Trump hater and former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann wrote a column this week, telling his old network exactly what to do during the second term of President-elect Trump. Step one, he outlined, would be to fire two channel co-hosts for trying to find common ground with Trump.
In a piece for Variety, Olbermann demanded that MSNBC not try to moderate for the second Trump era like several other outlets have stated they plan to do. Instead, he told the network to lean even further into anti-Trump, progressive content.
“Stay the course. The audience is exhausted and needs a break. It’ll be back — and Resistier than ever. Suffer the ratings trough,” he declared.
Olbermann began the piece with a demand for the network to fire Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the co-hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago following his election victory to re-establish communication between the two parties.
Prominent liberals have skewered the co-hosts for the move, characterizing it as them “kissing Trump’s ring.” Olbermann saw it as enough reason for the channel to axe them, writing, “I mean, obviously you have to fire Mr. and Mrs. Scared-Bro.” Olbermann added, “However: Continue their banal but largely benign political coffee klatch show without them and their insistence we all join their MSNVichy. Nobody will remember they were ever there.”
When the co-hosts first announced their meeting with Trump, Olbermann ripped them on X, posting, “BREAKING NEWS: I TOLD YOU SO @joenbc and @morningmika – Trump collaborators. Not a word Mr. and Mrs. Vichy Quisling say can ever be trusted again – not that those words ever should have been trusted. They are confidence tricksters – and grifters.”
In the column, he wrote that MSNBC should not moderate because “the next money is coming from more fervent opposition to MAGA.” He insisted that viewership has declined among outlets looking to slow down their anti-Trump coverage.
“Wasn’t the Scarborough disaster (60% of the demo audience gone in three days) instructive enough? Did you not notice CNN going from fact-based criticism of Trump’s madness to hours of cacophonous shouting, and sinking to whatever is the next level down from irrelevance?”
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He continued asking, “Did the quarter of a million canceled Washington Post subscriptions not tell you something? Or the exodus from Twitter/X? What do you think happened to all these news consumers? That they were raptured?”
Olbermann attempted to remind MSNBC executives that the channel is the “only liberal candy store still open” and that they could have a “monopoly” on liberal news content if they just embraced it.
“These other supposed bastions of journalism have left you a near monopoly. And MSNBC only exists today because the last time NBC was handed a near monopoly, your management ancestors said, ‘A hundred million in profits from Olbermann’s liberal show? I guess we’ll take it. If we have to,’” he said.
Later in the column, the pundit dragged MSNBC executives for not taking their own content seriously enough and thinking about ways of bringing in conservative audiences.
“Generation after generation of NBC Executive Idiots viewed politics as nothing more than a soda brand and believed there was some additional audience — undecided or right wing — that they could add to the present one if only they also offered a different flavor called ‘New MSNBC,’” he wrote, adding, “The new flavor invariably turns out to be turnip.”
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While insisting on keeping the far-left formula, he suggested some direction. “Your primetime audience doesn’t want new faces; it wants comfort food — so refresh the menu and decor. Scuttle those daytime shows… and replace them with the morning formula, only with different sets and different titles.”
He advocated for new, committed progressive hosts, like The Nation’s Elie Mystal — who has been a frequent guest on the network — as well as even changing MSNBC’s name.
“Change the damn name of the network! Use the acronym ‘N.E.W.S.’ Or ‘American News Network.’ Or how about a nice, self-explanatory ‘F Trump TV’?”
Olbermann concluded the column stating that if MSNBC implements some of these changes, it will get the “kind of profits only a monopoly can provide,” as well as “non-cash virtues like moral force and ethics and journalism and patriotism and liberty.”
“The bullies don’t stop hitting you because you’re nice to them. They stop hitting you when you knock them out cold.”
MSNBC did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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