Keith Olbermann Takes On … Everything

If you firmly believe reporters never should share their personal views, Keith Olbermann is definitely not the newsman for you.

"Mr. Bush, the question is no longer, 'What are you thinking,' but rather, 'Are you thinking at all?'" he said in a now famous commentary.

That diatribe against the president and the war in Iraq spiked the ratings of Olbermann's show, "Countdown." Its viewership is up 85 percent in the last year.

"Funny things happen sometimes," he told 48 Hours correspondent Susan Spencer. "The wages of sin are sometimes not what you expect."

In his case, the "wage of sin" for being outspoken, opinionated and irreverent, is "Countdown," a one-hour rollercoaster ride of a newscast every weeknight on MSNBC. It's not just politics; Olbermann counts down the day's top stories, from soup to nuts — the whole wacky world as he sees it.

His background hardly explains the wackiness. He grew up in the New York City suburbs. His dad was an architect and his mom was a schoolteacher, but he did pick up their take on politics.

"There wasn't any particular political conversation going on. There was a kind of broad-based assumption that they were all idiots," Olbermann said.

He picked up his mother's take on his other passion, baseball.

"My father detested sports — had no interest in it whatsoever," he said. "I would go to Yankee games with my mother, and we were the baseball fans."

But it was his father who accidentally steered him down his current path. His father told him he could listen to baseball games late at night on the radio, only if the lights are off and the room was dark.

"That's gonna inspire any kid's imagination," Olbermann said. "And so, this took me to far off, Kansas City, in my mind. Exotic places like Washington, D.C. And I became a fan of the announcers, as much as of the players."

In 1992, after stints in Los Angeles and Boston, Olbermann made it to sports nirvana: ESPN and "SportsCenter." However, it wasn't providing everything he really wanted out of his career.

"When you're actually on the air, and doing what you have sort of trained your entire career to do, obviously that part is exhilarating, but there were some drawbacks to it," he said. "One of them being, 'When are we going to talk about something besides sports?'"

After leaving ESPN in 1997 he bounced between news and sports until 9/11. Olbermann, who lives in Manhattan, was sleeping when it happened and didn't learn about it until he heard a voicemail from a friend asking if he was alright. A friend who ran a radio station in Los Angeles asked Olbermann to go on the air.

"So, I did. And, for 40 days, I was their street reporter," he said. "Best kind of therapy that you could get, as you know."

That therapy won him awards and swung the career pendulum back to news and eventually to "Countdown."

"You need to make a newscast that looks like life," he said. "Very serious, very angry, very stupid, very silly, very snarky — very much about pop culture."

The nightly audio and video assault includes his pick of "The Worst Person in the World" — frequently his arch enemy, conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly. There is also "Oddball," the day's catch of weird video. Whipsawing to the serious, he ends each show with a reminder of the unpopular war in Iraq, and borrows the somber sign-off of his hero Edward R. Murrow — "Good night and good luck" — and then seems to make fun of the whole exercise when he crumples his notes and throws them at the camera.

"Countdown" was flying beneath the ratings radar for several years until last August when a speech by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent Olbermann into a fury.

"He said, essentially, that anyone who was critical of the war on terror, or the war in Iraq, or, indeed, of the administration's policies, was equivalent to those who appeased Hitler in the '30s," he said. "I'm not a big fan of being called a Nazi appeaser, or even a parallel to a Nazi appeaser. I took that personally."

He was mad as hell and not going to take it any more, he said. And he didn't. He wrote what became the first of his "special comments."

For liberals, desperate for a white hot star to answer cable's popular conservatives, this was a gift. But Olbermann insists he's just saying what a lot of people really think.

"If a Democrat did those things, I would be out there just as ferociously," Olbermann said. "I don't think the Democrats are automatically right. I have many personal conservative views, I have many personal liberal views. I'm concerned about the freedoms that we say that we are protecting."

Not that such weighty concerns ever are allowed to crowd out sports. He continues a daily hour-long radio show on ESPN, and away from the microphones, baseball still rules. Olbermann, who began collecting at four, is one of the country's foremost authorities on baseball cards and is a consultant to the Topps baseball card company. He's got cards that even they have never seen before. His collection dates back to 1863.

But "Countdown"'s popularity has made it the priority today, and Olbermann shows no sign of pulling his punches. Spencer threw out a few names to see how he would react.

Alberto Gonzales:

"I'd really like to see his diploma," Olbermann said.

Laura Bush:

"Very nice lady. In a knife fight, I think she'd get me. I think she'd kill me. She's surprisingly capable," he said.

Paris Hilton:

"If she didn't exist we'd have to make her up," he said.

Hillary Clinton:

"I think she went to — to 'Improve Hillary Clinton' boot camp in the first six weeks of this year," Olbermann said. "I think she's trying real hard"

Dick Cheney:

"He scares the living crap out of me," he said.

Which may be how many people feel about Keith Olbermann.