May 4, 2023 • 38 mins
EPISODE 193: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: CNN's betrayal of journalism, democracy and America by giving Trump editorial control over part of its primetime next Wednesday has actually gotten worse. It is intended by Trump as a precursor to a "jump start" of his relationship with the new management of CNN, and it may be intended by CNN as a precursor to a pronounced lurch to the right in primetime - maybe even an 8 PM show featuring former Tucker Carlson employee Kaitlan Collins.
Barely anybody noticed that the start time for the New Hampshire "Town Hall" next week suddenly shifted from 9 PM EDT to 8 PM EDT and if you think that's trivial, think again. 8 PM is suddenly the Wild West of cable news. There are between a million and a million-and-a-half disaffected Tucker Carlson viewers looking for a new home and the signs are all there: CNN's Chris Licht wants their new home to be CNN. The network's primetime is in disarray (no CNN show is in the Top 25; the network just lost the 'ad demo' ratings to MSNBC for the first time in four years) and there would be no hesitation to shift Anderson Cooper from 8 to some later hour.
There's more bad news. CNN Political Director David Chalian, living in terror of losing another job to Republican complaints, again underscores the network's intent to treat Trump no differently than any other candidate - as if there were true in any universe. And while there are finally blowbacks from within CNN against Licht's looming disaster, CNN Contributor and January 6 victim Michael Fanone says he wrote an Op-Ed for CNN's website comparing giving Trump this time on CNN to giving a deranged person an AR-15 - and CNN won't publish it.
B-Block (15:53) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Another News/TV News story continues to unfold. Most people seem to have gotten over the visceral shock of seeing Carlson assert "It isn't how white men fight" and understood that it's not the comment that got him fired but the prospect of Carlson being forced to read it aloud in court (and sending shock waves through the Fox Board and the cable carriers from which Murdoch is trying to get more money). But I'm still hearing two questions: Who leaked the text (and all those Carlson outtake videos) and Why? The Who is obvious: it's Fox. The Why should be just as clear: to dirty Carlson up. And how do I know all this? Because it's been done to me by my immediate-previous employer SIX TIMES in my career: in radio, in local TV, twice in cable sports, twice in cable news.
C-Block (28:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Since we're on the subject of cable and TV News and Fox and dirtying things up: what I learned from going out on two dates with Laura Ingraham. The second of them was a quarter of a century ago, just about this time of year. I'll let you know when I recover from it.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Almost
nobody has noticed that CNN has changed the time of
(00:28):
its upcoming betrayal of American journalism at American democracy. And
this is not trivia. This is another confession of CNN's
real motives behind its cynical and irresponsible act, and also
a possible foreshadowing of a coming CNN attempt to launch
a conservative leaning show in prime time. The original announcement
(00:50):
and even the promos running on CNN said quite clearly
that the Trump town Hall was next Wednesday at nine
pm Eastern. Suddenly yesterday it became next Wednesday at eight
pm Eastern. So what what used to be on cable
News at eight pm Eastern as of say, two weeks
(01:14):
ago tomorrow eight pm Eastern time? What was on Fox
at eight pm Eastern time?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Why?
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Eight pm was when Fox put on Tucker Carlson. CNN
has now trebled down on this Trump town hall madness
by moving the town hall to the exact hour of
the conservative viewers discontent, the hour they no longer have
Tucker Carlson to indoctrinate them. While CNN's executives, especially its
(01:43):
a moral malefactor CEO Chris Lickt and its unfortunate and
terrified political director David Shalian continued to spout platitudes about
the journalistic necessity for turning over editorial control of primetime
to a manifestly irresponsible and seditious criminal. The real motive
is as simple as this time shift. Chris Lickt thinks
(02:06):
he can grab the eight pm conservative audience, the disaffected
Tucker Carlson crowd next Wednesday. That's all this is. That's
all that matters to him, that's all he understands, that's
all he is worth as a human being. And moreover,
(02:28):
it would not surprise me in the least if licked
and CNN are contemplating not just a one night pursuit
of the erstwhile Tucker Carlson crowd, but an actual nightly
play for it. The new CNN did not have one
program in the cable news Top twenty five in the
month of April. Anderson Cooper's eight PM Show was its best.
(02:50):
It ranked number twenty seven with seven hundred and eighty
two thousand viewers, five percent less than My Friend Chris
Jansen Gets on MSNBC and My Friend Chris Jansen is
on at one in the afternoon on MSNBC, not in
primetime besides Anderson Cooper's No CNN primetime show even includes
(03:12):
the name of the anchor or anchors, and last month
was the first time in four years that CNN lost
to MSNBC in the so called ad demo of viewers
age twenty five to fifty four for the entire day,
and there is somewhere between a million and two million
Tucker Carlson X viewers up for grabs the booking. As
(03:36):
puck News naively describes CNN's deal with the Devil, which
CNN producers, executives, and the events moderator Caitlin Collins spent
months trying to land finally came together due to a
confluence of interests. Moderator Caitlin Collins spent months trying to
land Trump. Hmm. This same article describes the awkward and
(04:02):
glowering Collins as quote on questionably the network's fastest rising star.
Her conservative bona fides parentheses Alabama a Daily Caller pedigree
are instrumental to Licht's efforts to win over conservatives and
likely played a role in convincing Trump to agree to
the town Hall. Unquote, the signs are all there and
(04:25):
in capital letters. CNN sources are pushing not just Trump
and the town Hall on the more easily manipulated of
the TV writers, but they are pushing Collins herself. They
are crediting her in part with getting Trump to return
to CNN. CNN and its marks among the TV critics
(04:46):
are sanitizing her past. I mean, do you really want
to describe her articles in which she compared als charity
fundraising with the ice bucket challenge to waterboarding at GITMO?
Do you really want to call that her Daily caller pedigree?
The ratings say CNN has nothing to lose by moving
(05:07):
Anderson Cooper elsewhere in primetime from eight o'clock. It's done
that before. His ratings are as inert, as is his expression.
So this nightmare scenario is entirely plausible. Stage two of
Chris Licht's attack on the old, incorrectly perceived as liberal
CNN could easily be a pursuit of the old Tucker
(05:28):
Carlson audience. And it could hinge on how well Kitlyn
Collins does in the town Hall and how well the
town Hall does in the ratings. And remember, they just
moved it from nine pm to eight pm and pretended
they had never ever said it was at nine pm.
But what does doing well for Kitlyn Collins or for
(05:50):
CNN at this monstrosity look like? What happens if Collins
refers to something Trump has previously done or said and
he denies it ever happened. Do they cut away to
tape of him doing it or saying it? What exactly
happens if Trump announces that President Biden eats babies? Does
Colin say, excuse me, sir, I don't think that's true
(06:11):
to CNN cut the feed? More realistically, what happens when
Trump insists the twenty twenty election was fixed, rigged against him,
as you and I know he will. Is it the
job of Caitlyn Collins to push back? Or is it
the job of Kitlyn Collins to not push back? Is
(06:31):
success for CNN revealing Trump for the psychopath he is?
Or is success for CNN discovering that among its audience
next Wednesday night is four hundred thousand displaced Tucker Carlson
viewers because four hundred thousand more eight pm viewers would
suddenly put CNN back in the top twenty. Or is
it something worse still from another website, quote, a Trump
(06:56):
advisor told semaphores Shlby Talcott that they hope to quote
jump start the relationship with CNN now that the network
is under new management. Trump on CNN as a regular feature.
Nobody who has ever appeared in television has lacked ambition.
(07:20):
People often say Walter Cronkite would never do that. Well, Hell,
Walter Cronkite used to go over the daily ratings for
an hour at a time and analyze the show rundowns
and curse loudly as warranted. What would Caitlin Collins, seven
years removed from being an unpaid twenty four year old
CNN guest be willing to do or say on air
(07:42):
to become the lead anchor on her network? Well? What
was Tucker Carlson willing to do or say? As it
is now the front man for CNN's moral failure. Here
is its political director, David Shalian quote for us our job,
despite Trump's unique status, Shally until the Washington Post is
(08:03):
the same. I don't think our mission is journalist does
anything less than to cover the news, and he's the news. Unquote.
Shalian's naivete incredible for anybody in his position anywhere, Stams
in part from the day when he was the news.
Shalian was once the Washington bureau chief of Yahoo News.
(08:24):
He was part of live online coverage of the twenty
twelve Republican National Convention by Yahoo and ABC News, and
he was caught on a hot mic making a crash
joke with racial overtones about Mitt Romney and his wife.
Yahoo fired him on the spot, and Shalien has been
terrified of Republican criticism ever since. Just like Chuck Todd, is,
(08:46):
just like Margaret Brennan, is just like all of them are.
And this is the guy charged with keeping Trump honest
on CNN and keeping Caitlin Collins honest too. If there
is a silver lining here, it is that there have
finally been some signs of conscience from within CNN about
(09:08):
this looming debacle. One author record one on the post
reporting quote. A CNN staffer, speaking on the condition of
anonymity to be candid about his employer, called the decision
baffling quote. He's going to be taking questions from voters.
This staffer asked, this was the guy who tried to
overturn what voters decided in twenty twenty end quote a
(09:29):
good point. Except the voters to whom CNN has also
seeded editorial control at the town hall think that's a
good thing. Remember, these are not just voter voters. These
will only be people voting in the New Hampshire Republican primary.
More owned up to and more disturbing yet, puck News
(09:52):
reports that the former US Capitol police officer and January
sixth victim, Michael Fennone, now a CNN contributor, submitted an
op ed he wrote for CNN's website in which he wrote, quote,
allowing Donald Trump an open forum on a major television
news network is the moral equivalent of putting an AR
fifteen in the hands of someone mentally unstable. Mister Fennone
(10:17):
says CNN will not run his op ed, which is
odd since it seems to be pretty much a statement
of fact. And it's odder since the new Lichti in
CNN is supposed to be all about nonpartisanship or at
least balance, and somebody somewhere within the CNN galaxy should
be publicly pushing back against the whorehouse Chris Lickt has
turned the place into Fannone also says he asked for
(10:41):
a forum in which he could debate Chris lickt about
this town hall. Well, guess what the answer to that was.
There is a reason I always say that when we
were at MSNBC together, we used to think Chris licked
eight paste. There is a second TV news story I
have something on. It is tangentially related to licked Burning
(11:03):
down CNN, and he and Caitlyn Collins watching in gleeful
fascination as it burns. It is the aftermath of the
Tucker Carlson firing. Oddly enough, the term burning down applies
here too. Please do not mistake any of this for
sympathy or empathy. I heard it as early as last week,
and it has been getting louder and louder. And it
crested Tuesday night with The New York Times publishing the
(11:25):
unredacted Exhibit two hundred and seventy six from the Fox
dominion suit, the now infamous It's not how white men
fight Tucker Carlson text. The sentiment is not at issue,
as I said yesterday, from having worked with him, that's
who he is. It may be his family crest what
(11:45):
Fox perceived as the damage seems less mysterious. To most
people than it did initially. If there had been a
trial and there had not been a Carlson firing, Dominion's
attorneys would have been within their rights to have called
Tucker Carlson to testify an open court, then hand him
that text and have him read it aloud. That alone
could have sparked backlashes on the Fox board and more importantly,
(12:07):
among the cable carriers that Fox is trying to get
more money out of. But no, it's neither of those things.
People are also struggling to figure out who leaked the
text and who leaked the details of how much Carlson
was despised within Fox, and who leaked who keeps leaking
all of these outtake videos of him? Who? And why?
(12:33):
Who seriously Fox leaked them? Duh? Why? Ah? Another easy
question because I don't just know it, I've lived it.
The answer that's next this is countdown postscripts to the news. So,
(13:09):
as promised, of course, Fox leaked the it isn't how
white men fight Tucker Carlson text, just as of course
Fox leaked the video of Carlson bantering with Pierce Morgan
and swearing at media. Matters for America meant bellowing about
how mean the Dominion lawyer was to him during his deposition,
and then trashing his own employer's website. Not complicated. It
(13:31):
dirties him up. It reduces, maybe completely, maybe negligibly, the
chances that somebody else hires Tucker Carlson, given the blind
Trump like loyalty to Carlson. That may be a pipe dream.
But the win win out of this for Fox is
for Tucker Carlson to disappear, to not wind up at
eight pm on Newsmax Oran or News Nation or America's
(13:58):
Got Fascists or whatever channel has dropped his name since
the firing. Make him look like a disloyal employee, like
a loose cannon, like a perpetual problem, like a whatever.
Do it well enough, and you might even make those
who would finance a Tucker Carlson's startup think twice or
invest less. Even do it superficially, and you can make
(14:20):
Tucker Carlson in his new job look bad or feel bad.
At minimum. It is revenge. How do I know this?
It's been done to me six times that I recall,
twice in cable news, twice in cable sports, once in
(14:40):
local TV news thirty nine years ago once in network
radio longer ago than that. I'll give you the details,
but first just put yourself for a moment in the
role of Chris Ruddy at Newsmax or Heinrich Himmler of
America's Got Fascists. TV executives are the biggest prima donnas
in the world. I have met maybe three of them
(15:03):
in my life who would willingly hire a new and
whiney employee. And I confess to often being said whiney employee.
Hire that person and ignore the whininess and think only
of the ratings and the quality and the prophet. One
of them is Jeff Zucker. One of them, oddly enough,
is Rupert Murdoch. The rest of them are soft as grapes,
(15:26):
and they will take no drama, even when it means
no ratings every damn time. And you thought they were businessmen. Well,
to be fair, I thought they were businessmen too. You're
the guy who wants to hire Tucker Carlson, and you
(15:47):
hear this and you think, what, well, I feel great.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
You know, I can never I can never assess my appearance.
I wait for my post mental puzzle fans to weigh
in on that.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Oh great, postmenopausal fans. So you think at some point
there'll be a tape of him disparaging the age of
our female audience. And then then you hear this.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
This is airing on the nighttime show, and I wanted
to look official. I don't want it to be like
bro talk, I and I you know what I mean, give.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
It a majority of it, Like if we go like
forty five minutes, it's gonna be pro Foxnation.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Nobody's gonna watch it on Foxnation. Nobody watches Foxnation because
the site sucks.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Oh great, Ron Vibbentrop and I are trying to build
our America's Got fascist brand, trying to move up from
plucky outsiders to challenging Fox, and this idiot will be
bad mouthing the Marquee show on our sub channel called
called I did not see that coming. You got it yet,
(16:54):
That's what they're trying to do to Tucker Carlson, Oh no, stop,
oh no. So I promised some details on my personal
experience with this dirtying up process. This was first done
to me, as I said in radio, when I was
twenty one years old, on my last scheduled weekend before
I left my old network, UPI for my new one RKO,
(17:16):
I caught strep throat and I called in sick. The
business editor at my old network, a tiny jackass named
Mike Alibaw, told everybody at UPI and a bunch of
people at other New York radio outlets that I had
faked the illness, that he had heard me doing my
new job that very day. Happily, the enraged UPI general
(17:40):
manager phoned me at home to threaten me. I answered, olloh,
and he did not even recognize my voice. Can I
talk to Keith please, I said, speaking, and he said no,
can I talk to Keith Olboman please. That got resolved
fairly quickly, but it was my first experience with dirtying
(18:02):
up somebody on the way out. After I left a
TV job in Boston, the GM of that station, James Coppersmith,
not only told my agent and the local newspapers he
will never again work in this business, but he called
the general manager of a rival Boston TV station which
had previously offered me a job, and he trashed me
to him too. The first time I left ESPN in
(18:26):
nineteen ninety seven to go to MSNBC and NBC, the
parting was actually amicable. The president of the network asked
me to come back as a guest on some ESPN shows.
Bob Iiger, chairman of Disney then ends now, said if
you ever want to work here again, call me personally.
Then about five months later, I got a call from
Rudy Martsky, the TV sports columnist from USA Today. Another
(18:50):
top level ESPN executive had called Rudy and read him
the ratings of my new MSNBC show. The ratings were microscopic.
I don't think Rudy remembered. He was not supposed to
tell me about the call in who it was from,
but that was Rudy. They tried to dirty me up.
I got mad, so I tried to dirty them up,
(19:11):
and the next thing I knew, we were in a
nuclear war. ESPN and me. Fox Sports did it to
me in two thousand and one, after Rupert Murdoch fired me.
They trashed me to a guy named Chris Ballard at
Sports Illustrated, and then they gave him my email and
they said I was ready to talk to him, never
telling me that that's what they told him, Also never
telling him that before they told him that they'd first
(19:33):
shut off my access to my email, so it said
in his article that I didn't comment, don't put it
in the paper. I was mad. They also planted something
in the New York Daily News asking why in my
farewell statement I had not thanked several Fox Sports executives. Well,
maybe because they and Murdoch had just fired me. MSNBC
(19:56):
did this to me more pertinently when I left there
in twenty eleven, after they breached my contract, there was
a strict non disparagement clause. Then I started reading story
after story after story about warnings I had been issued
by executives which never happened, and their version of the
day the chairman of GE nearly took the network off
the air because his mommy, the Fox fan, told him to.
(20:19):
And finally I read about how I had appalled colleagues
by wearing five toed running shoes in the office. All
of these stories were from NBC sources unnamed. Of course,
some of it matched word for word with the same
unnamed NBC sources had said eight years earlier when they
had fired Phil Donahue. And I know that because I
(20:40):
was already at MSNBC when they fired Phil Donahue, and
I was in the office as one of the anonymous
sources called a writer he knew and read most of
the smears about Donahue to that writer off a page
of talking points. MSNBC's campaign against me in twenty eleven
was designed to keep me from being hired anywhere else
(21:01):
in news. Happily, they did not know I had already
agreed to join Al Gore's Current TV before I left NBC. Unhappily,
I didn't know that Current TV was just a scam
by Gore's business partner to raise the price at which
he could sell the network to Al Jazeera. When he
got that price, he suddenly stopped paying me. Then he
(21:22):
hired an ex White House spin doctor who announced to
the public that I had violated CURRENTS values of respect, openness, collegiality,
and loyalty. This is after they stopped paying my paycheck.
The spin doctor then leaked that I was so disrespectful
that I had insulted car service drivers everywhere by demanding
(21:42):
that my assistant get a new company to come pick
me up as it said in my contract, because my
driver smelled bad. This guy even produced my email and
showed it to reporters to prove it was true. Of course,
he left out the fact that the driver did smell
bad because the driver had been smoking inside the car
(22:04):
while he was driving me to the Current TV studio.
And this was the sixth or seventh different car service
we had in the previous month, because Current TV had
stopped paying its bills and the good car services would
no longer pick me up or pick up any of
our guests for the show. Anyway, the video part of
(22:25):
the Carlson thing is kind of new. I have seen
it done before by employers who did not want to
fire a talent so much as to merely embarrass or
discipline them. And the next thing you knew, his off
air comments were on somebody else's website somewhere. Most people,
of course, who were on TV know not to say
anything of substance, anything angry, funny, complimentary, or otherwise while
(22:50):
a camera or a microphone is or could be on.
But as we have found out this week, somebody who
does not know that is Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
You wouldn't, okay, I'm not you know what, I'm not
qualified on that score. I will say I thought his
girlfriend was funny, yummy.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Just kidding, just kitting cases. Is being pulled off the bird. Yeah,
the bird. Hey, medium matters for America. Go yourself.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
That's the first thing I want to say.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
To the number one story on the countdown on my
favorite topic, Me and things I promised not to tell.
As if the entire show has not been about my
favorite topic, me, The first two parts of this edition
(23:44):
of the podcast have been about politics and television and
Fox Quote News and me. So fittingly so is this
part just about this time of year? Early May late
April nineteen ninety eight, twenty five years ago, I went
on my second and final date with somebody who had
(24:05):
been one of the originals at MSNBC, and in November
of nineteen ninety seven she had appeared on my show
as a guest for the first time. She was paid
to be there on the show, not the date, and
her name was Laura Ingram. This began a process that
ended in us going out on two dates, and something
(24:26):
she told me on the first of these dates has
resonated with me literally every month since and is relevant
to politics today. I did not so much date her
as survive her. Even then before nine to eleven helped
to slide her cheese off her cracker. I find a
(24:48):
diary entry referring to her as Hurricane Laura. That was
March fifteenth, nineteen ninety eight. Beware the IDEs of March
Julius Caesar. I didn't, honestly, and God helped me. Nearly
forty eight years of dating, I have not been a
kiss and teller. I have dated. I don't know dozens.
(25:09):
We're in a couple of hundred, actually thirteen, seriously, with
maybe three exceptions. You don't know any of their names.
One of them, now a political writer, basically lived with
me for three years. I keep that confidence. So why
am I telling this story violating that? Because not three
months after that first date, when we were still going out,
(25:33):
Laura Ingram asked me if she could look at a
speech I was going to give it Corneill's graduation weekend
and offer suggestions. This is so long ago. I literally
faxed it to her. Sure Enough, a couple days later,
I'm watching Imus in the morning, which was televised by
my network MSNBC, and there on his desk in front
(25:54):
of him is the FAXT copy of my speech, and
he is reading from my facts. I could recognize the
exact sequence of the vertical stripes. My cheap fax machine
used to streak all my outgoing pages with Laura used
to go on his show a lot, so to curry
favor with Imus. She sent him the speech without asking me,
(26:19):
as I told her that day. All bets are now off.
So I've told parts of this story before, like she
had been a Supreme Court clerk for Clarence Thomas, and
our first date consisted of taking me on an insider's
tour of the court and having me sit in his
chair in tribute to him. I did not say or
do anything constructive. She then cooked me the largest steak
(26:43):
I had ever seen that did not have a rodeo
cowboy riding on it, and we watched a woman later
discredited because she could not keep her stories straight, go
on sixty minutes and make allegations against Bill Clinton. This
is my perfect date, Laura told me, seared into my memory.
But the important Laura Ingram story sitting there in the
(27:06):
middle of all the debris. I don't think I've ever
told this. The first date was only about six weeks
after the then First Lady Hillary Clinton got on the
Today Show and blamed the at best exaggerated scandal about
her husband at Monica Lewinsky on the quote vast right
wing conspiracy that is sound stumpid. Laura said that night,
(27:29):
as she showed me her small office upstairs, I expected
that she was about to decry the idea that Republicans
would exploit television, talk radio and the brand new Internet
to try to bring down a president from the other party.
And I said, so naive little boy that I was no,
not that, of course we're doing that. She was kind
(27:49):
of offended that I doubted the conspiracy part. I explained,
I'd only been covering politics for two months. At the
end of the day, she said, end of the day, constantly,
at the end of the day, it's that vast part.
It's not vast, vast wayne conspiracy. Why, I bet there's
not even thirty of us. Laura Ingram then explained that
(28:11):
she was essentially the central desk for what she called
the miniature right wing conspiracy. She showed me a printed
page that had the facts numbers of about two dozen people.
There at the top are the sources, She said. There
was Ted Olsen, the attorney, founder of the so called
Arkansas Project and the husband of Barbara Olson, a constant
presence as a talking head on cable news. She later
(28:33):
died on nine to eleven. Everybody liked her. There were
several numbers in the Office of Independent Counsel ken Starr.
One of them read B. Kavanaugh. I said, who's that?
She said, nobody impartant. The only other name I remember
was Spencer Abraham, who then was a senator from Michigan.
She said, they, including the people in ken Starr's office,
(28:54):
sent her all the rumors, the ideas, stuff about Clinton.
Stuff they made up, and she distributed them to the
other parts of the list. That's these numbers. One number
was marked Hannity Radio, another Hannity TV, O'Reilly Radio, O'Reilly TV.
There was one for Limbaugh. There was one mark Justice Thomas,
(29:16):
and I pointed to it. He likes to stay and farmed. Now,
maybe the most important name is not on that list.
That's Matt Dradge. She said. Matt Drudge used all her stuff,
but he didn't want any of it to be traceable,
very big on not traceable, so I never fax it
to him. She said, I just give it to my brother.
This is when she still liked her brother. He sees
(29:39):
Drudge all the time. He gives the stuff to Drudge now, Oliver,
here is my baseball collection. See there were reasons to
go out with her. At the time, I could think
only of an old cartoon I had once seen. It
was an octopus working in the post office, using all
eight of its limbs to sort the mail. But every
(30:02):
couple of weeks it dawns on me afresh. Then I
was actually a witness to one of the earliest configurations
of the machinery. And there is no doubt today whether
it is vast or miniature. It's best the machinery that
links the right wing politicians and those who are supposed
to be above the fray, like Supreme Court justices and
special prosecutors and people like that. There with the right
(30:24):
wing publicity outlets that pretend to be news organizations like
Fox and Drudge and Oaan and Newsmax, and the ones
that don't even pretend, like those who succeeded Limbaugh. This
machine is, in fact everything that your typical paranoid conservative,
republican fascist trumpst thinks is being run by George Soros
(30:46):
or Bill Gates or doctor Fauci or me. You want
to be able to say, there are reports or accusations
about some Democrat or a liberal figure or celebrity. Well,
somebody puts a rumor in at one end of the machinery,
or somebody makes up a rumor at one end of
the machinery. It is then sent to dozens of other people.
(31:06):
They repeat it, voila. Suddenly there are reports. The reports
then get fed back to Fox News or Breitbart, or
the Wall Street Journal or the Supreme Court, or they're
just tweeted by a thousand bots simultaneously. You want to
push this ancient racist, anti Semitic paranoia called the Great Replacement,
(31:29):
but you want it to come out washed clean enough
that soulless opportunists like Elise Stefanic and jd Vance can
say it aloud on the campaign trail without forfeiting their candidacies.
This is the machinery. And I saw the machinery when
it was just a list of twenty and thirty people,
And at that moment I barely recognized the importance of
(31:51):
what I saw. Then again, I was still on that night,
recovering from not just the Giant's steak, but something far
more visceral. Earlier that day, as we were leaving the
Supreme Court, Laura Ingram had boasted about getting even with
an ex boyfriend by going back into what had been
(32:11):
their house and putting up exact copies of all the
photos of the two of them together that he had
taken down from his walls. And when he got smart
and changed the locks, she went back again to finish
the job. Found her key didn't work so naturally as
(32:32):
you would. She stuffed his garden hose through the mail
slot of his front door and turned on the outdoor spigot.
Ten thousand dollars worth of heart. When Florence ruined, she
said proudly, And part of me screamed, flee, flee Now
(32:53):
I didn't flee. Later, as I tried to sleep, two
noises kept me awake, snoring, not my own and Laura's
daw Laura's dog kept talking in his sleep, I mean
almost in syllables like that. It was something like twenty
(33:19):
five degrees out and I was on the second floor.
And yet I resolved that if her dog really did
make that last leap to formulate actual syllables. And it
turned out her dog was the one telling her what
to do, I was simply going to leave by the
window without bothering to open it first. The next morning,
(33:40):
Laura and I walked her dog. We got to an
empty field. She threw a tennis ball, He went and
got it. She cocked her arm back again. He took off,
loving life as he did. She did not throw it.
He went forty fifty sixty feet, then stopped and looked
back at her with such disappointment and even a sense
(34:03):
of betrayal, and she said, loudly, without a trace of
affection for him or anything else, wait far at, which
is when I realized I was being courted to be
the next dog. A few weeks later, back home in
New York, I got home from working an early morning
(34:25):
shift filling in for the commentator Paul Harvey at ABC Radio.
I was just waking up from a tortured nap when
the phone rang and it's Lara. I'm downstairs. We're going
to my old law firms party at the museum. I said.
I was exhausted. We're going, or I'll just stay here
at this payphone outside your planes calling you all night.
(34:45):
We went. The next opportunity probably was going to be
me on the wrong end of a hostage drama. Turned
out she was not invited to her party. We're crashing it.
I'm going to drink heavily. Frankly, it was a great party.
I got to meet Hillary Clinton's mother and her brother,
and I think the fascists are completely sincere about everything,
(35:07):
even their neuroses and their paranoia. No, Laura Ingram hugged
Hillary Clinton's mother and Hillary Clinton's brother. They seem to
be friends. Later we wound up meeting friends of her
in the Oak bar at the Plaza Hotel, where she
kept drinking. I was astonished. After about her sixth Cosmopolitan,
(35:29):
on top of everything she'd had at the party, she
began to droop her head, nodding like a bobblehead doll.
Her friend said, Okay, that's it. We'll take care of
the check. You take care of her. She had not
gotten a hotel room or anything. And if you've ever
heard of anybody who needed to be poured into a
cab because they were so drunk, you don't really know
(35:50):
what that means until you have to pour them into
a cab. Frankly, I wanted to put her in a
hotel somewhere, but the spectacle would have made the gossip pages.
She basically could not stand up, so I took her
to my apartment, put her into my bed, and I
went and slept on the couch at the far end
(36:11):
of the apartment, which is where I was hours later
in the morning when she woke me up, because she
came parading through using my phone to call my assistant
to get a car sent to my address to take
her to the airport, and to make sure that everybody
in my office knew she had stayed overnight at my apartment.
And all I kept thinking was why didn't I follow
(36:33):
my instincts. My instincts, said Flea, I fleed. Not, of course,
if I had fled, I would have missed seeing the
telephone tree of the miniature right wing conspiracy, wouldn't I.
(37:03):
I've done all the damage I can do here. I'll
have recovered from the Laura Ingram dates anytime. Now. Here
are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced
and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillip Shaneal. They
are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by
John Phillip Shaneal. Guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray,
produced by TKO Brothers. The other Beethoven selections have been
(37:25):
arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music
is the Oberman theme from ESPN two When We Run It,
and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of
ESPN Inc. Musical comments by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust. We didn't have an announcer today, so it
was only me and everything else was pretty much my fault.
(37:45):
So that's countdown for this, the eight hundred and forty
ninth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Don't forget to
keep arresting him while we still can, and not putting
him on televised town halls on major networks. A quick
promo tomorrow, I've got something special, I think on Saturday,
(38:06):
as on every May sixth, since the year nineteen fifty four,
the world has celebrated Roger Banister, the mile runner, for
breaking the four minute mile barrier, the first man ever
to run a mile in four minutes or least. Except
he was not the first man to do that. It
is probably the greatest undeserved record or accomplishment in sports history.
(38:27):
A long and I think fascinating story that's tomorrow on
Countdown Till Then. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
(38:51):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Almost
nobody has noticed that CNN has changed the time of
(00:28):
its upcoming betrayal of American journalism at American democracy. And
this is not trivia. This is another confession of CNN's
real motives behind its cynical and irresponsible act, and also
a possible foreshadowing of a coming CNN attempt to launch
a conservative leaning show in prime time. The original announcement
(00:50):
and even the promos running on CNN said quite clearly
that the Trump town Hall was next Wednesday at nine
pm Eastern. Suddenly yesterday it became next Wednesday at eight
pm Eastern. So what what used to be on cable
News at eight pm Eastern as of say, two weeks
(01:14):
ago tomorrow eight pm Eastern time? What was on Fox
at eight pm Eastern time?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Why?
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Eight pm was when Fox put on Tucker Carlson. CNN
has now trebled down on this Trump town hall madness
by moving the town hall to the exact hour of
the conservative viewers discontent, the hour they no longer have
Tucker Carlson to indoctrinate them. While CNN's executives, especially its
(01:43):
a moral malefactor CEO Chris Lickt and its unfortunate and
terrified political director David Shalian continued to spout platitudes about
the journalistic necessity for turning over editorial control of primetime
to a manifestly irresponsible and seditious criminal. The real motive
is as simple as this time shift. Chris Lickt thinks
(02:06):
he can grab the eight pm conservative audience, the disaffected
Tucker Carlson crowd next Wednesday. That's all this is. That's
all that matters to him, that's all he understands, that's
all he is worth as a human being. And moreover,
(02:28):
it would not surprise me in the least if licked
and CNN are contemplating not just a one night pursuit
of the erstwhile Tucker Carlson crowd, but an actual nightly
play for it. The new CNN did not have one
program in the cable news Top twenty five in the
month of April. Anderson Cooper's eight PM Show was its best.
(02:50):
It ranked number twenty seven with seven hundred and eighty
two thousand viewers, five percent less than My Friend Chris
Jansen Gets on MSNBC and My Friend Chris Jansen is
on at one in the afternoon on MSNBC, not in
primetime besides Anderson Cooper's No CNN primetime show even includes
(03:12):
the name of the anchor or anchors, and last month
was the first time in four years that CNN lost
to MSNBC in the so called ad demo of viewers
age twenty five to fifty four for the entire day,
and there is somewhere between a million and two million
Tucker Carlson X viewers up for grabs the booking. As
(03:36):
puck News naively describes CNN's deal with the Devil, which
CNN producers, executives, and the events moderator Caitlin Collins spent
months trying to land finally came together due to a
confluence of interests. Moderator Caitlin Collins spent months trying to
land Trump. Hmm. This same article describes the awkward and
(04:02):
glowering Collins as quote on questionably the network's fastest rising star.
Her conservative bona fides parentheses Alabama a Daily Caller pedigree
are instrumental to Licht's efforts to win over conservatives and
likely played a role in convincing Trump to agree to
the town Hall. Unquote, the signs are all there and
(04:25):
in capital letters. CNN sources are pushing not just Trump
and the town Hall on the more easily manipulated of
the TV writers, but they are pushing Collins herself. They
are crediting her in part with getting Trump to return
to CNN. CNN and its marks among the TV critics
(04:46):
are sanitizing her past. I mean, do you really want
to describe her articles in which she compared als charity
fundraising with the ice bucket challenge to waterboarding at GITMO?
Do you really want to call that her Daily caller pedigree?
The ratings say CNN has nothing to lose by moving
(05:07):
Anderson Cooper elsewhere in primetime from eight o'clock. It's done
that before. His ratings are as inert, as is his expression.
So this nightmare scenario is entirely plausible. Stage two of
Chris Licht's attack on the old, incorrectly perceived as liberal
CNN could easily be a pursuit of the old Tucker
(05:28):
Carlson audience. And it could hinge on how well Kitlyn
Collins does in the town Hall and how well the
town Hall does in the ratings. And remember, they just
moved it from nine pm to eight pm and pretended
they had never ever said it was at nine pm.
But what does doing well for Kitlyn Collins or for
(05:50):
CNN at this monstrosity look like? What happens if Collins
refers to something Trump has previously done or said and
he denies it ever happened. Do they cut away to
tape of him doing it or saying it? What exactly
happens if Trump announces that President Biden eats babies? Does
Colin say, excuse me, sir, I don't think that's true
(06:11):
to CNN cut the feed? More realistically, what happens when
Trump insists the twenty twenty election was fixed, rigged against him,
as you and I know he will. Is it the
job of Caitlyn Collins to push back? Or is it
the job of Kitlyn Collins to not push back? Is
(06:31):
success for CNN revealing Trump for the psychopath he is?
Or is success for CNN discovering that among its audience
next Wednesday night is four hundred thousand displaced Tucker Carlson
viewers because four hundred thousand more eight pm viewers would
suddenly put CNN back in the top twenty. Or is
it something worse still from another website, quote, a Trump
(06:56):
advisor told semaphores Shlby Talcott that they hope to quote
jump start the relationship with CNN now that the network
is under new management. Trump on CNN as a regular feature.
Nobody who has ever appeared in television has lacked ambition.
(07:20):
People often say Walter Cronkite would never do that. Well, Hell,
Walter Cronkite used to go over the daily ratings for
an hour at a time and analyze the show rundowns
and curse loudly as warranted. What would Caitlin Collins, seven
years removed from being an unpaid twenty four year old
CNN guest be willing to do or say on air
(07:42):
to become the lead anchor on her network? Well? What
was Tucker Carlson willing to do or say? As it
is now the front man for CNN's moral failure. Here
is its political director, David Shalian quote for us our job,
despite Trump's unique status, Shally until the Washington Post is
(08:03):
the same. I don't think our mission is journalist does
anything less than to cover the news, and he's the news. Unquote.
Shalian's naivete incredible for anybody in his position anywhere, Stams
in part from the day when he was the news.
Shalian was once the Washington bureau chief of Yahoo News.
(08:24):
He was part of live online coverage of the twenty
twelve Republican National Convention by Yahoo and ABC News, and
he was caught on a hot mic making a crash
joke with racial overtones about Mitt Romney and his wife.
Yahoo fired him on the spot, and Shalien has been
terrified of Republican criticism ever since. Just like Chuck Todd, is,
(08:46):
just like Margaret Brennan, is just like all of them are.
And this is the guy charged with keeping Trump honest
on CNN and keeping Caitlin Collins honest too. If there
is a silver lining here, it is that there have
finally been some signs of conscience from within CNN about
(09:08):
this looming debacle. One author record one on the post
reporting quote. A CNN staffer, speaking on the condition of
anonymity to be candid about his employer, called the decision
baffling quote. He's going to be taking questions from voters.
This staffer asked, this was the guy who tried to
overturn what voters decided in twenty twenty end quote a
(09:29):
good point. Except the voters to whom CNN has also
seeded editorial control at the town hall think that's a
good thing. Remember, these are not just voter voters. These
will only be people voting in the New Hampshire Republican primary.
More owned up to and more disturbing yet, puck News
(09:52):
reports that the former US Capitol police officer and January
sixth victim, Michael Fennone, now a CNN contributor, submitted an
op ed he wrote for CNN's website in which he wrote, quote,
allowing Donald Trump an open forum on a major television
news network is the moral equivalent of putting an AR
fifteen in the hands of someone mentally unstable. Mister Fennone
(10:17):
says CNN will not run his op ed, which is
odd since it seems to be pretty much a statement
of fact. And it's odder since the new Lichti in
CNN is supposed to be all about nonpartisanship or at
least balance, and somebody somewhere within the CNN galaxy should
be publicly pushing back against the whorehouse Chris Lickt has
turned the place into Fannone also says he asked for
(10:41):
a forum in which he could debate Chris lickt about
this town hall. Well, guess what the answer to that was.
There is a reason I always say that when we
were at MSNBC together, we used to think Chris licked
eight paste. There is a second TV news story I
have something on. It is tangentially related to licked Burning
(11:03):
down CNN, and he and Caitlyn Collins watching in gleeful
fascination as it burns. It is the aftermath of the
Tucker Carlson firing. Oddly enough, the term burning down applies
here too. Please do not mistake any of this for
sympathy or empathy. I heard it as early as last week,
and it has been getting louder and louder. And it
crested Tuesday night with The New York Times publishing the
(11:25):
unredacted Exhibit two hundred and seventy six from the Fox
dominion suit, the now infamous It's not how white men
fight Tucker Carlson text. The sentiment is not at issue,
as I said yesterday, from having worked with him, that's
who he is. It may be his family crest what
(11:45):
Fox perceived as the damage seems less mysterious. To most
people than it did initially. If there had been a
trial and there had not been a Carlson firing, Dominion's
attorneys would have been within their rights to have called
Tucker Carlson to testify an open court, then hand him
that text and have him read it aloud. That alone
could have sparked backlashes on the Fox board and more importantly,
(12:07):
among the cable carriers that Fox is trying to get
more money out of. But no, it's neither of those things.
People are also struggling to figure out who leaked the
text and who leaked the details of how much Carlson
was despised within Fox, and who leaked who keeps leaking
all of these outtake videos of him? Who? And why?
(12:33):
Who seriously Fox leaked them? Duh? Why? Ah? Another easy
question because I don't just know it, I've lived it.
The answer that's next this is countdown postscripts to the news. So,
(13:09):
as promised, of course, Fox leaked the it isn't how
white men fight Tucker Carlson text, just as of course
Fox leaked the video of Carlson bantering with Pierce Morgan
and swearing at media. Matters for America meant bellowing about
how mean the Dominion lawyer was to him during his deposition,
and then trashing his own employer's website. Not complicated. It
(13:31):
dirties him up. It reduces, maybe completely, maybe negligibly, the
chances that somebody else hires Tucker Carlson, given the blind
Trump like loyalty to Carlson. That may be a pipe dream.
But the win win out of this for Fox is
for Tucker Carlson to disappear, to not wind up at
eight pm on Newsmax Oran or News Nation or America's
(13:58):
Got Fascists or whatever channel has dropped his name since
the firing. Make him look like a disloyal employee, like
a loose cannon, like a perpetual problem, like a whatever.
Do it well enough, and you might even make those
who would finance a Tucker Carlson's startup think twice or
invest less. Even do it superficially, and you can make
(14:20):
Tucker Carlson in his new job look bad or feel bad.
At minimum. It is revenge. How do I know this?
It's been done to me six times that I recall,
twice in cable news, twice in cable sports, once in
(14:40):
local TV news thirty nine years ago once in network
radio longer ago than that. I'll give you the details,
but first just put yourself for a moment in the
role of Chris Ruddy at Newsmax or Heinrich Himmler of
America's Got Fascists. TV executives are the biggest prima donnas
in the world. I have met maybe three of them
(15:03):
in my life who would willingly hire a new and
whiney employee. And I confess to often being said whiney employee.
Hire that person and ignore the whininess and think only
of the ratings and the quality and the prophet. One
of them is Jeff Zucker. One of them, oddly enough,
is Rupert Murdoch. The rest of them are soft as grapes,
(15:26):
and they will take no drama, even when it means
no ratings every damn time. And you thought they were businessmen. Well,
to be fair, I thought they were businessmen too. You're
the guy who wants to hire Tucker Carlson, and you
(15:47):
hear this and you think, what, well, I feel great.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
You know, I can never I can never assess my appearance.
I wait for my post mental puzzle fans to weigh
in on that.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Oh great, postmenopausal fans. So you think at some point
there'll be a tape of him disparaging the age of
our female audience. And then then you hear this.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
This is airing on the nighttime show, and I wanted
to look official. I don't want it to be like
bro talk, I and I you know what I mean, give.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
It a majority of it, Like if we go like
forty five minutes, it's gonna be pro Foxnation.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Nobody's gonna watch it on Foxnation. Nobody watches Foxnation because
the site sucks.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Oh great, Ron Vibbentrop and I are trying to build
our America's Got fascist brand, trying to move up from
plucky outsiders to challenging Fox, and this idiot will be
bad mouthing the Marquee show on our sub channel called
called I did not see that coming. You got it yet,
(16:54):
That's what they're trying to do to Tucker Carlson, Oh no, stop,
oh no. So I promised some details on my personal
experience with this dirtying up process. This was first done
to me, as I said in radio, when I was
twenty one years old, on my last scheduled weekend before
I left my old network, UPI for my new one RKO,
(17:16):
I caught strep throat and I called in sick. The
business editor at my old network, a tiny jackass named
Mike Alibaw, told everybody at UPI and a bunch of
people at other New York radio outlets that I had
faked the illness, that he had heard me doing my
new job that very day. Happily, the enraged UPI general
(17:40):
manager phoned me at home to threaten me. I answered, olloh,
and he did not even recognize my voice. Can I
talk to Keith please, I said, speaking, and he said no,
can I talk to Keith Olboman please. That got resolved
fairly quickly, but it was my first experience with dirtying
(18:02):
up somebody on the way out. After I left a
TV job in Boston, the GM of that station, James Coppersmith,
not only told my agent and the local newspapers he
will never again work in this business, but he called
the general manager of a rival Boston TV station which
had previously offered me a job, and he trashed me
to him too. The first time I left ESPN in
(18:26):
nineteen ninety seven to go to MSNBC and NBC, the
parting was actually amicable. The president of the network asked
me to come back as a guest on some ESPN shows.
Bob Iiger, chairman of Disney then ends now, said if
you ever want to work here again, call me personally.
Then about five months later, I got a call from
Rudy Martsky, the TV sports columnist from USA Today. Another
(18:50):
top level ESPN executive had called Rudy and read him
the ratings of my new MSNBC show. The ratings were microscopic.
I don't think Rudy remembered. He was not supposed to
tell me about the call in who it was from,
but that was Rudy. They tried to dirty me up.
I got mad, so I tried to dirty them up,
(19:11):
and the next thing I knew, we were in a
nuclear war. ESPN and me. Fox Sports did it to
me in two thousand and one, after Rupert Murdoch fired me.
They trashed me to a guy named Chris Ballard at
Sports Illustrated, and then they gave him my email and
they said I was ready to talk to him, never
telling me that that's what they told him, Also never
telling him that before they told him that they'd first
(19:33):
shut off my access to my email, so it said
in his article that I didn't comment, don't put it
in the paper. I was mad. They also planted something
in the New York Daily News asking why in my
farewell statement I had not thanked several Fox Sports executives. Well,
maybe because they and Murdoch had just fired me. MSNBC
(19:56):
did this to me more pertinently when I left there
in twenty eleven, after they breached my contract, there was
a strict non disparagement clause. Then I started reading story
after story after story about warnings I had been issued
by executives which never happened, and their version of the
day the chairman of GE nearly took the network off
the air because his mommy, the Fox fan, told him to.
(20:19):
And finally I read about how I had appalled colleagues
by wearing five toed running shoes in the office. All
of these stories were from NBC sources unnamed. Of course,
some of it matched word for word with the same
unnamed NBC sources had said eight years earlier when they
had fired Phil Donahue. And I know that because I
(20:40):
was already at MSNBC when they fired Phil Donahue, and
I was in the office as one of the anonymous
sources called a writer he knew and read most of
the smears about Donahue to that writer off a page
of talking points. MSNBC's campaign against me in twenty eleven
was designed to keep me from being hired anywhere else
(21:01):
in news. Happily, they did not know I had already
agreed to join Al Gore's Current TV before I left NBC. Unhappily,
I didn't know that Current TV was just a scam
by Gore's business partner to raise the price at which
he could sell the network to Al Jazeera. When he
got that price, he suddenly stopped paying me. Then he
(21:22):
hired an ex White House spin doctor who announced to
the public that I had violated CURRENTS values of respect, openness, collegiality,
and loyalty. This is after they stopped paying my paycheck.
The spin doctor then leaked that I was so disrespectful
that I had insulted car service drivers everywhere by demanding
(21:42):
that my assistant get a new company to come pick
me up as it said in my contract, because my
driver smelled bad. This guy even produced my email and
showed it to reporters to prove it was true. Of course,
he left out the fact that the driver did smell
bad because the driver had been smoking inside the car
(22:04):
while he was driving me to the Current TV studio.
And this was the sixth or seventh different car service
we had in the previous month, because Current TV had
stopped paying its bills and the good car services would
no longer pick me up or pick up any of
our guests for the show. Anyway, the video part of
(22:25):
the Carlson thing is kind of new. I have seen
it done before by employers who did not want to
fire a talent so much as to merely embarrass or
discipline them. And the next thing you knew, his off
air comments were on somebody else's website somewhere. Most people,
of course, who were on TV know not to say
anything of substance, anything angry, funny, complimentary, or otherwise while
(22:50):
a camera or a microphone is or could be on.
But as we have found out this week, somebody who
does not know that is Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
You wouldn't, okay, I'm not you know what, I'm not
qualified on that score. I will say I thought his
girlfriend was funny, yummy.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Just kidding, just kitting cases. Is being pulled off the bird. Yeah,
the bird. Hey, medium matters for America. Go yourself.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
That's the first thing I want to say.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
To the number one story on the countdown on my
favorite topic, Me and things I promised not to tell.
As if the entire show has not been about my
favorite topic, me, The first two parts of this edition
(23:44):
of the podcast have been about politics and television and
Fox Quote News and me. So fittingly so is this
part just about this time of year? Early May late
April nineteen ninety eight, twenty five years ago, I went
on my second and final date with somebody who had
(24:05):
been one of the originals at MSNBC, and in November
of nineteen ninety seven she had appeared on my show
as a guest for the first time. She was paid
to be there on the show, not the date, and
her name was Laura Ingram. This began a process that
ended in us going out on two dates, and something
(24:26):
she told me on the first of these dates has
resonated with me literally every month since and is relevant
to politics today. I did not so much date her
as survive her. Even then before nine to eleven helped
to slide her cheese off her cracker. I find a
(24:48):
diary entry referring to her as Hurricane Laura. That was
March fifteenth, nineteen ninety eight. Beware the IDEs of March
Julius Caesar. I didn't, honestly, and God helped me. Nearly
forty eight years of dating, I have not been a
kiss and teller. I have dated. I don't know dozens.
(25:09):
We're in a couple of hundred, actually thirteen, seriously, with
maybe three exceptions. You don't know any of their names.
One of them, now a political writer, basically lived with
me for three years. I keep that confidence. So why
am I telling this story violating that? Because not three
months after that first date, when we were still going out,
(25:33):
Laura Ingram asked me if she could look at a
speech I was going to give it Corneill's graduation weekend
and offer suggestions. This is so long ago. I literally
faxed it to her. Sure Enough, a couple days later,
I'm watching Imus in the morning, which was televised by
my network MSNBC, and there on his desk in front
(25:54):
of him is the FAXT copy of my speech, and
he is reading from my facts. I could recognize the
exact sequence of the vertical stripes. My cheap fax machine
used to streak all my outgoing pages with Laura used
to go on his show a lot, so to curry
favor with Imus. She sent him the speech without asking me,
(26:19):
as I told her that day. All bets are now off.
So I've told parts of this story before, like she
had been a Supreme Court clerk for Clarence Thomas, and
our first date consisted of taking me on an insider's
tour of the court and having me sit in his
chair in tribute to him. I did not say or
do anything constructive. She then cooked me the largest steak
(26:43):
I had ever seen that did not have a rodeo
cowboy riding on it, and we watched a woman later
discredited because she could not keep her stories straight, go
on sixty minutes and make allegations against Bill Clinton. This
is my perfect date, Laura told me, seared into my memory.
But the important Laura Ingram story sitting there in the
(27:06):
middle of all the debris. I don't think I've ever
told this. The first date was only about six weeks
after the then First Lady Hillary Clinton got on the
Today Show and blamed the at best exaggerated scandal about
her husband at Monica Lewinsky on the quote vast right
wing conspiracy that is sound stumpid. Laura said that night,
(27:29):
as she showed me her small office upstairs, I expected
that she was about to decry the idea that Republicans
would exploit television, talk radio and the brand new Internet
to try to bring down a president from the other party.
And I said, so naive little boy that I was no,
not that, of course we're doing that. She was kind
(27:49):
of offended that I doubted the conspiracy part. I explained,
I'd only been covering politics for two months. At the
end of the day, she said, end of the day, constantly,
at the end of the day, it's that vast part.
It's not vast, vast wayne conspiracy. Why, I bet there's
not even thirty of us. Laura Ingram then explained that
(28:11):
she was essentially the central desk for what she called
the miniature right wing conspiracy. She showed me a printed
page that had the facts numbers of about two dozen people.
There at the top are the sources, She said. There
was Ted Olsen, the attorney, founder of the so called
Arkansas Project and the husband of Barbara Olson, a constant
presence as a talking head on cable news. She later
(28:33):
died on nine to eleven. Everybody liked her. There were
several numbers in the Office of Independent Counsel ken Starr.
One of them read B. Kavanaugh. I said, who's that?
She said, nobody impartant. The only other name I remember
was Spencer Abraham, who then was a senator from Michigan.
She said, they, including the people in ken Starr's office,
(28:54):
sent her all the rumors, the ideas, stuff about Clinton.
Stuff they made up, and she distributed them to the
other parts of the list. That's these numbers. One number
was marked Hannity Radio, another Hannity TV, O'Reilly Radio, O'Reilly TV.
There was one for Limbaugh. There was one mark Justice Thomas,
(29:16):
and I pointed to it. He likes to stay and farmed. Now,
maybe the most important name is not on that list.
That's Matt Dradge. She said. Matt Drudge used all her stuff,
but he didn't want any of it to be traceable,
very big on not traceable, so I never fax it
to him. She said, I just give it to my brother.
This is when she still liked her brother. He sees
(29:39):
Drudge all the time. He gives the stuff to Drudge now, Oliver,
here is my baseball collection. See there were reasons to
go out with her. At the time, I could think
only of an old cartoon I had once seen. It
was an octopus working in the post office, using all
eight of its limbs to sort the mail. But every
(30:02):
couple of weeks it dawns on me afresh. Then I
was actually a witness to one of the earliest configurations
of the machinery. And there is no doubt today whether
it is vast or miniature. It's best the machinery that
links the right wing politicians and those who are supposed
to be above the fray, like Supreme Court justices and
special prosecutors and people like that. There with the right
(30:24):
wing publicity outlets that pretend to be news organizations like
Fox and Drudge and Oaan and Newsmax, and the ones
that don't even pretend, like those who succeeded Limbaugh. This
machine is, in fact everything that your typical paranoid conservative,
republican fascist trumpst thinks is being run by George Soros
(30:46):
or Bill Gates or doctor Fauci or me. You want
to be able to say, there are reports or accusations
about some Democrat or a liberal figure or celebrity. Well,
somebody puts a rumor in at one end of the machinery,
or somebody makes up a rumor at one end of
the machinery. It is then sent to dozens of other people.
(31:06):
They repeat it, voila. Suddenly there are reports. The reports
then get fed back to Fox News or Breitbart, or
the Wall Street Journal or the Supreme Court, or they're
just tweeted by a thousand bots simultaneously. You want to
push this ancient racist, anti Semitic paranoia called the Great Replacement,
(31:29):
but you want it to come out washed clean enough
that soulless opportunists like Elise Stefanic and jd Vance can
say it aloud on the campaign trail without forfeiting their candidacies.
This is the machinery. And I saw the machinery when
it was just a list of twenty and thirty people,
And at that moment I barely recognized the importance of
(31:51):
what I saw. Then again, I was still on that night,
recovering from not just the Giant's steak, but something far
more visceral. Earlier that day, as we were leaving the
Supreme Court, Laura Ingram had boasted about getting even with
an ex boyfriend by going back into what had been
(32:11):
their house and putting up exact copies of all the
photos of the two of them together that he had
taken down from his walls. And when he got smart
and changed the locks, she went back again to finish
the job. Found her key didn't work so naturally as
(32:32):
you would. She stuffed his garden hose through the mail
slot of his front door and turned on the outdoor spigot.
Ten thousand dollars worth of heart. When Florence ruined, she
said proudly, And part of me screamed, flee, flee Now
(32:53):
I didn't flee. Later, as I tried to sleep, two
noises kept me awake, snoring, not my own and Laura's
daw Laura's dog kept talking in his sleep, I mean
almost in syllables like that. It was something like twenty
(33:19):
five degrees out and I was on the second floor.
And yet I resolved that if her dog really did
make that last leap to formulate actual syllables. And it
turned out her dog was the one telling her what
to do, I was simply going to leave by the
window without bothering to open it first. The next morning,
(33:40):
Laura and I walked her dog. We got to an
empty field. She threw a tennis ball, He went and
got it. She cocked her arm back again. He took off,
loving life as he did. She did not throw it.
He went forty fifty sixty feet, then stopped and looked
back at her with such disappointment and even a sense
(34:03):
of betrayal, and she said, loudly, without a trace of
affection for him or anything else, wait far at, which
is when I realized I was being courted to be
the next dog. A few weeks later, back home in
New York, I got home from working an early morning
(34:25):
shift filling in for the commentator Paul Harvey at ABC Radio.
I was just waking up from a tortured nap when
the phone rang and it's Lara. I'm downstairs. We're going
to my old law firms party at the museum. I said.
I was exhausted. We're going, or I'll just stay here
at this payphone outside your planes calling you all night.
(34:45):
We went. The next opportunity probably was going to be
me on the wrong end of a hostage drama. Turned
out she was not invited to her party. We're crashing it.
I'm going to drink heavily. Frankly, it was a great party.
I got to meet Hillary Clinton's mother and her brother,
and I think the fascists are completely sincere about everything,
(35:07):
even their neuroses and their paranoia. No, Laura Ingram hugged
Hillary Clinton's mother and Hillary Clinton's brother. They seem to
be friends. Later we wound up meeting friends of her
in the Oak bar at the Plaza Hotel, where she
kept drinking. I was astonished. After about her sixth Cosmopolitan,
(35:29):
on top of everything she'd had at the party, she
began to droop her head, nodding like a bobblehead doll.
Her friend said, Okay, that's it. We'll take care of
the check. You take care of her. She had not
gotten a hotel room or anything. And if you've ever
heard of anybody who needed to be poured into a
cab because they were so drunk, you don't really know
(35:50):
what that means until you have to pour them into
a cab. Frankly, I wanted to put her in a
hotel somewhere, but the spectacle would have made the gossip pages.
She basically could not stand up, so I took her
to my apartment, put her into my bed, and I
went and slept on the couch at the far end
(36:11):
of the apartment, which is where I was hours later
in the morning when she woke me up, because she
came parading through using my phone to call my assistant
to get a car sent to my address to take
her to the airport, and to make sure that everybody
in my office knew she had stayed overnight at my apartment.
And all I kept thinking was why didn't I follow
(36:33):
my instincts. My instincts, said Flea, I fleed. Not, of course,
if I had fled, I would have missed seeing the
telephone tree of the miniature right wing conspiracy, wouldn't I.
(37:03):
I've done all the damage I can do here. I'll
have recovered from the Laura Ingram dates anytime. Now. Here
are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced
and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillip Shaneal. They
are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by
John Phillip Shaneal. Guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray,
produced by TKO Brothers. The other Beethoven selections have been
(37:25):
arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music
is the Oberman theme from ESPN two When We Run It,
and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of
ESPN Inc. Musical comments by the best baseball stadium organist ever,
Nancy Faust. We didn't have an announcer today, so it
was only me and everything else was pretty much my fault.
(37:45):
So that's countdown for this, the eight hundred and forty
ninth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Don't forget to
keep arresting him while we still can, and not putting
him on televised town halls on major networks. A quick
promo tomorrow, I've got something special, I think on Saturday,
(38:06):
as on every May sixth, since the year nineteen fifty four,
the world has celebrated Roger Banister, the mile runner, for
breaking the four minute mile barrier, the first man ever
to run a mile in four minutes or least. Except
he was not the first man to do that. It
is probably the greatest undeserved record or accomplishment in sports history.
(38:27):
A long and I think fascinating story that's tomorrow on
Countdown Till Then. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
(38:51):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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