More on Keith Olbermann

Josh offers his take over at TPM:

I find the Keith Olbermann story bizarre, on both sides but mainly on MSNBC's. First, political contribution records are the most public thing in the world for anyone who is even somewhat in the public eye, certainly for someone who courts controversy. So political giving strikes me as something done entirely in the open for someone of Olbermann's stature. On the one hand that sounds like MSNBC is flipping out about something that must have been all but an open secret. On the other, if this is MSNBC's policy, why was Olbermann openly flouting it?

Second, MSNBC's policy forbids employees from making donations to political candidates, unless they ask for permission to do so, in which it seems usually to be granted. That seems to me to undercut the principle behind the policy.

But of course all of this pales behind the larger point which is that Olbermann's job at MSNBC is to be an extremely opinionated commentator on politics. And he's the centerpiece (along with Maddow and more equivocally, Matthews) behind the business strategy of making MSNBC the liberal cable news/chat network. (How they square that with simultaneously having a more traditional and by the books NBC News is something they clearly have yet to work out.) But when you take that all into account, seeing him now all but canned over a handful of individual political contributions because he's compromised the objectivity he's supposed to bring to the job sounds like a bit of a joke.

Josh does offer more insight into this at TPM.