The Most Honest Man in News

Audience response was positive, so Olbermann began hitting the Bush administration even harder. Scathing commentaries, directly inspired by broadcast legend Edward R. Murrow, became a regular feature on Countdown. As in Network, momentarily losing it seems to have paid off. Since August, the show's nightly audience has increased by sixty-three percent, with Olbermann proving especially popular in the key demographic of twenty-five-to-fifty-four-year-olds. The long-struggling MSNBC, meanwhile, became the only one of the four cable-news networks to post an increase in viewership last year. (Fox News, by comparison, saw its prime-time viewership decline by twenty percent, though it remains far and away the ratings leader in cable news.)

"That scene from Network where Howard Beale is walking down the street in his pajamas, mumbling to himself -- that's not me," Olbermann insists. "I'm not in a state of perpetual outrage. But I don't think I've ever taken a position on the air that I didn't feel strongly about. What I do is not some kind of performance designed to create an image for myself, or to create false anger in people. The difference between me and O'Reilly is, I will shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater if there's a fire. I think Bill would shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater to hear the sound of his own voice."

On a recent weekday, Olbermann meets me for lunch at the Parker Meridien Hotel in midtown Manhattan. He's tall (nearly six-four) and already dressed for the evening's broadcast (in a blue pinstriped suit). "I'm going to sit with my back to the wall, like we're in The Godfather," he says. He's only half-kidding, having just received his second death-threat letter since September. (The first contained a white powder that turned out to be soap.) In a more absurd vein, Geraldo Rivera recently challenged Olbermann to a fight, calling him a "midget." (In 2003, Olbermann reported on how Rivera gave away U.S. troop positions while covering the war in Iraq.) Olbermann responded by pointing out that he is seven inches taller than Rivera. "Geraldo, you should not give me a hard time," he added. "I can still remember when you were a big deal . . . when I was a kid."

I bring up the general impression people have of Olbermann -- that he will say anything, that he does not give a fuck. "Yeah, but I've always gotten that," he says. "Twenty years ago, when I was doing four minutes of sports on local television in Los Angeles, someone wrote an article in which the premise was how at least fifty percent of what I did was a satire of television. Like, 'Look how ridiculous this is, me sitting here. And you sitting on the other end, watching me -- what are you doing that for?' I think that's always been my attitude."

After joking about how the menu contains a number of desserts disguised as entrees, Olbermann orders a Belgian waffle with cream and berries. "The first time I came in here," he says, "I was looking for granola." When I laugh, he says, "I'm not kidding." When the waffle arrives, he cuts it in half, then cuts the halves into a number of roughly equal-size smaller pieces, which he then individually daubs with cream. He speaks with a similar fastidiousness, never dropping his precise broadcasting-school enunciation.

Now forty-eight, Olbermann grew up in Westchester, a wealthy suburb of New York. His father was an architect who designed malls and stores. "There was a time when all but four or five of the Baskin-Robbins stores in the United States were his," Olbermann notes. As a kid, Olbermann was an obsessive baseball fan who listened to games in his bedroom on the radio after his parents ordered the TV off and the lights out. "That was a mistake," he says, "because it would just heighten your sense of being there, as someone described these faraway places like Kansas City. Fifty percent of baseball fans over the age of forty became fans exactly that way." By age eight, he had decided on a career: announcer for the Yankees.

He entered Cornell at sixteen, majoring in communications and working at the college radio station. "I was always counter-counterculture," Olbermann says. "I was the last kid with short hair. I went to a private high school, and a month after I got there, they eliminated jackets and ties. I was the kid that said, 'I kind of liked the jacket.' So I kept wearing it for the next four years. I've since controlled it, being so contrarian. But for a while it was really strong: 'I'm not listening to rock & roll, because everyone else is.' I listened to comedy, news. The Beatles were always sacrosanct, but after that, it was always like, 'Well, that's a bad impression of the Beatles' or 'That's the name of the band? Oh, I don't think so.' " (He's since come around to rock: He and his girlfriend of nine months, Katy Tur, a 2005 graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, recently caught Patti Smith's sixtieth-birthday show in New York.)