Tom Brokaw: MSNBC Will Be Just Fine Without Olbermann

January 31st, 2011 1:53 PM

Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune interviewed former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, and asked the question: Are NBC and MSNBC better off  now that Keith Olbermann is gone? "You're not going to get me to go there," Brokaw said. With a little prodding, he said he believes MSNBC will do just fine.

"All of our component parts — NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC — are much bigger than one player, and I include myself in that," Brokaw said. "If I went away tomorrow, NBC News would still be the dominant news division in America. There ain't none of us who is irreplaceable."

But knowing Brokaw's public feelings that Olbermann had "gone too far" in celebrating Obama, it's not hard to read the Tom-won/Keith-lost vibe in his comments:

 

"Listen, we're better off than (ABC and CBS) because we do have cable," Brokaw said. "Where it got sticky is when our commentators were anchoring political coverage. Those are, in some ways, incompatible roles. We worked our way through that."

And also in this passage:

"There are a lot of planets out there, and some are colliding with one another," he said. "Some of them are drifting too close to the sun and burning up. Others seem to be supporting a different kind of life-form than anybody would have expected."

Brokaw scolded Olbermann several times in 2008 for going too far. Before the New Hampshire primary, he scolded MSNBC’s Obama fans to stay out of “the business of making judgments before the polls are closed and trying to stampede, in effect, the process.”

He told Peter Boyer of The New Yorker that he sometimes felt like the “hall monitor at NBC News.”The day after the New Hampshire primary, [Chris] Matthews asserted that Hillary Clinton owed her election as senator to public sympathy for her in light of her husband's sexual peccadilloes. "It was completely out of line," Brokaw said. "And Keith took it to another level," he added, with a commentary where he told Bush to "shut the hell up." Matthews was “completely out of line,” and Olbermann was worse, the retired anchorman clearly said.

Brokaw frowned on the set as Hillary Clinton folded her campaign, and he declared there were “two remarkable stories” in the party nominees, and Olbermann inserted that Hillary was still trying to “shoehorn” her way into attention: “I think that's unfair, Keith. I don't think she shoe-horned her way in."In a Denver forum before the Democratic convention, when Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell called MSNBC "the official network of the Obama campaign," Brokaw expressed dismay and agreement at what was then MSNBC’s prime-time political anchorman team: "I think Keith has gone too far. I think Chris has gone too far.”