Salon has interviewed Keith Olbermann. Here’s a couple of his answers to questions on the Bush Administration’s statements on terrorism and on the tone of his commentaries.
You’re obviously rather upset with the statements that President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other officials have been making recently about the war on terror.
It, in many respects, is accomplishing — as I said on the air the other night — that which the terrorists are supposed to be looking to do, which is to divide us, make us fearful, change our way of life. I believe Mr. Bush said they hate us for our liberty, and the government seems to be intent on reducing many of those freedoms and liberties. It’s been building; this is not the first time I’ve said anything about this, about the administration or about its conduct. Pretty much this has been constant since this newscast went on the air. As they have wandered further from reality and our history and what I think all of us — liberals and conservatives and everybody else — were taught as far as our way of life. The further they wander away, the harder you have to reach out to try and grab them and pull them back.
Why did you decide to start making your commentaries so harsh?
I didn’t, actually. These are just the first ones — well, I wouldn’t say the first ones — that got prominent play. I did one a year ago that was necessitated by the administration’s reaction to Katrina, in particular the Homeland Security secretary’s rather Freudian slip, when he said, “Louisiana is a city that is largely under water,” which I thought summarized their whole problem with it. I think that was five or six minutes long.
There is a public platform afforded to you. If you spend your entire time on it trying to bend the ordinary rules of news to encourage people to ask what’s really going on, if you do that nonstop, it necessarily becomes an act. You really should have that weapon close to you, but you should keep it holstered as much as possible. If you don’t have it, or you don’t ever use it, you might as well be a trained monkey doing the news, which unfortunately is the case in a lot of places.
My skepticism — I think that’s the right word, as opposed to “cynicism” — toward the administration has been evident from — I think the day it started was May 1 of 2003, the flight-suit story. I can remember interviewing several people that day and saying, “Isn’t this a little premature? Isn’t this a little theatrical? Isn’t this a little staged?” and being assured that my opinion was ridiculous and alone and this was George Bush’s historic moment, all the rest of that.
I’m not saying I come out and beat anybody over the head on a regular basis, but when it’s merited — it sounds almost like a tautology, almost too simple to be true — when it’s merited, this is the sort of stuff people on television ought to be doing, and it doesn’t matter who’s running the country. The country belongs to the people, not to the government that happens to be in charge at the moment. We should remind ourselves of that fact periodically.
