According to Stephen Spruiell:
Liberal bloggers are attributing the network’s decision to the fact that “the right complained enough,” and while I’d love to take some credit here, I think it had a lot more to do with Keith Olbermann’s outrageous behavior toward his colleagues during the week of the Democratic convention. What is most objectionable about Olbermann is not his politics but his attitude. He has to be a jerk about everything. By all accounts, his rising popularity went to his head and he started pulling the same stunts he is notorious for pulling at every other place he has worked: treating everyone around him like dirt and pushing the envelope further and further on the air.
Yes, I’d like to say conservatives had something to do with it, but the truth is probably closer to what a longtime MSNBC employee told me when I spoke to him for this NR cover story (I didn’t end up using the quote, but it’s a great one): “Sooner or later, Keith is going to collapse under the weight of his own insanity.” This isn’t a total collapse, of course — he’ll still have Countdown — but it’s a big setback for the man who nakedly aspires to be this generation’s Edward R. Murrow. And it happened a lot sooner than anyone thought.
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