going
to have great viewership. Because your show stands on its own.
You don't need gratuitous stuff. I interjected here that the
one silver lining of the last two months had been
that while I was not sure what percentage reduction in
the references to Fox helped the show and what percentage

(01:05:22):
hurt it, it was clear just from a programming point
of view, that to some degree less may now indeed
be more. Immelt smiled extraordinarily broadly and started to laugh.
Let's leave it at that. Let's leave it right there,
let's declare success. Let's leave it just as a judgment
thing between the two of us, because I don't want
to make it any more restrictive than that. Okay, I

(01:05:46):
told him we could try, and that I hoped it
would work, but that I would still strongly advise doing
opposition research because to me, if this did not get
Fox what it wanted, Fox would be back to try
something else. I don't disagree with that, and all I
need to know is that you've tried on my behalf.
Because I don't think there's any formula for this, I'm
just never going to have a story written that says

(01:06:08):
I censored, Keith Ulderman, I'm just not going to go there.
I think it's dangerous for the network. By and large,
what you've done has been I don't know how you'd
replay the abortion doctor being killed right. I think it
was a tough call because there was a certain extent
that was part of the story that one. Despite the
fact that it got major blowback when I look at

(01:06:29):
that one, they were part of the story at Fox.
So I'm not sure I would handle that any differently, Keith,
than what we did. If you can stay away from
the gratuitous stuff, make it when there are the news
call it out. I don't know if I can ask
much more than that. I said we could do that,
but I told them they needed to understand that wherever

(01:06:50):
we wound up adjusting the level to whether on a
scale or one hundred fourteen was just right or ninety
six was just right right. Now we were basically at zero,
and there was a definite and palpable fear at MSNBC
that doing more than zero would cause a lot of trouble,
and many people had to be reassured that we could
still do more than zero. The Phil Griffins, the Rachel Maadows,

(01:07:13):
the various producers. I'll take care of that. I'll talk
to each of them, Zucker said. I then told about
advising Rachel Maddow on how to stay within the spirit
of this. While addressing the crazy Fox analyst who had
suggested the Taliban might help us by killing an American
whom they claimed to have captured, but whom the analyst
thought might be a defector. I suggested to Rachel have

(01:07:35):
the video blown up and obscure the Fox logo, just
mention on what network the statement had been made, and
thus reduced the impact cosmetically. See. I think that's brilliant.
Mmelt said, that's fair to do that, that's helpful, Zucker said,
in many ways. Iml then said, part of the charm

(01:07:56):
of cable news is this point counterpoint between Fox and MSNBC.
That's actually part of the beauty of the whole thing.
That beauty can't be disturbed. But I contrast that to Billow.
The clown can't be the worst person in the world
five nights in a row. You've got to play off them.

(01:08:17):
They're the opposition. That's one of the things that makes
it watchable. Do that it's just a matter of judgment
and some degree of prioritization, and then we'll see what happens.
Doesn't work, then screw it. Jeff Zucker then said, just
don't test it tomorrow. We then veered off to baseball.

(01:08:38):
Then five minutes later the dinner concluded. I told Phil
Griffin and my agent and my producer and my line
producer each was stunned that Zucker had even shown up.
It became evident that Immelt was providing both of them
cover by rewriting the past, trying to put the toothpaste
back into the tube, or at least back to the
period when Zucker and I had met the day after

(01:09:00):
Memorial Day. And my line producer summed it perfectly that
the last two much with just the MSNBC equivalent of
that one season from the TV series Dallas, which was
retroactively erased by having it written off as one character's dream.
So it was all resolved, I guess. I crossed my fingers.

(01:09:22):
I held my breath that nobody would find out that
NBC had made a deal with Fox to decide which
each network's news operation would and would not cover. And
then on August first, two thousand and nine, while I
was on that long vacation, they gave me The New
York Times TV reporter who was Brian Stelter did a
piece that was headlined Voices from above Silence a cable

(01:09:45):
TV feud. Some idiot at GE had decided to boast
about how they and Ales and Murdoch and Beth Comstock
and I don't know O'Reilly himself had gotten the childish
talent to stop sniping at one another. Let me quote
you a little of the Times article. It was a

(01:10:08):
media cage fight televised every weeknight at eight pm, but
the match was halted when the blood started to spray
executives in the high priced seats in early June. The
combat stopped the anchors, for the most part, finding other
targets for their verbal missiles. It was time to grow up,
one of the company's employees said. The detante, not acknowledged
by the parties until now, showcases how a personal and

(01:10:31):
commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for
their parent corporations. A GE shareholders meeting, for instance, was
overrun by critics of MSNBC and by one of mister
O'Reilly's producers. Last April. We all recognize that a certain
level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion.

(01:10:51):
Gary Scheffer, a spokesman for GE, said this week, we're
happy that has happened. The parent companies decided to comment
directly on the details of the ceasefire, which was spearheaded
by Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal, and Gary Ginsberg,
an executive vice president who oversees corporate affairs at News Corp.

(01:11:11):
Mister Olderman, who was on vacation, said by email, I
am party to no deal, adding that he wouldn't have
been included in any conversations between GE and News Corporation.
Fox has declined to respond, Needless to say, I went
back to management and reiterated what I had told Stelter.

(01:11:33):
I am party to no deal. I swore a lot.
I asked why we had gone through that excruciating dinner
with Jeff Immelt if somebody was going to boast that
they had silenced me anyway, went his entire two hour
spiel was I don't want to censor you. Phil Griffin

(01:11:55):
slapped his head a few times. Jeff Zucker said he
was ready to kill whoever the GE leaker was and
just between ourselves, Matto admitted that we were grateful to
whoever had leaked it, since basically it blew up the deal.
It wasn't you, was it, she asked me. I fluttered
my eyebrows in response. No, but I thought about it.

(01:12:18):
And so six days after the deal was announced, the
Washington Post had this from a correspondent named Howard Kurtz.
That Howard Kurtz, who now works for Fox News. He
wrote Alberman, O'Reilly still fighting, and he added it was
never intended to be a ceasefire. The best that the

(01:12:38):
men who run two of the nation's media giants were
hoping to achieve was a ratcheting down of the rhetoric
between their warring commentators, But Keith Olberman refused to play along.
This week, Bill O'Reilly returned fire, and The New York
Times got wounded in the crossfire. The piece talks with
Fox sparked a fierce battle within MSNBC, where a faction
led by Alberman argued that the network's journalistic integrity was

(01:13:01):
at stake and that any leak of a non aggression
pack with Fox could damage NBC's reputation for independence. So
the next day, Stelter came back with an update in
The New York Times at Fox and MSNBC hosts refire
the insult machines. Executives at two of the country's largest

(01:13:22):
media companies are still trying to salvage what was essentially
a ceasefire between MSNBC and the Fox News Channel. The
two cable news channels temporarily resumed their long running feud
this week after The New York Times reported that their
parent companies, General Electric in the News Corporation, had struck
a deal to stop each other's televised personal attacks. Fox
News executives felt that MSNBC had broken the DULO when

(01:13:43):
Keith Olverman, an apparent show of independence, insulted his eight
PM rival Bill O'Reilly and the News Corporation's chairman Rupert
Murdoch on Monday. On his show Countdown, mister Olderman called
mister O'Reilly a racist clown. Mister O'Reilly responded with his
own attack two days later on his program The O'Reilly Factor,
where he claimed that Ge through MSNBC, was promoting the

(01:14:06):
election of Barack Obama and then seeking to profit from
his policies. In a statement, Ge said while both companies
agreed that the tone should be more civil, no one
at GE told anyone at NBC News or MSNBC how
to report the news. Some Fox employees said they were

(01:14:27):
told in June and July not to flagrant recriticize General Electric.
Fox said in a statement Friday, this has nothing to
do with preventing anyone from practicing journalism or interfering with
freedom of speech. This is about corporate responsibility. We've never
suppressed any stories about NBC or GE. Both organizations are
covered as news warrants. Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon

(01:14:54):
dot Com, said Thursday that had appeared that the owners
of two large news organizations colluded to make sure their
audience got less, not more information, and to promote their
business interests, not the public interest. She asked, how is
it any different from a media organization making a deal
with a politician not to expose a scandal in exchange
for a political favor. We'd call that corruption, and I

(01:15:16):
think this is the same thing. Then it was the
Associated Press chiming in with a story. Ulderman, for his part,
has named O'Reilly one of his worst persons in the
world three times in the seven shows he's done since
report of the supposed truce. Yeah, I did. He condemned
O'Reilly on Monday for spending too much time talking about

(01:15:38):
O'Reilly's own ratings quote. As a reporter, I wouldn't send
Bill O'Reilly to cover a John overflowing Ulderman said, and
so on and so on and so on. This unholy
deal had blown up. Zooker and Griffin and Immelt never
again tried to contain my Fox coverage if the deal

(01:16:00):
had not blown up, and I later found out that
the leaker was some almost anonymous midlevel executive at GE
who thought he was scoring brownie points with the chairman,
Jeff Mmelt. If it hadn't blown up, I would have
left MSNBC a year and a half earlier than I did.
MSNBC had become the leading voice trying to prove what
these two rounds of Murdoch and Tucker, Carlson and Ingram

(01:16:23):
and Hannity texts and testimony just proved again that Fox
News is not news, that it's not honest, that it's
not defensible. MSNBC had seen in two thousand and nine
its owners negotiate away its rights to do that, its
rights to point accurately at a wolf in sheep's clothing

(01:16:44):
and say this Fox operation is a danger to this country.
And then MSNBC had seen its owners blow up the
deal because they boasted about it. It was about this point,
end of summer two thousand and nine, that a new
strategy developed at NBC relative to Fox. Let's not get

(01:17:05):
rid of the anti Fox news coverage. Let's get rid
of the guy doing the anti Fox News coverage. They
couldn't fire me, as Immelt said, I had turned the
place from a disastrous fire pit burning ge dollars at
least one hundred or two hundred million a year, he
had said, turned it into a profit center that was

(01:17:26):
actually greater than NBC News per se. But what they
could do was to make the whole experience more and
more unhappy for me, to take away my spot as
the co host of the football pregame show Sunday nights
on NBC, which I did just because it was such
a nice break from politics all the time. Then they
moved my favorite producers off my show to go and

(01:17:47):
launch Lawrence O'Donnell's show, And they installed an entirely new
management team on Countdown that was devising a way to
bring in more Republican guests and alternative voices, on the
pretext that it would freshen up the format of the
program find as I have also mentioned here at greater length.
In November twenty ten, they suspended me for making donations

(01:18:10):
to three Democratic candidates at the end of their campaigns.
All three had been subjected to extensive death threats and
were broke. One of them was Gabby Gifford's The Night
the Story of My suspension, or actually the story of
my donation broke. The president of MSNBC and I worked
out a quick statement and I volunteered to stop making

(01:18:30):
any further donations, even though I was under no obligation
to not donate. By the next morning, the president of
NBC News had overruled the president of MSNBC, and he
suspended me indefinitely without pay because he claimed I had
violated the NBC Employee's handbook. That's when somebody illegal pointed
out to him that my contract had been specifically written

(01:18:53):
by NBC to emphasize that I was not an NBC
News employee. Because that way they didn't act to pay
me dental or medical or insurance. Seriously said it in
the contract, not an employee of NBC News. So after
that I was back at work two days later, but

(01:19:13):
the damage was done and final and irrevocable, and NBC's
lawyers were already negotiating how to resolve the fact that
they had just breached my contract. I was already negotiating
with Al Gore, who, hours after my suspension had been announced,
had called me and offered me the moon if I
would bring countdown to his little network, Current TV. In retrospect,

(01:19:33):
I should not have gone to work for Current TV.
His business partner was merely trying to inflate the value
of the network before they sold it to Al Jazeera.
But I saw what NBC was doing and what it
was going to do in the remaining twenty two months
of my contract, and I figured I could cash out
and should, or in twenty two months they would take
some revenge against me. So I left. MSNBC never completely

(01:20:00):
got out of the criticizing Fox game, but any real
impact of what it did left with me and at Fox.
Roger Ales told his people that he had defeated MSNBC
and NBC and they were now free to go harder
on the things he believed Fox News was designed to attack, like,
you know, minorities and women and taxes for the rich

(01:20:21):
and democrats and democracy. And so since twenty eleven, there
has not been any organization operating at or near Fox's level,
and certainly not in Fox's sphere acting as a counterbalance
two Fox. Like twenty sixteen, we all saw what that meant.
Fox could advocate with a straight face for a manifestly

(01:20:43):
insane individual and help him in his quest to become
President of the United States. Bill O'Reilly was eventually fired
because of women. Ales was eventually fired because of women,
And of course I didn't mean by that because of
the women they abused. It didn't matter. The skivy little
producer who did much of O'Reilly's dirty work for him

(01:21:04):
in chasing Jeff immelt around at the stockholders meeting. He
was named Jesse Waters, and he now kicks off primetime
for Fox, and he's about twice as dumb as O'Reilly was.
O'Reilly's substitute host back then was Laura Ingram. She's on
at ten o'clock every night. Now Hannity abides management all

(01:21:26):
of it, trained by Ales, still behaves as if he
is watching them and guiding them from hell. And at
eight pm they have finally found somebody who's actually worse
than Bill O'Reilly, a man who, unlike Billow, has never
worried for one second whether he was saying and selling
things that were too absurd to be taken seriously. O'Reilly

(01:21:47):
had feelings to hurt Tucker Carlson does not, And somehow,
at the age of ninety one, Rupert Murdoch goes on
and on his channel went from saying society was unfairly
rigged for the benefit of liberals to letting others say, Oh,
it's the elections that are rigged, and democracy is a

(01:22:07):
fraud and the ends justify the means, and Trump must
be reinstated. While Rupert Murdoch sat back and watched and
could have stopped it and chose not to and instead
just sat around catching counting the money. One might hope
these dominion revelations and the trial that is expected to

(01:22:29):
come in April might finish off Murdoch and Fox News.
I would think that is unlikely. During Trump's campaign, Rupert
provided Trump's son in law and senior advisor Jared Kushner
with Fox confidential information about Biden's ads, providing Kushner a
preview of Biden's ads before they were public. If anybody

(01:22:52):
at an actual news organization had done that, they would
wind up in jail or at least banned from the
industry for the rest of their natural life. Problem is,
even if that were somehow to happen, Lachlan Murdoch is
only fifty one, and he appears to be an even

(01:23:14):
bigger scent of a bitch than dear old Dad. Thank
you for listening. I'm just figured since I went through
so much of this crap and had documented so much

(01:23:35):
of that crap, it was worth it to go long
on this. Back to the regular format tomorrow. Here are
the credits. Most of the music arranged, produced and performed
by Brian Ray and John Philip Chanelle, who are the
Countdown musical directors. Produced by t Ko Brothers. All orchestration
and keyboards by John Philip Channel guitarist Bassed and drums
by Brian Ray. Other beetom and selections have been arranged

(01:23:57):
and performed by No Horns allowed. The sports music when
we play It is the Old Woman theme from ESPN two.
It was written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtisy ESPN Inc.
Musical comments by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever.
Everything else is pretty much my fault, except the parts
that were Jeff Immelts. So that's countdown for this, the
seven and eighty fourth day since Donald Trump's first attempted

(01:24:19):
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Arrest him now while we still can. The next schedule
countdown is tomorrow, and until then, I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning,
good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman

(01:24:56):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or We're wherever you
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