April 21, 2023 • 40 mins
EPISODE 183: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: "My main cancer," the dying writer told the TV interviewer in 1994, "I call it Rupert." The prophetic words of the auteur of 'The Singing Detective' and 'Pennies from Heaven,' Dennis Potter, were said 29 years ago at this time of the year. He ruminated that he was living out the cliched plot of every writer: you're given three months to live - who do you kill? "That man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time...I would shoot the bugger if I could." 1994.
Meanwhile your tax dollars in action: Murdoch and Fox may be able to deduct the entirety of the $787,500,000 payment to Dominion as an ordinary cost of business. It will translate to us as taxpayers underwriting $213,000,000. We pay part of Rupert's price to lie.
And he's right back at it: a spokesman insists about the upcoming Smartmatic case that there's nothing more newsworthy than the claims of fraud by "the President of the United States and his lawyers." And if Rupert settles that case on similar terms to Dominion, you and I will pay another $364,000,000 for Rupert.
B-Block (15:43) IN SPORTS: The original Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1955. They flirted with moves to Louisville, Milwaukee and Seattle before moving to Oakland in 1968. THEN they flirted almost annually with a move to Denver. And the first Las Vegas rumor floated in 1996. And now they appear set on a move to Nevada in 2027. This presents a couple of problems. One is: the threat to the water supply of Vegas. The second is: who's going to see a lame duck baseball team? One of them drew so poorly they stopped playing home games. Plus the Max Scherzer suspension, and the dumping of World Series hero Madison Bumgarner. (21:34) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Mike Lindell said he'd give $5,000,000 to anybody who proved his evidence of Chinese election interference was nonsense. An arbitration board just ruled: somebody proved it. Dick Durbin went ahead with his meaningless "invitation" to Chief Justice Roberts to a meaningless SCOTUS hearing because Dianne Feinstein isn't there to vote for a subpoena. And Elon Musk blows up Twitter and SpaceX on the same day.
C-Block (28:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Back to Rupert Murdoch. I always hated him (though not as much as Dennis Potter). But I hated him FAR more after he fired me, for following his rules and the instructions of his lackeys on how to handle a sports story involving him.
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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 quote
my main cancer unquote, the dying writer told the television interview,
(00:29):
I call it Rupert unquote. You and I, it turns out,
are paying a little over one quarter of Rupert Murdoch's
settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Tax Law news yesterday that
Fox can deduct the settlement from its corporate income tax,
as calculated by the website the Lever. If it can
(00:50):
deduct the entire settlement, and it sure looks like it can.
Fox can deduct two hundred and thirteen million dollars out
of seven hundred and eighty seven and a half million,
two hundred and thirteen million dollars two hundred and thirteen
million taxpayer dollars. A little more of an explanation of
that in a moment first that quote. At the end
(01:14):
of March nineteen ninety four, a man you might have
heard of named Dennis Potter gave perhaps the most extraordinary
interview in the history of television anywhere in the world.
Dennis Potter, once a London newspaper reporter, was the playwright
of some television masterpieces, particularly The Singing Detective and pennies
(01:36):
from heaven, and weeks earlier, he had been diagnosed with terminal,
untreatable pancreatic cancer that had spread throughout his body. As
he was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg of Britain's Channel four,
Dennis Potter was dying. The interview aired on April fourth,
nineteen ninety four, and Potter died exactly two months and
(01:57):
three days later. The entire interview is indescribable in its honesty,
it's clarity, it's sincerity, and in vernacular that did not
really exist yet. In nineteen ninety four, in the Lack
of F's, Dennis Potter gave quote, one of the favorite
(02:18):
fantasy plots of a writer is a character's told you've
got three months to live, which is what I was told.
Who would you kill? You went on. I call my
cancer the main one, the pancreast one. I call it
rupert so I can get close to it, because that
man Murdoch is the one who if I had the time.
(02:40):
In fact, I've got too much writing to do and
I haven't got the energy. But I would shoot the
bugger if I could. Unquote March of nineteen ninety four,
America barely knew Rupert Murdoch. In March of nineteen ninety four,
he owned the New York Post and had made it
ryebald and dumber even than it had been before. He
(03:00):
had bought a bunch of the television stations owned by
the Metromedia Company and cobbled together a kind of low
grade fourth television network. It had the Simpsons and almost
nothing else. And by the night of April fourth, nineteen
ninety four, as Dennis Potter was heard telling the British
interviewer Melbyn Bragg, my main cancer, I call it Rupert.
(03:21):
If I had the time, I would shoot the bugger
if I could. By that exact hour, Rupert Murdoch was
already beginning to formulate plans for a twenty four hour
channel in this country to be named Fox News, with
ultimately the same kind of bitter, taunting, oxymoronic imbecility contained
in the phrase military intelligence. Back in the UK, Dennis
(03:47):
Potter was still giving his farewell address about the man
he would have shot if he had the time quote,
there is no one person more responsible for the pollution
of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the
pollution of the British press is an important part of
the pollution of British political life, and it's an important
(04:08):
part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities
that is destroying so much of our political discourse. Unquote,
strong stuff from anybody, even from a dying man who
had equipped himself with a flask of liquid morphine from
which he swigged frequently. But March of nineteen ninety four,
(04:33):
just before he died, was not the first time Dennis
Potter had taken Murdoch on the Year before that same
British network Channel Four had turned over an entire episode
of its half hour series Opinions to Dennis Potter, and
he spent much of the time talking about quote that
drivel merchant, global huckster and so to speak, media psychopath
(04:57):
Rupert Murdoch. There is an avid, wet mouthed down market
slide said that began its giddiest descent the day marauding
Rupert Murdoch first left his paw marks on these shores
and dragged so many others towards the sewers, where too
(05:17):
many of his two craven employees have their natural Habitat
nineteen ninety four wise words, Sir, stand the test of
time nineteen ninety four, and Dennis Potter already knew nineteen
(05:38):
ninety four. And a dying man named the cancer that
would kill him named it Rupert. So it had an
identity he could hate, an identity he could fight against,
an identity he could exploit in order to publicly express
the menace he perceived Rupert Murdoch to already be. News
(05:59):
Corp is headquartered at twelve eleven Sixth Avenue in New
York City, on the west side of the atte Anue,
just north of forty seventh Street. Fox quote News unquote
has its studios there. I passed by them in a
cab yesterday. There's no docksing involved here. One side of
the building features gigantic posters of Tucker Carlson and Sean
Hannity and Ingram and Bear and some of the other
(06:22):
journalistic prostitutes who lie on behalf of Rupert Murdoch and
on behalf of themselves and for his profits and for theirs.
When NBC moved us to thirty Rock, which is two
blocks north, I was offered a series of offices. I
took the one in the southwest corner of the building,
(06:42):
so I could always look out my south window and
give myself a little heads up, a little warning time
for when the day finally came that News Corp Headquarters
began to attract or emit lightning, bolts and demons and
fire and brimstone, just like in Ghostbusters, or that day
when the whole building would transform itself into a giant, gleaming,
(07:03):
ghostly devil with hornes, urns and glasses and Rupert Murdoch's face.
On the east side of the avenue is a rather
nondescript building sold a few years ago for forty million dollars.
It's kind of the western edge of Manhattan's Diamond District.
I always thought they should remove all the windows from
the side that faces the Fox Headquarters across the street,
(07:25):
and instead cover those six stories with a giant engraving
of the words of Dennis Potter. And by the way,
Murdoch's settlement with Dominion has indeed come in part from
a generous donation by us, the taxpayers of America. As
this site the lever writes quote. Federal law allows taxpayers
(07:48):
to write off many legal costs, providing that they are
ordinary and necessary business expenses. The IRS has repeatedly affirmed
that for major corporations, paying out settlements is just part
of the cost of doing business. The math goes usly.
Fox reported net income of a billion two last year,
and it paid a combined state and federal corporate tax
(08:10):
rate of twenty seven percent last year. And if none
of the settlement with Dominion was covered by any insurance,
Murdoch would be able to write off the entire seven
hundred and eighty seven and a half million as just
part of the cost of doing business, and thus the
deduction would be twenty seven percent of seven hundred and
eighty seven and a half million, two one hundred and
(08:30):
thirteen million dollars courtesy.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
US.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
I can confirm tax deductibility, said Fox corporate chief communications
officer Brian Nick to the reporter from the lever, but
not the amount your tax dollars in action, So onwards
and upwards too. Smart Maattic and its lawsuit against Rupert
Murdoch for two billion, seven hundred million dollars, claiming it
(08:57):
was slandered just as was Dominion, and that Fox knew
it knew it with malice a forethought. And if Fox
settles that suit on the same terms at a little
less than half the demand we you and I, mister
and miss American taxpayer, we will underwrite another three hundred
and sixty four million dollars for Rupert Murdoch or emboldened
(09:21):
by Dominion, and the outcome there, Rupert Murdoch will not settle,
and we will get the other option. About smart Mattock,
a Fox spokesman stated to Sarah Fisher, the media reporter
at Axios, quote, there is nothing more newsworthy than covering
the President of the United States and his lawyers making
allegations of voter fraud. Freedom of the press is foundational
(09:41):
to our democracy and must be protected. Unquote. Not only
did Fox learn nothing from the entire Dominion case, they're
not even pretending to have learned. Rupert Murdoch headed into
the smartmatic suit, wrapping himself in the words of the
First Amendments, when he should be wrapped in the words
(10:02):
of Dennis Potter. There is no one person more responsible
for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press.
And the pollution of the press is an important part
of the pollution of political life, and it's an important
part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities
that is destroying so much of our political discourse. He
(10:29):
named his fatal cancer Rupert. By the way, if you
(10:50):
saw a story attributed to Radar Online that in the
wake of the settlement with Dominion, Murdoch was now going
to fire Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Piro and Dan Bongino, No,
that's not what was reported. They were voting a media
columnist who was guessing that he would fire Bartiromo and Piro.
But why would he. He just settled that one point
(11:12):
six billion dollar case that was supposed to destroy his
company for effectively one thirty the original price. Dan Bongino
is gone, apparently not connected to the trial. No one
will miss him except for that beautiful line of drawn
on hare Stell. Ahead on this edition of Countdown, I
will return to the subject of Rupert Murdoch and what
was confirmed nearly a decade after the fact as the
(11:35):
day he personally fired me because I had followed his
rules and the people he hired to enforce those rules
to the letter. He fired me anyway. Also, Elon Musk
blows up SpaceX and Twitter on the same day and
then he tries to impress Lebron James with a valuable
(11:57):
gift worth nearly one hundred dollars. And Baseball's Oakland A's
are moving to the city of the future, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Are they bringing their own water? And I'll tell you
why you should not fall for the Ooh, it'll create jobs.
Confidence trick. That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown
(12:27):
with Keith Olberman. This is Sports Center. Wait, check that
not anymore. This is countdown with Keith Olberman in Sports.
(12:53):
Baseball's Oakland A's have signed a binding agreement, they say,
to build a new ballpark in Las Vegas, Nevada. And
although they say they have not moved to Nevada quite yet,
the expectation is they will play there by the year
twenty twenty seven, which means they will be lame ducks
in Oakland, presumably for the next three and a half seasons. Firstly,
of several points on this, baseball fans of every century
(13:15):
have not responded well to lame duck teams, as they
were widely rumored to be moving out of Boston after
the nineteen fifty two season. The Boston Braves drew two
hundred and eighty one thousand, two hundred and seventy eight
fans for total of seventy seven games. The eighteen ninety
(13:36):
nine Cleveland Spiders were stuck on the wrong end of
a system that allowed the same two brothers to own
both their National League team and another National League team,
the one in Saint Louis. Since Saint Louis was the
bigger market, the brothers moved all the good Cleveland players
from Cleveland to Saint Louis, including Cy Young, in hopes
of creating a mega team. In fact, it was a
(13:58):
disaster on both ends. Saint Louis finished fifth, and the
Cleveland Spiders home opener drew one hundred fans. Somehow, it
went downhill from there. They averaged one hundred and ninety
nine fans for their first sixteen home games. On June twelfth,
the crowd was fifty eight people. Soon, visiting teams began
(14:20):
to refuse to travel to Cleveland because it cost way
more just to get there than they could possibly earn
from their share of the gate receipts in Cleveland. Finally,
on July third, the inevitable happened. The Spiders stopped playing
home games. They went on a road trip on July
third and did not come home until August twenty fourth.
(14:40):
In fact, they played only eight more home games. Ever,
for the season, they won twenty games and lost one
hundred and thirty four. Las Vegas is also an interesting
choice to move to right now because worst case scenarios
had the city's main sources of drinking water the Colorado River,
Lake Mead, and Lake Powell effectively drying up within a decade.
(15:05):
So bring a bottle or flask, or an eternal supply
of both. Back to the baseball part, the A's are
quite the nomads. They have their origins in the original
Athletic Club of Philadelphia from the eighteen seventies. They played
as the Philadelphia Athletic in the Major League American Association
of the eighteen eighties. A new Philadelphia Athletics team joined
(15:25):
the new American League in nineteen oh one. They moved
to Kansas City in nineteen fifty five, and under the
dyspeptic owner Charles O. Finley, the A's threatened every winter
to move somewhere else. Finley negotiated with Seattle. He had
an overture with Milwaukee. He made a deal to move
the team to Louisville, Kentucky. Finally, in nineteen sixty eighty
(15:46):
actually did move to Oakland, but within nine years he
was moving elsewhere again annually. From nineteen seventy eight through
nineteen eighty, the A's were on the verge of moving
to Denver. In nineteen ninety six, due to construction at
the Oakland Coliseum, the Oakland A's played their first six
home games in, of all places, Las Vegas. One last
(16:08):
thing on this The coverage of the apparent move included,
as it always does, the perennial confidence trickster claim that
the new stadium in Las Vegas and the public money
spent on it will bring new jobs and improve the economy.
A prominent economist once explained to me that there are
lots of formulas and facts that explain why that's not true,
that just the jobs move from one part of a
(16:30):
city to another temporarily. But the easiest explanation is this,
if new stadiums actually made money for the people who
build new stadiums, the sports team owners would build all
the new sports stadiums themselves, because that's what owners do.
Two other baseball notes. The other shoe dropped in the
(16:52):
Max Scherzers Stickham controversy. He was suspended for ten games
and originally announced he would appeal, but then said when
he found out the appeal process was not to a
neutral arbitrator but to instead baseball executives, he decided not
to and will serve the ten days. His agent, Scott Boris,
had hinted at legal action against the rule. We'll see
and Madison Bumgarner, who made four starts in the twenty ten,
(17:15):
twenty twelve, and twenty fourteen World Series for the San
Francisco Giants as they won all three and he won
all those starts, and he made one five inning relief appearance,
saving the seventh game of the twenty fourteen series. Madison
Bumgarner was designated for assignment yesterday by the Arizona Diamondbacks,
essentially cut loose. Bumgarner injured his pitching shoulder in a
(17:36):
dirt bike accident in twenty seventeen. He left the Giants
for Arizona as a free agent in twenty twenty, and
since then he had won fifteen games, lost thirty two,
pitched to an ERA of five point two three and
a wins above replacement figure of minus point six Bumgarner
is thirty three years old. He may be claimed by
another team willing to take a chance, but it's pretty clear,
(17:58):
whatever happens, his Hall of Fame trajectory is irreversibly a
thing of the past. Still ahead on countdown back to
(18:19):
Rupert Murdoch. Trust me, I never hated him as much
as Dennis Potter did. But I hated him before I
worked for him. I hated him while I worked for him,
But I really hated him after he fired me, after
I did exactly what his people had told me to
do about a story concerning a sports team he owned
(18:40):
and was trying to sell things I promised not to
tell next first time for the Daily round Up, the
miss Grants, morons and Dunn Kruger effect specimens who constitute
two days worst persons in the world, The Brons Mike Lindell,
I'm not saying I feel sorry for any of these
wile e coyotes who tried to overthrow the government, who
(19:00):
are still trying to overthrow the government. But if I did,
it would be for this most brain damaged of the junta.
In August twenty twenty one, Lindell hosted a cyber symposium
as he called it in South Dakota, and the gobbledegook
he spat out that day was to him so obviously
proof that the Chinese had interfered with the twenty twenty
(19:20):
election that he said he would give five million dollars
to anybody who could prove that the material wasn't from
the twenty twenty US election. He called the contest proof
Mike wrong, and he said that any claims would be
evaluated by an independent arbitration board. One person entered the contest,
Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert from Nevada. He went
(19:44):
to Lindell management and said, this is not only not
from the twenty twenty US election, it doesn't prove any
kind of electoral interference anywhere at any time, and they
ignored him and refused the claim. So Zideman went to
the Independent Arbitration Board and it yesterday announced yep, Zeideman
had proved Mike Lindell wrong, and Lindell owes him five mil.
(20:04):
When Dell says now he's going to sue the arbitrator
over this, presumably he can just have his lawyers work
on it, the ones who are already defending him from
Dominion's one point three billion dollars suit against him. Punchline
the guy who proved him wrong. Zeidman, a Trump voter,
the bronze Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, chairman of the
(20:25):
Senate Judiciary Committee. Well he did it. He wrote Chief
Justice John Roberts, and just like I told you on Wednesday,
he invited Roberts or any other member of the Court
Roberts wants to send instead to appear at a quote
hearing regarding the ethical rules that govern the justices of
the Supreme Court. What rules. It's gonna be a hell
of a short hearing.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Rules.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
There are no rules here. As I also mentioned Wednesday,
Durbin did not put this in the letter. But the
committee never considered subpoenas for Roberts or Clarence name your price, Thomas,
because despite the Democrats being in the majority in the Senate,
durban cannot get his committee to approve subpoena. It's because
Dianne Feinstein is out sick this year, and so the
(21:08):
Democratic Senate majority doesn't really exist. Because the Democrats brought
a flag football team to a knife fight. But our
winner is Elon Musk, not a good day for Elon yesterday. First,
Elmo's SpaceX rocket, the most powerful ever launched, blew up
(21:28):
four minutes after it launched. But as every reporter noted,
it was the most powerful ever launched, and they learned
so much from it, and it blew up, and it
was the most powerful rocket ever. Blow up. Hours later,
Emmy lou Musk finally fulfilled his threat to end Twitter's
verification system by eliminating the blue verified check marks and
(21:49):
transforming them into a paid feature that lets you write
unbearably long tweets I ain't reading all that. I'm happy
for you though, or sorry that happened, life hack. If
you had a blue check mark, you can't just replace
it with any other emoji check mark. Elton's too smart
for you on that one, but he did not look
long enough at this issue. As usual, just use one
(22:12):
of the white arrows on a grayish blue background emojis.
I think the slanted one that's pointed down to the
left that looks the most like a check mark. Used
that one. I'm doing that, and still the worst was
yet to come. While the Pope and Lady Gaga and
Trump and the New York City government all lost their
blue checks, and a rival account soon appeared claiming it
(22:34):
was the real New York City Government Twitter. The blue
marks on some other really big names stayed as they
were Stephen King, Lebron James, William Shatner. While Rando's insulted
the likes of Lebron, who had vowed never to pay
for his blue check mark, somebody broke the story that
Musk had offered them free or comped Twitter blue check marks.
(22:57):
MUCKs later tweeted, I'm paying for them, persutely? What is
wrong with this dude? What is wrong with them that
he thinks Lebron James is going to be impressed by
a free blue check mark worth nearly one hundred dollars American?
Who would be impressed by that? William Shatner. William Shatner wrote,
(23:18):
thank you, I accept thumbs up. Well, thank god Elon's
purpose in buying Twitter has been achieved. He has impressed
William Frickin' Shatner. Elon blowed up good, blowed up real good,
Musk two days worst on blue check mark.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Person and I.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Have changed jobs a lot, and seldom have the departures
included gold watches and going away parties At least not
going away parties to which I was invited. But in
forty three years in radio and television, I have only
actually been fired in the traditional sense of go clean
out your desk and get out twice. Once the order
(24:25):
was from a drunken radio executive who did not like
the fact that I was twenty one years old, and
he was overruled, and he was sent home with a
warning by his bosses hours later, and I was back
on the job forty eight hours after that. The other time,
when it actually happened, you're fired, clean out your desk,
that was unsurprisingly at the hands of Rupert Murdoch and Fox,
(24:47):
and I mean Rupert Murdoch personally, or so he claims.
When I finally convinced NBC News that I was serious
about no longer hosting its Monica Lewinsky Athon in nineteen
ninety eight, the head of NBC Sports, Dick Eversoll, had
an in genius solution. He knew his friends at Fox
Sports longed to have me front their version of SportsCenter,
(25:12):
and so he proposed the following NBC would give my
agent ten days in which to negotiate two deals, a
deal for me to go to La and host Fox
Sports News and Major League Baseball on Fox, and another
deal in which Fox would pay NBC one million dollars
for my contract, like I was a mediocre baseball pitcher. Amazingly,
(25:39):
it worked. I got what was then a record breaking
salary for any cable sportscaster. Ever, NBC got its million,
and maybe most startlingly, NBC then asked me to stay
on the air as a lane duck at MSNBC for
like six weeks. Curiously, throughout my career, no matter how
abrasive the exit, my lane duck employers have always for
(26:03):
some reason trusted me to stay on their air, even
though I was leaving in local news in Los Angeles
once I did this for three months. Anyway, At first,
going to work at Fox Sports was a delight. Their
news guys, the evil Roger Ales and his henchman John Moody,
(26:24):
pitched me on doing stuff for them, maybe co anchoring
with Bill O'Reilly. I'm serious. I passed sports. We spent money.
I worked with friends. I didn't have to talk about politics.
I could narrate highlights. I could do funny voices way
downtown Bang. I lived on the beach. I mean, my
(26:44):
next door neighbor was Hawaii. Every time there was a
newspaper story about ESPN, even though our ratings were terrible,
there was also my picture in it with a caption
like challenging ESPN. It was great, But then two things happened.
The Fox guy, who knew we needed five years at
(27:05):
minimum just to tie ESPN in the ratings, took me
to lunch one day and said, sorry, mate, mo missus
is moving back to England tomorrow without me, so I'm
going good luck. He was replaced by guys who replaced
the five year plan with a five week plan to
raise the ratings by literally one fifth of one point.
(27:29):
I left that meeting, in which they explained their suicidal
plan and revealed that my salary represented an unsustainable twenty
percent of their entire budget, and I called my real
estate agent and put my house on the beach up
for sale. Not long after, my doctor gave me a
physical and a warning, cut back on work and stress
(27:50):
and everything else, or you can have a heart attack
ten years from now. I told my bosses this, and
their response was to blackmail me. We have a clause
in your contract which allows us to send you on
the road once a week while you are still working
five days in the studio. We're going to enforce that
unless you kick back two thirds of your salary. They
(28:11):
put this in a document. There are, as the kids, say, receipts.
So I folded to blackmail because two thirds of three
million dollars a year is still pretty good. But I
kept doing the job. In nineteen ninety nine, I broke
a story that everybody laughed at that Michael Jordan was
unhappy in retirement and he wanted to come back to
(28:32):
play in the NBA, but instead of getting a salary,
he wanted an ownership stake in a team. Two years later,
he did exactly that. In two thousand, I got to
host the first Mets Yankees World Series, and hosting baseball
every Saturday on Fox was a pretty good gig. And
we were just gearing up for the two thousand and
one baseball season when I got a tip on April
(28:53):
twentieth that the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers had
unofficially put their team up for sale, and in fact,
they were talking to the old owners, the O'Malley family,
about taking the Dodgers off their hands, selling the Dodgers
back to the son of Walter O'Malley. This was a
great scoop, but it had great danger because the owners
(29:16):
of the Dodgers were Fox, my own employers. The next day,
after getting this scoop, I made about one hundred phone calls,
and sure enough I got the friend of a friend
of a friend of my agent to confirm that he
and his family were in preliminary discussions joining the O'Malley's
to buy the Dodgers from Fox. Two sources, great scoop,
(29:38):
and that night I reached out to my bosses and said,
what the hell do we do here? The story is solid,
The Dodgers are for sale. But look, this is your
candy store, and I do work for you, and if
you don't want me to report this, I'm obviously not
going to report it, and I'm not going to pouch
and I'm not going to give the story to somebody else.
(29:58):
My bosses replied, good for you. Why don't we all
get on the phone with the top Rupert Murdoch has
his own Personal News Corp Public relations department. Let's see
what he says. So on Sunday, April twenty second, two
thousand and one, we got Murdoch's own PR guy on
the blower, and I explained it to him. Now, mister
Murdoch has a policy about this. He never interferes in
(30:20):
editorial decisions, not even in sourced business stories, not even
if they involve him. So long as you make it
clear your sources are not from within the company, and
so long as you're confident in your sources, and so
long as you include our denial, you should proceed with
this Dodger story. That is what we are paying you for.
(30:43):
For a brief moment, I thought maybe I have misjudged
Rupert Murdoch. Well, it turned out to be a very
brief moment and a very wrong moment. I reported the
story that night, howls of denials. Five days later, though
the Long Beach Press Telegram newspaper had its own story said,
(31:05):
despite denials, Dodgers are for sale, with far more details
than I had, And that really was the end of it.
The team was unofficially for sale. Dodger fans who hated
what Fox had done to the team seemed happy, and
the vast stinking, pile of burning excrement that was Fox
and NewsCorp and Murdoch sailed on unperturbed, but Twelve days
(31:29):
after that, just before I was getting in my car
to go to the first Fox Baseball meeting for our
two thousand and one season coverage, the president of Fox Sports,
yet another Aussie, called David Hill, called my agent and
told her case, not doing any baseball for us this year.
Business decision click, end of conversation. Nothing else, no firing,
(31:52):
no get out, no clean out your desk, no announcement.
But then two days later they turned off my access
to the Fox computer system, and four days after that
they called and canceled my cable show. And then that
night I got two weird calls from Rich Sandomir, who
was the TV sports critic and TV sports business reporter
for the New York Times, And Rich asks me, so,
(32:15):
did you know you got fired by Rupert Murdoch personally?
And I said, with genuine astonishment that I not only
didn't know that, but even given my thoughts about Rupert Murdoch,
I didn't believe that. Well, that's what my sources at
Fox tell me. Apparently your Dodger story really pissed him off.
But really, and I said I had cleared it through
(32:35):
his personal pr guy, I don't know, Rich Sandomir said,
Apparently he was on vacation and he got back like
the ninth of this month, and he read all these
stories about the Dodgers being for sale and how Fox
Sports was the first to report it, and he called
up David Hill and he told Hill to fire you immediately.
So I told Rich, this is the first I have
heard of this, and I still don't believe it, even
(32:57):
though the day he mentioned May ninth was the day
David Hill had called my agent and told her I
would not be doing baseball for Fox that year. An
hour later, the phone rings again and it's Rich Sandomir again,
and he sounds shaken. I got it wrong. I don't
have any sources at Fox who told me Rupert fired
you personally. My source said that you were telling people
(33:19):
Rupert had fired you personally over the Dodger story. And
I gave Rich a sequence of well, kind of friendly
uh huhs, And I said, no, I didn't and know
You've never been dumb enough in your life to make
the mistake you're saying you just made. And he said, well,
I never said somebody at Fox said Murdock fired Joe. Okay, thanks.
(33:39):
By the next day they had me come into the
Fox building on Pico Boulevard and clean out my office
while a guard watched. And she was a really nice guard.
In fact, she brought donuts but a lovely way to
go out. As I packed, I thought more and more
of what had happened in the month since I had
gotten that tip about the Dodgers being for sale. As
(34:00):
I left the Fox lot for the last time as
an employee, I went back a couple of times to
attend table reads for the Simpsons. Table reads for the
Simpsons were much more fun than being an employee at Fox.
I called a couple of reporters I knew, and my
agent and some people in the business, and we tried
to put together a timeline that made some sort of sense,
because the slow motion firing thing. May ninth, you're not
(34:23):
doing baseball. May eleventh, your computer it won't work. May fifteenth,
your cable show is canceled. May sixteenth, clean out your office.
A week long firing made no sense until one reporter
friend said, you know, Fox called me and said, call
Keith up and provoke him, get him to call us names,
(34:44):
tell him about this story and that paper, calling him
washed up, get him going, And then it all clicked.
My contract ran through the end of the year two
thousand and one. Because Fox was firing me without any
cause or even claiming there was a cause, without any
violation of my contract or their rules. Because I had
left a trail of good behavior on the Dodgers store.
(35:05):
They were trying to enrage me and get me to
say something nasty that itself would be a violation of
my contract so they could outright fire me and keep
the money. And the money still on the contract was
about eight hundred thousand dollars. Now, after decades of contemplating this,
I am confident that I am no crazier than the
(35:27):
next guy, at least not the next guy in television.
But on my worst, craziest, least rational day, if you
said you have two choices, Alderman, you can blow up
these people who are firing you, and you can make
them look bad in a newspaper for a day and
then they'll fire you and keep all the money they
owe you. Or you can keep your big bazoo shut
(35:52):
for just seven months. You can keep the eight hundred
thousand dollars, and you can spend the summer doing whatever
the hell you want, and you can then spend the
rest of your natural life blowing these people up. If
that's the choice, I will always take the scenario that
gives me the eight hundred thousand dollars for doing nothing.
(36:14):
Always so. On January first, two thousand and two, after
the last Fox check cleared, I began making a professional
avocation out of attacking Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Business,
Fox Murdoch, Fox O'Reilly, Fox, Tucker Carlson, whatever. And I
got the eight hundred thousand dollars. But they're lingered for years,
(36:37):
this kind of academic question of whether Rupert Murdoch had
actually fired me for having followed the rules set out
by his own personal pr guy. As usual, these things
resolve themselves when you least expect them to. Murdoch was
speaking at a Dow Jones conference in Carlsbad, California, on
(36:57):
May twenty eighth, two thousand and eight, seven years to
the month they got rid of me, and a story
came across the wire with my name on it. The
guy interviewing him at this conference talked about whether there
should be dissenting voices on Fox quote news unquote, like
that guy who was killing it on MSNBC Keith Olderman. Now,
(37:19):
Murdoch barked, if fired him five years ago. He was crizy.
Timing was off, but there it was Rupert Murdoch confessing
in front of a crowd that he fired me personally,
the red badge of courage in quotes. I wondered if
it still pissed him off that he had to pay
(37:40):
me the eight hundred thousand dollars when I didn't take
the grievance bait. Three years after that, Murdoch said it
again like I hadn't heard it the first time. On
February first, twenty eleven, Rupert Murdoch was interviewed by his
business talking had Neil Cavudo, who for some reason asked
him if he would consider hiring me to put me
(38:00):
on Fox News. Now we fired him once. We don't
believe even firing people twice. Kaboodo replied, you called him
a nut lad he was a nut on. Well, we
had him on late night Fox Sports. There was never
any such show called late night Fox Sports. But never mind,
Rupe went on, It was impossible I fired him. He
(38:22):
was crazy, fired me for following his rules, and I
was the one who was crazy. Finally, speaking of crazy,
I have had for sixty three nearly sixty four years now,
a love hate relationship with the name Keith. But did
you know that Rupert Murdoch's real first name is also Keith,
(38:47):
but that rather than call himself Keith, he voluntarily chooses
to call himself Rupert. I mean, sure, my name is Keith,
but at least my name ain't freakin'. I mean, if
(39:19):
you're not going with Keith and your other given option
is Rupert, try something less embarrassing from outside that field.
I don't know, like Elon. Elon Murdoch done all the
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Here
the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced and
performed by Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel, who are
(39:40):
the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John
Phillip Shanel, guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray, produced
by Tko Brothers. Another Beethoven selections have been arranged and
performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music
is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, and it was
written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of the ESPN Inc.
(40:00):
Musical comments from Nancy fous The best baseball stadium organist
ever you today was Kenny Maine. Everything else is pretty
much my fault. So that's countdown for this the eight
hundred and thirty sixth 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.
(40:21):
The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Until 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
(40:43):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio quote
my main cancer unquote, the dying writer told the television interview,
(00:29):
I call it Rupert unquote. You and I, it turns out,
are paying a little over one quarter of Rupert Murdoch's
settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Tax Law news yesterday that
Fox can deduct the settlement from its corporate income tax,
as calculated by the website the Lever. If it can
(00:50):
deduct the entire settlement, and it sure looks like it can.
Fox can deduct two hundred and thirteen million dollars out
of seven hundred and eighty seven and a half million,
two hundred and thirteen million dollars two hundred and thirteen
million taxpayer dollars. A little more of an explanation of
that in a moment first that quote. At the end
(01:14):
of March nineteen ninety four, a man you might have
heard of named Dennis Potter gave perhaps the most extraordinary
interview in the history of television anywhere in the world.
Dennis Potter, once a London newspaper reporter, was the playwright
of some television masterpieces, particularly The Singing Detective and pennies
(01:36):
from heaven, and weeks earlier, he had been diagnosed with terminal,
untreatable pancreatic cancer that had spread throughout his body. As
he was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg of Britain's Channel four,
Dennis Potter was dying. The interview aired on April fourth,
nineteen ninety four, and Potter died exactly two months and
(01:57):
three days later. The entire interview is indescribable in its honesty,
it's clarity, it's sincerity, and in vernacular that did not
really exist yet. In nineteen ninety four, in the Lack
of F's, Dennis Potter gave quote, one of the favorite
(02:18):
fantasy plots of a writer is a character's told you've
got three months to live, which is what I was told.
Who would you kill? You went on. I call my
cancer the main one, the pancreast one. I call it
rupert so I can get close to it, because that
man Murdoch is the one who if I had the time.
(02:40):
In fact, I've got too much writing to do and
I haven't got the energy. But I would shoot the
bugger if I could. Unquote March of nineteen ninety four,
America barely knew Rupert Murdoch. In March of nineteen ninety four,
he owned the New York Post and had made it
ryebald and dumber even than it had been before. He
(03:00):
had bought a bunch of the television stations owned by
the Metromedia Company and cobbled together a kind of low
grade fourth television network. It had the Simpsons and almost
nothing else. And by the night of April fourth, nineteen
ninety four, as Dennis Potter was heard telling the British
interviewer Melbyn Bragg, my main cancer, I call it Rupert.
(03:21):
If I had the time, I would shoot the bugger
if I could. By that exact hour, Rupert Murdoch was
already beginning to formulate plans for a twenty four hour
channel in this country to be named Fox News, with
ultimately the same kind of bitter, taunting, oxymoronic imbecility contained
in the phrase military intelligence. Back in the UK, Dennis
(03:47):
Potter was still giving his farewell address about the man
he would have shot if he had the time quote,
there is no one person more responsible for the pollution
of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the
pollution of the British press is an important part of
the pollution of British political life, and it's an important
(04:08):
part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities
that is destroying so much of our political discourse. Unquote,
strong stuff from anybody, even from a dying man who
had equipped himself with a flask of liquid morphine from
which he swigged frequently. But March of nineteen ninety four,
(04:33):
just before he died, was not the first time Dennis
Potter had taken Murdoch on the Year before that same
British network Channel Four had turned over an entire episode
of its half hour series Opinions to Dennis Potter, and
he spent much of the time talking about quote that
drivel merchant, global huckster and so to speak, media psychopath
(04:57):
Rupert Murdoch. There is an avid, wet mouthed down market
slide said that began its giddiest descent the day marauding
Rupert Murdoch first left his paw marks on these shores
and dragged so many others towards the sewers, where too
(05:17):
many of his two craven employees have their natural Habitat
nineteen ninety four wise words, Sir, stand the test of
time nineteen ninety four, and Dennis Potter already knew nineteen
(05:38):
ninety four. And a dying man named the cancer that
would kill him named it Rupert. So it had an
identity he could hate, an identity he could fight against,
an identity he could exploit in order to publicly express
the menace he perceived Rupert Murdoch to already be. News
(05:59):
Corp is headquartered at twelve eleven Sixth Avenue in New
York City, on the west side of the atte Anue,
just north of forty seventh Street. Fox quote News unquote
has its studios there. I passed by them in a
cab yesterday. There's no docksing involved here. One side of
the building features gigantic posters of Tucker Carlson and Sean
Hannity and Ingram and Bear and some of the other
(06:22):
journalistic prostitutes who lie on behalf of Rupert Murdoch and
on behalf of themselves and for his profits and for theirs.
When NBC moved us to thirty Rock, which is two
blocks north, I was offered a series of offices. I
took the one in the southwest corner of the building,
(06:42):
so I could always look out my south window and
give myself a little heads up, a little warning time
for when the day finally came that News Corp Headquarters
began to attract or emit lightning, bolts and demons and
fire and brimstone, just like in Ghostbusters, or that day
when the whole building would transform itself into a giant, gleaming,
(07:03):
ghostly devil with hornes, urns and glasses and Rupert Murdoch's face.
On the east side of the avenue is a rather
nondescript building sold a few years ago for forty million dollars.
It's kind of the western edge of Manhattan's Diamond District.
I always thought they should remove all the windows from
the side that faces the Fox Headquarters across the street,
(07:25):
and instead cover those six stories with a giant engraving
of the words of Dennis Potter. And by the way,
Murdoch's settlement with Dominion has indeed come in part from
a generous donation by us, the taxpayers of America. As
this site the lever writes quote. Federal law allows taxpayers
(07:48):
to write off many legal costs, providing that they are
ordinary and necessary business expenses. The IRS has repeatedly affirmed
that for major corporations, paying out settlements is just part
of the cost of doing business. The math goes usly.
Fox reported net income of a billion two last year,
and it paid a combined state and federal corporate tax
(08:10):
rate of twenty seven percent last year. And if none
of the settlement with Dominion was covered by any insurance,
Murdoch would be able to write off the entire seven
hundred and eighty seven and a half million as just
part of the cost of doing business, and thus the
deduction would be twenty seven percent of seven hundred and
eighty seven and a half million, two one hundred and
(08:30):
thirteen million dollars courtesy.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
US.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
I can confirm tax deductibility, said Fox corporate chief communications
officer Brian Nick to the reporter from the lever, but
not the amount your tax dollars in action, So onwards
and upwards too. Smart Maattic and its lawsuit against Rupert
Murdoch for two billion, seven hundred million dollars, claiming it
(08:57):
was slandered just as was Dominion, and that Fox knew
it knew it with malice a forethought. And if Fox
settles that suit on the same terms at a little
less than half the demand we you and I, mister
and miss American taxpayer, we will underwrite another three hundred
and sixty four million dollars for Rupert Murdoch or emboldened
(09:21):
by Dominion, and the outcome there, Rupert Murdoch will not settle,
and we will get the other option. About smart Mattock,
a Fox spokesman stated to Sarah Fisher, the media reporter
at Axios, quote, there is nothing more newsworthy than covering
the President of the United States and his lawyers making
allegations of voter fraud. Freedom of the press is foundational
(09:41):
to our democracy and must be protected. Unquote. Not only
did Fox learn nothing from the entire Dominion case, they're
not even pretending to have learned. Rupert Murdoch headed into
the smartmatic suit, wrapping himself in the words of the
First Amendments, when he should be wrapped in the words
(10:02):
of Dennis Potter. There is no one person more responsible
for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press.
And the pollution of the press is an important part
of the pollution of political life, and it's an important
part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities
that is destroying so much of our political discourse. He
(10:29):
named his fatal cancer Rupert. By the way, if you
(10:50):
saw a story attributed to Radar Online that in the
wake of the settlement with Dominion, Murdoch was now going
to fire Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Piro and Dan Bongino, No,
that's not what was reported. They were voting a media
columnist who was guessing that he would fire Bartiromo and Piro.
But why would he. He just settled that one point
(11:12):
six billion dollar case that was supposed to destroy his
company for effectively one thirty the original price. Dan Bongino
is gone, apparently not connected to the trial. No one
will miss him except for that beautiful line of drawn
on hare Stell. Ahead on this edition of Countdown, I
will return to the subject of Rupert Murdoch and what
was confirmed nearly a decade after the fact as the
(11:35):
day he personally fired me because I had followed his
rules and the people he hired to enforce those rules
to the letter. He fired me anyway. Also, Elon Musk
blows up SpaceX and Twitter on the same day and
then he tries to impress Lebron James with a valuable
(11:57):
gift worth nearly one hundred dollars. And Baseball's Oakland A's
are moving to the city of the future, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Are they bringing their own water? And I'll tell you
why you should not fall for the Ooh, it'll create jobs.
Confidence trick. That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown
(12:27):
with Keith Olberman. This is Sports Center. Wait, check that
not anymore. This is countdown with Keith Olberman in Sports.
(12:53):
Baseball's Oakland A's have signed a binding agreement, they say,
to build a new ballpark in Las Vegas, Nevada. And
although they say they have not moved to Nevada quite yet,
the expectation is they will play there by the year
twenty twenty seven, which means they will be lame ducks
in Oakland, presumably for the next three and a half seasons. Firstly,
of several points on this, baseball fans of every century
(13:15):
have not responded well to lame duck teams, as they
were widely rumored to be moving out of Boston after
the nineteen fifty two season. The Boston Braves drew two
hundred and eighty one thousand, two hundred and seventy eight
fans for total of seventy seven games. The eighteen ninety
(13:36):
nine Cleveland Spiders were stuck on the wrong end of
a system that allowed the same two brothers to own
both their National League team and another National League team,
the one in Saint Louis. Since Saint Louis was the
bigger market, the brothers moved all the good Cleveland players
from Cleveland to Saint Louis, including Cy Young, in hopes
of creating a mega team. In fact, it was a
(13:58):
disaster on both ends. Saint Louis finished fifth, and the
Cleveland Spiders home opener drew one hundred fans. Somehow, it
went downhill from there. They averaged one hundred and ninety
nine fans for their first sixteen home games. On June twelfth,
the crowd was fifty eight people. Soon, visiting teams began
(14:20):
to refuse to travel to Cleveland because it cost way
more just to get there than they could possibly earn
from their share of the gate receipts in Cleveland. Finally,
on July third, the inevitable happened. The Spiders stopped playing
home games. They went on a road trip on July
third and did not come home until August twenty fourth.
(14:40):
In fact, they played only eight more home games. Ever,
for the season, they won twenty games and lost one
hundred and thirty four. Las Vegas is also an interesting
choice to move to right now because worst case scenarios
had the city's main sources of drinking water the Colorado River,
Lake Mead, and Lake Powell effectively drying up within a decade.
(15:05):
So bring a bottle or flask, or an eternal supply
of both. Back to the baseball part, the A's are
quite the nomads. They have their origins in the original
Athletic Club of Philadelphia from the eighteen seventies. They played
as the Philadelphia Athletic in the Major League American Association
of the eighteen eighties. A new Philadelphia Athletics team joined
(15:25):
the new American League in nineteen oh one. They moved
to Kansas City in nineteen fifty five, and under the
dyspeptic owner Charles O. Finley, the A's threatened every winter
to move somewhere else. Finley negotiated with Seattle. He had
an overture with Milwaukee. He made a deal to move
the team to Louisville, Kentucky. Finally, in nineteen sixty eighty
(15:46):
actually did move to Oakland, but within nine years he
was moving elsewhere again annually. From nineteen seventy eight through
nineteen eighty, the A's were on the verge of moving
to Denver. In nineteen ninety six, due to construction at
the Oakland Coliseum, the Oakland A's played their first six
home games in, of all places, Las Vegas. One last
(16:08):
thing on this The coverage of the apparent move included,
as it always does, the perennial confidence trickster claim that
the new stadium in Las Vegas and the public money
spent on it will bring new jobs and improve the economy.
A prominent economist once explained to me that there are
lots of formulas and facts that explain why that's not true,
that just the jobs move from one part of a
(16:30):
city to another temporarily. But the easiest explanation is this,
if new stadiums actually made money for the people who
build new stadiums, the sports team owners would build all
the new sports stadiums themselves, because that's what owners do.
Two other baseball notes. The other shoe dropped in the
(16:52):
Max Scherzers Stickham controversy. He was suspended for ten games
and originally announced he would appeal, but then said when
he found out the appeal process was not to a
neutral arbitrator but to instead baseball executives, he decided not
to and will serve the ten days. His agent, Scott Boris,
had hinted at legal action against the rule. We'll see
and Madison Bumgarner, who made four starts in the twenty ten,
(17:15):
twenty twelve, and twenty fourteen World Series for the San
Francisco Giants as they won all three and he won
all those starts, and he made one five inning relief appearance,
saving the seventh game of the twenty fourteen series. Madison
Bumgarner was designated for assignment yesterday by the Arizona Diamondbacks,
essentially cut loose. Bumgarner injured his pitching shoulder in a
(17:36):
dirt bike accident in twenty seventeen. He left the Giants
for Arizona as a free agent in twenty twenty, and
since then he had won fifteen games, lost thirty two,
pitched to an ERA of five point two three and
a wins above replacement figure of minus point six Bumgarner
is thirty three years old. He may be claimed by
another team willing to take a chance, but it's pretty clear,
(17:58):
whatever happens, his Hall of Fame trajectory is irreversibly a
thing of the past. Still ahead on countdown back to
(18:19):
Rupert Murdoch. Trust me, I never hated him as much
as Dennis Potter did. But I hated him before I
worked for him. I hated him while I worked for him,
But I really hated him after he fired me, after
I did exactly what his people had told me to
do about a story concerning a sports team he owned
(18:40):
and was trying to sell things I promised not to
tell next first time for the Daily round Up, the
miss Grants, morons and Dunn Kruger effect specimens who constitute
two days worst persons in the world, The Brons Mike Lindell,
I'm not saying I feel sorry for any of these
wile e coyotes who tried to overthrow the government, who
(19:00):
are still trying to overthrow the government. But if I did,
it would be for this most brain damaged of the junta.
In August twenty twenty one, Lindell hosted a cyber symposium
as he called it in South Dakota, and the gobbledegook
he spat out that day was to him so obviously
proof that the Chinese had interfered with the twenty twenty
(19:20):
election that he said he would give five million dollars
to anybody who could prove that the material wasn't from
the twenty twenty US election. He called the contest proof
Mike wrong, and he said that any claims would be
evaluated by an independent arbitration board. One person entered the contest,
Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert from Nevada. He went
(19:44):
to Lindell management and said, this is not only not
from the twenty twenty US election, it doesn't prove any
kind of electoral interference anywhere at any time, and they
ignored him and refused the claim. So Zideman went to
the Independent Arbitration Board and it yesterday announced yep, Zeideman
had proved Mike Lindell wrong, and Lindell owes him five mil.
(20:04):
When Dell says now he's going to sue the arbitrator
over this, presumably he can just have his lawyers work
on it, the ones who are already defending him from
Dominion's one point three billion dollars suit against him. Punchline
the guy who proved him wrong. Zeidman, a Trump voter,
the bronze Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, chairman of the
(20:25):
Senate Judiciary Committee. Well he did it. He wrote Chief
Justice John Roberts, and just like I told you on Wednesday,
he invited Roberts or any other member of the Court
Roberts wants to send instead to appear at a quote
hearing regarding the ethical rules that govern the justices of
the Supreme Court. What rules. It's gonna be a hell
of a short hearing.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Rules.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
There are no rules here. As I also mentioned Wednesday,
Durbin did not put this in the letter. But the
committee never considered subpoenas for Roberts or Clarence name your price, Thomas,
because despite the Democrats being in the majority in the Senate,
durban cannot get his committee to approve subpoena. It's because
Dianne Feinstein is out sick this year, and so the
(21:08):
Democratic Senate majority doesn't really exist. Because the Democrats brought
a flag football team to a knife fight. But our
winner is Elon Musk, not a good day for Elon yesterday. First,
Elmo's SpaceX rocket, the most powerful ever launched, blew up
(21:28):
four minutes after it launched. But as every reporter noted,
it was the most powerful ever launched, and they learned
so much from it, and it blew up, and it
was the most powerful rocket ever. Blow up. Hours later,
Emmy lou Musk finally fulfilled his threat to end Twitter's
verification system by eliminating the blue verified check marks and
(21:49):
transforming them into a paid feature that lets you write
unbearably long tweets I ain't reading all that. I'm happy
for you though, or sorry that happened, life hack. If
you had a blue check mark, you can't just replace
it with any other emoji check mark. Elton's too smart
for you on that one, but he did not look
long enough at this issue. As usual, just use one
(22:12):
of the white arrows on a grayish blue background emojis.
I think the slanted one that's pointed down to the
left that looks the most like a check mark. Used
that one. I'm doing that, and still the worst was
yet to come. While the Pope and Lady Gaga and
Trump and the New York City government all lost their
blue checks, and a rival account soon appeared claiming it
(22:34):
was the real New York City Government Twitter. The blue
marks on some other really big names stayed as they
were Stephen King, Lebron James, William Shatner. While Rando's insulted
the likes of Lebron, who had vowed never to pay
for his blue check mark, somebody broke the story that
Musk had offered them free or comped Twitter blue check marks.
(22:57):
MUCKs later tweeted, I'm paying for them, persutely? What is
wrong with this dude? What is wrong with them that
he thinks Lebron James is going to be impressed by
a free blue check mark worth nearly one hundred dollars American?
Who would be impressed by that? William Shatner. William Shatner wrote,
(23:18):
thank you, I accept thumbs up. Well, thank god Elon's
purpose in buying Twitter has been achieved. He has impressed
William Frickin' Shatner. Elon blowed up good, blowed up real good,
Musk two days worst on blue check mark.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Person and I.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Have changed jobs a lot, and seldom have the departures
included gold watches and going away parties At least not
going away parties to which I was invited. But in
forty three years in radio and television, I have only
actually been fired in the traditional sense of go clean
out your desk and get out twice. Once the order
(24:25):
was from a drunken radio executive who did not like
the fact that I was twenty one years old, and
he was overruled, and he was sent home with a
warning by his bosses hours later, and I was back
on the job forty eight hours after that. The other time,
when it actually happened, you're fired, clean out your desk,
that was unsurprisingly at the hands of Rupert Murdoch and Fox,
(24:47):
and I mean Rupert Murdoch personally, or so he claims.
When I finally convinced NBC News that I was serious
about no longer hosting its Monica Lewinsky Athon in nineteen
ninety eight, the head of NBC Sports, Dick Eversoll, had
an in genius solution. He knew his friends at Fox
Sports longed to have me front their version of SportsCenter,
(25:12):
and so he proposed the following NBC would give my
agent ten days in which to negotiate two deals, a
deal for me to go to La and host Fox
Sports News and Major League Baseball on Fox, and another
deal in which Fox would pay NBC one million dollars
for my contract, like I was a mediocre baseball pitcher. Amazingly,
(25:39):
it worked. I got what was then a record breaking
salary for any cable sportscaster. Ever, NBC got its million,
and maybe most startlingly, NBC then asked me to stay
on the air as a lane duck at MSNBC for
like six weeks. Curiously, throughout my career, no matter how
abrasive the exit, my lane duck employers have always for
(26:03):
some reason trusted me to stay on their air, even
though I was leaving in local news in Los Angeles
once I did this for three months. Anyway, At first,
going to work at Fox Sports was a delight. Their
news guys, the evil Roger Ales and his henchman John Moody,
(26:24):
pitched me on doing stuff for them, maybe co anchoring
with Bill O'Reilly. I'm serious. I passed sports. We spent money.
I worked with friends. I didn't have to talk about politics.
I could narrate highlights. I could do funny voices way
downtown Bang. I lived on the beach. I mean, my
(26:44):
next door neighbor was Hawaii. Every time there was a
newspaper story about ESPN, even though our ratings were terrible,
there was also my picture in it with a caption
like challenging ESPN. It was great, But then two things happened.
The Fox guy, who knew we needed five years at
(27:05):
minimum just to tie ESPN in the ratings, took me
to lunch one day and said, sorry, mate, mo missus
is moving back to England tomorrow without me, so I'm
going good luck. He was replaced by guys who replaced
the five year plan with a five week plan to
raise the ratings by literally one fifth of one point.
(27:29):
I left that meeting, in which they explained their suicidal
plan and revealed that my salary represented an unsustainable twenty
percent of their entire budget, and I called my real
estate agent and put my house on the beach up
for sale. Not long after, my doctor gave me a
physical and a warning, cut back on work and stress
(27:50):
and everything else, or you can have a heart attack
ten years from now. I told my bosses this, and
their response was to blackmail me. We have a clause
in your contract which allows us to send you on
the road once a week while you are still working
five days in the studio. We're going to enforce that
unless you kick back two thirds of your salary. They
(28:11):
put this in a document. There are, as the kids, say, receipts.
So I folded to blackmail because two thirds of three
million dollars a year is still pretty good. But I
kept doing the job. In nineteen ninety nine, I broke
a story that everybody laughed at that Michael Jordan was
unhappy in retirement and he wanted to come back to
(28:32):
play in the NBA, but instead of getting a salary,
he wanted an ownership stake in a team. Two years later,
he did exactly that. In two thousand, I got to
host the first Mets Yankees World Series, and hosting baseball
every Saturday on Fox was a pretty good gig. And
we were just gearing up for the two thousand and
one baseball season when I got a tip on April
(28:53):
twentieth that the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers had
unofficially put their team up for sale, and in fact,
they were talking to the old owners, the O'Malley family,
about taking the Dodgers off their hands, selling the Dodgers
back to the son of Walter O'Malley. This was a
great scoop, but it had great danger because the owners
(29:16):
of the Dodgers were Fox, my own employers. The next day,
after getting this scoop, I made about one hundred phone calls,
and sure enough I got the friend of a friend
of a friend of my agent to confirm that he
and his family were in preliminary discussions joining the O'Malley's
to buy the Dodgers from Fox. Two sources, great scoop,
(29:38):
and that night I reached out to my bosses and said,
what the hell do we do here? The story is solid,
The Dodgers are for sale. But look, this is your
candy store, and I do work for you, and if
you don't want me to report this, I'm obviously not
going to report it, and I'm not going to pouch
and I'm not going to give the story to somebody else.
(29:58):
My bosses replied, good for you. Why don't we all
get on the phone with the top Rupert Murdoch has
his own Personal News Corp Public relations department. Let's see
what he says. So on Sunday, April twenty second, two
thousand and one, we got Murdoch's own PR guy on
the blower, and I explained it to him. Now, mister
Murdoch has a policy about this. He never interferes in
(30:20):
editorial decisions, not even in sourced business stories, not even
if they involve him. So long as you make it
clear your sources are not from within the company, and
so long as you're confident in your sources, and so
long as you include our denial, you should proceed with
this Dodger story. That is what we are paying you for.
(30:43):
For a brief moment, I thought maybe I have misjudged
Rupert Murdoch. Well, it turned out to be a very
brief moment and a very wrong moment. I reported the
story that night, howls of denials. Five days later, though
the Long Beach Press Telegram newspaper had its own story said,
(31:05):
despite denials, Dodgers are for sale, with far more details
than I had, And that really was the end of it.
The team was unofficially for sale. Dodger fans who hated
what Fox had done to the team seemed happy, and
the vast stinking, pile of burning excrement that was Fox
and NewsCorp and Murdoch sailed on unperturbed, but Twelve days
(31:29):
after that, just before I was getting in my car
to go to the first Fox Baseball meeting for our
two thousand and one season coverage, the president of Fox Sports,
yet another Aussie, called David Hill, called my agent and
told her case, not doing any baseball for us this year.
Business decision click, end of conversation. Nothing else, no firing,
(31:52):
no get out, no clean out your desk, no announcement.
But then two days later they turned off my access
to the Fox computer system, and four days after that
they called and canceled my cable show. And then that
night I got two weird calls from Rich Sandomir, who
was the TV sports critic and TV sports business reporter
for the New York Times, And Rich asks me, so,
(32:15):
did you know you got fired by Rupert Murdoch personally?
And I said, with genuine astonishment that I not only
didn't know that, but even given my thoughts about Rupert Murdoch,
I didn't believe that. Well, that's what my sources at
Fox tell me. Apparently your Dodger story really pissed him off.
But really, and I said I had cleared it through
(32:35):
his personal pr guy, I don't know, Rich Sandomir said,
Apparently he was on vacation and he got back like
the ninth of this month, and he read all these
stories about the Dodgers being for sale and how Fox
Sports was the first to report it, and he called
up David Hill and he told Hill to fire you immediately.
So I told Rich, this is the first I have
heard of this, and I still don't believe it, even
(32:57):
though the day he mentioned May ninth was the day
David Hill had called my agent and told her I
would not be doing baseball for Fox that year. An
hour later, the phone rings again and it's Rich Sandomir again,
and he sounds shaken. I got it wrong. I don't
have any sources at Fox who told me Rupert fired
you personally. My source said that you were telling people
(33:19):
Rupert had fired you personally over the Dodger story. And
I gave Rich a sequence of well, kind of friendly
uh huhs, And I said, no, I didn't and know
You've never been dumb enough in your life to make
the mistake you're saying you just made. And he said, well,
I never said somebody at Fox said Murdock fired Joe. Okay, thanks.
(33:39):
By the next day they had me come into the
Fox building on Pico Boulevard and clean out my office
while a guard watched. And she was a really nice guard.
In fact, she brought donuts but a lovely way to
go out. As I packed, I thought more and more
of what had happened in the month since I had
gotten that tip about the Dodgers being for sale. As
(34:00):
I left the Fox lot for the last time as
an employee, I went back a couple of times to
attend table reads for the Simpsons. Table reads for the
Simpsons were much more fun than being an employee at Fox.
I called a couple of reporters I knew, and my
agent and some people in the business, and we tried
to put together a timeline that made some sort of sense,
because the slow motion firing thing. May ninth, you're not
(34:23):
doing baseball. May eleventh, your computer it won't work. May fifteenth,
your cable show is canceled. May sixteenth, clean out your office.
A week long firing made no sense until one reporter
friend said, you know, Fox called me and said, call
Keith up and provoke him, get him to call us names,
(34:44):
tell him about this story and that paper, calling him
washed up, get him going, And then it all clicked.
My contract ran through the end of the year two
thousand and one. Because Fox was firing me without any
cause or even claiming there was a cause, without any
violation of my contract or their rules. Because I had
left a trail of good behavior on the Dodgers store.
(35:05):
They were trying to enrage me and get me to
say something nasty that itself would be a violation of
my contract so they could outright fire me and keep
the money. And the money still on the contract was
about eight hundred thousand dollars. Now, after decades of contemplating this,
I am confident that I am no crazier than the
(35:27):
next guy, at least not the next guy in television.
But on my worst, craziest, least rational day, if you
said you have two choices, Alderman, you can blow up
these people who are firing you, and you can make
them look bad in a newspaper for a day and
then they'll fire you and keep all the money they
owe you. Or you can keep your big bazoo shut
(35:52):
for just seven months. You can keep the eight hundred
thousand dollars, and you can spend the summer doing whatever
the hell you want, and you can then spend the
rest of your natural life blowing these people up. If
that's the choice, I will always take the scenario that
gives me the eight hundred thousand dollars for doing nothing.
(36:14):
Always so. On January first, two thousand and two, after
the last Fox check cleared, I began making a professional
avocation out of attacking Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Business,
Fox Murdoch, Fox O'Reilly, Fox, Tucker Carlson, whatever. And I
got the eight hundred thousand dollars. But they're lingered for years,
(36:37):
this kind of academic question of whether Rupert Murdoch had
actually fired me for having followed the rules set out
by his own personal pr guy. As usual, these things
resolve themselves when you least expect them to. Murdoch was
speaking at a Dow Jones conference in Carlsbad, California, on
(36:57):
May twenty eighth, two thousand and eight, seven years to
the month they got rid of me, and a story
came across the wire with my name on it. The
guy interviewing him at this conference talked about whether there
should be dissenting voices on Fox quote news unquote, like
that guy who was killing it on MSNBC Keith Olderman. Now,
(37:19):
Murdoch barked, if fired him five years ago. He was crizy.
Timing was off, but there it was Rupert Murdoch confessing
in front of a crowd that he fired me personally,
the red badge of courage in quotes. I wondered if
it still pissed him off that he had to pay
(37:40):
me the eight hundred thousand dollars when I didn't take
the grievance bait. Three years after that, Murdoch said it
again like I hadn't heard it the first time. On
February first, twenty eleven, Rupert Murdoch was interviewed by his
business talking had Neil Cavudo, who for some reason asked
him if he would consider hiring me to put me
(38:00):
on Fox News. Now we fired him once. We don't
believe even firing people twice. Kaboodo replied, you called him
a nut lad he was a nut on. Well, we
had him on late night Fox Sports. There was never
any such show called late night Fox Sports. But never mind,
Rupe went on, It was impossible I fired him. He
(38:22):
was crazy, fired me for following his rules, and I
was the one who was crazy. Finally, speaking of crazy,
I have had for sixty three nearly sixty four years now,
a love hate relationship with the name Keith. But did
you know that Rupert Murdoch's real first name is also Keith,
(38:47):
but that rather than call himself Keith, he voluntarily chooses
to call himself Rupert. I mean, sure, my name is Keith,
but at least my name ain't freakin'. I mean, if
(39:19):
you're not going with Keith and your other given option
is Rupert, try something less embarrassing from outside that field.
I don't know, like Elon. Elon Murdoch done all the
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Here
the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced and
performed by Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel, who are
(39:40):
the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John
Phillip Shanel, guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray, produced
by Tko Brothers. Another Beethoven selections have been arranged and
performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music
is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, and it was
written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of the ESPN Inc.
(40:00):
Musical comments from Nancy fous The best baseball stadium organist
ever you today was Kenny Maine. Everything else is pretty
much my fault. So that's countdown for this the eight
hundred and thirty sixth 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.
(40:21):
The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Until 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
(40:43):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
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