Keith Olbermann and Bill Clinton Exchanged Regrets Over 'Ceaseless' Lewinsky Coverage

Tim Graham
October 11th, 2014 2:00 PM
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Huffington Post media correspondent Michael Calderone reported on the latest batch of documents released from the Clinton Presidential Library. It shows that not only did MSNBC host Keith Olbermann beat his breast across the media in 1998 about his overflowing guilt over covering the Monica Lewinsky-presidential perjury story. He actually wrote to the president about it.

A presidential aide named R. Scott Michaud referred to an e-mail from the MSNBC star: “Keith Olbermann has written to POTUS [President of the United States] apologize for, ‘whatever part I may have played in perpetuating this ceaseless coverage (of the Lewinsky story)…. I’ll be heading back to my previous career in sports as quickly as possible.’”

Olbermann did that, spending a few years at Fox Sports Net until he returned in 2003 to show no remorse whatsoever in mercilessly assaulting President Bush as the worst kind of war criminal. 

The document also shows Clinton aides planned a warm presidential reply:

Dear Keith:

Thanks so much for your kind message. I’ve been touched by the many expressions of encouragement and support I have received from friends across the country.

I’m grateful you got in touch with me, and I send you my very best wishes.

Sincerely, POTUS.

In a 1998 commencement speech at Cornell, Olbermann made a big show of how much he hated the Lewinsky story, suggesting the era was worse than the McCarthy era, which is really saying something when you're a hyperbolic liberal: "There are days now when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depessed, makes me cry. And it occurs to me that this moral sensor has been fine-tuned within the walls of this campus. Forty years ago the great news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow got up in front of the convention of the radio and television news directors and announced that without moral direction all this great medium would become was 'wires and lights in a box,' and there are days when I wish it would still be even that idealistic."

Olbermann typified the media coverage that year: the volume was large, and the tone was extremely sympathetic to Clinton throughout. They really felt the pain of President Feel Your Pain.

Here's how the document looked in a tweet:

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