• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 3, 2015

Another day, another Keith Olbermann suspension -- followed by a return to the air and a long-winded, self-referential speech.

This particular suspension lasted a week, ending yesterday with Keith’s return to his afternoon show on ESPN2 titled simply “Olbermann.”

As he has done before, he opened the show with a statement about the controversy that got him in trouble this time. Typically, it was a very complicated statement that twisted and turned for nearly seven minutes (a substantial chunk of airtime for a show that is only a half-hour in length).

It was partly an explanation and also an apology (sort of) for denigrating Penn State students on Twitter last week, and in the process, appearing to criticize their efforts to raise money for a pediatric cancer charity. Olbermann says his criticism of the charity was inadvertent.

But it was really a speech about Olbermann himself, who seems to write these things with an eye toward demonstrating to the world how smart he is.

This particular oration was constructed with complicated sentences that dipped and rose, and ebbed and flowed, and steered circuitously over, under and around topics, issues and subject matter -- beginning precariously, if not mysteriously, with a florid metaphor in which Keith likened spring-training batting practice to the world of social media with specific attention paid to Twitter, whence this controversy first sprang (or is it “sprung”?).

“[Twitter] can wind up making it seem that you have just attacked, belittled, marginalized, trivialized, joked about, or called ‘pitiful’ [a word he used in one of the tweets] a cause that has been for years as close to your own heart as your lungs are,” went one such sentence (ending awkwardly with the word “are”).

I’ll say this for Olbermann: his pompous verbosity -- which, when you get right down to it, is Olbermann’s “act” -- almost never lacks for entertainment value, whether or not his speeches are completely comprehensible. You can watch yesterday’s example here. 

If many people were not aware that Olbermann has a daily show on ESPN2 (he’s been back with ESPN since 2013) -- airing weekdays at 5 p.m. Eastern -- then many people know it now. It’s an example of the old adage, which actually does not apply everywhere but seems to apply to Keith, that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Olbermann is 56, and has had a career riddled with controversy and conflict, including various firings, suspensions, lawsuits (threatened or otherwise) and on-air feuds with competitors (Bill O’Reilly) and non-competitors (Pat Sajak, among others). And yet, despite the tumult that seems to stay with him wherever he goes, Keith is almost always gainfully employed.

At one week in length, this latest suspension was three days longer than the four-day suspension from MSNBC he served in November 2010. Remember that one? Olbermann was MSNBC’s top-rated personality at the time, but he ran afoul of rules embedded deep inside the NBC News employee handbook that prohibited staffers from donating money to political candidates, something he had done.

So MSNBC punished him with an “indefinite” suspension that suddenly -- and definitely -- ended after only four days (two of which were a weekend). 

However, MSNBC let him go a few months later anyway, in January 2011. He then turned up on Al Gore’s Current TV, a gig that lasted until he parted company with Current in March 2012. Not one to go quietly – or do anything quietly -- Olbermann went on the “Letterman” show and, in an interview with Dave, indicated that the producers and executives he worked with at Current didn’t know the first thing about making television shows.

But despite this sort of behavior that, for most of us, would constitute the kind of career bridge-burning that most people would advise against, Keith was hired by both ESPN (from which he was once fired) and TBS (where he hosts the network’s coverage of post-season baseball playoffs).

I even once had a feud long ago with Keith that had something to do with something he said about the newspaper I once worked for, and he and I went at it one afternoon on some pre-Twitter social media forum – perhaps a journalism or sports chat room of some kind.

But I never felt angry at him (and some time later I appeared on his “Countdown” show on MSNBC to talk about some other subject and I doubt he even remembered that we had feuded).

I always feel it’s refreshing when that rare public personality dares to come out and say exactly what’s on his or her mind without regard to the consequences. Of course, for a journalist on the TV beat, a personality such as Keith Olbermann is like a gift that keeps on giving.

So thank you, Keith. And for what it’s worth, I now know when to watch you on ESPN2 -- something I did not know until yesterday.