Marvin Kitman hails Keith Olbermann as Murrow II
Sep 25th, 2007 by Paul Moor
So nice to discover (in the latest issue of The Nation) this all-out tribute to my own greatest stateside television enthusiasm since I fled the country twelve years ago. I know him only thanks to occasional snippets that come my way via the Internet, but they’ve sufficed to make me an all-out fan; I share Kitman’s admiration for what he calls Olbermann’s passion.
I have no inkling as to what extent Mr. Kitman has become a household word over yonder in my original homeland, so in the event that you know as little about him as I did until an hour or so ago, let me relay this autobiographical snippet:
The Marvin Kitman, to whom this web site is dedicated, is the Famous Marvin Kitman. TV critic for New York Newsday from 1969 , his column was printed three times a week and was syndicated nationally by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. It was seen, if not read, by hundreds of thousands. The column, in which he modestly listed himself as the “Executive Producer,” was called “The Marvin Kitman Show.” For 32 years and 6,641 performances, it lasted longer than many other shows he had written about, i.e. David Frost, Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson….
To whet your appetite for his Nation article, let me extract this passage from the body of it:
. . . In short, what CBS (and all the others) need is a new Ed Murrow. Good news! There’s already one out there on the launchpad who has demonstrated his qualifications. I’m talking about Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. He has the journalistic chops and the mind, heart, instincts and courage.
Olbermann, who anchors a one-hour nightly news show on MSNBC called Countdown With Keith Olbermann, closes his show every night by saying “1,547th [for instance] day since Mission Accomplished in Iraq,” an hommage to Ted Koppel’s “Iran Hostage” coverage, which evolved into Koppel’s late-night ABC news show Nightline (the MSNBC show was originally Countdown: Iraq). Then Olbermann throws his crumpled script at the camera, which shatters, a simulated digital effect (something Koppel never did).
“Our charge for the immediate future is to stay out of the way of the news,” he explained when the show debuted on March 31, 2003. “News is news. We will not be screwing around with it,” a reference to Bill O’Reilly, his rival over at Fox News in the 8 pm time slot. “It will not be a show in which opinion and facts are juxtaposed so as to appear to be the same.”
Olbermann, who looks more like a high school teacher than a glitzy TV anchor, is the one who cuts and dices the news of the day into five segments, what he and his staff consider the day’s top stories, illustrated with news reports from NBC News correspondents, interviews with newsmakers, whom he treats courteously, interspersed with signature witty interjections (calling 9/11 Rudolph “Giuliani’s red badge of courage”), further interrupted by new ways to look at the news….
You can read The Nation‘s entire article – which I whole-heartedly recommend – by clicking here.
