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Politico...
Glenn Beck, Keith
Olbermann start over
By Keach Hagey
6/17/11
After years of generating both ratings and headaches for their
respective networks, Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are starting over
on smaller and riskier television platforms, their departures from
their prominent cable posts greeted with confident predictions from
their critics that the day when TV political debate was driven by
larger-than-life commentators may be over.
Beck and Olbermann are making a different bet – that the strength of
their personal brands will bring in viewers, no matter how obscure
their platforms, and that the control they will now have over their
shows will launch a whole new era of personality-driven programming.
“Glenn Beck and me, we’re in the same boat now,” Olbermann said in a
recent interview with Rolling Stone.
But just where that boat is headed is a matter of some dispute. Paul
Levinson, a professor of communications and media studies at Fordham
University, says Beck and Olbermann “will likely thrive in their new
environments,” but warns against interpreting their exits as a turning
point for Fox and MSNBC.
“I don’t think we’ve seen the high water mark of extreme points of view
on cable, because cable continues to want to seek people who are
different and authentic in their points of view,” he said. “They’re
playing with fire and they know it.”
The two talkers are going to very different gigs. Olbermann is set to
relaunch his MSNBC show, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” at 8 p.m. on
Monday on Al Gore’s Current TV. Beck, who is due to step down from his
eponymous Fox News show at the end of the month, will launch an
expanded, two-hour format, on a new, subscription-based internet
channel called GBTV in the fall.
But both are taking dead aim at their former employers from their old
time slots, and have hired producers from their former cable networks
to help them - Joel Cheatwood from Fox for Beck and David Sarosi from
MSNBC for Olbermann.
And both are out to refute the spin from MSNBC and Fox that big
personalities may bring high ratings, but also cause big headaches that
ultimately are not worth the trouble – particularly when those ratings
start to slide a little.
That view is backed up by polling - Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici pointed out
that roughly four times as many people dislike Olbermann as like him.
Beck, both more loved and more hated, showed a similar spread.
Still, it is hard to discount what they brought to their networks – and
what those networks have now lost.
Beck doubled ratings at Fox’s 5 p.m. hour soon after he came from HLN
in January 2009, pushing them to the unprecedented heights of more than
3 million viewers at his peak last year.
Olbermann grew his audience at MSNBC from an annual average of 350,000
the year “Countdown” debuted in 2003 to 1.3 million at the peak of his
coverage of the last presidential campaign. He built his 8 p.m. hour
into the highest-rated show on the network – albeit a network that
comes in well behind Fox News in the ratings – and showed MSNBC brass
how a left-leaning perspective could generate ratings across primetime.
Beck and Olbermann think those viewers will convey - “We’re going to
take MSNBC’s business away from them,” Olbermann told Rolling Stone –
and so will the profits.
Beck owns GBTV outright through his company, Mercury Radio Arts. By one
calculation, he’ll need only 40,000 subscribers at the $4.95 level to
make the same revenue he brought in from his $2 million Fox News
contract – though, of course, the costs of producing a television show
of the quality he is planning are quite high.
Read the rest of the story at Politico
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