NY Times Magazine-Questions for Keith Olbermann

MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann: David S. Holloway/NY Times

(Interview with Keith Olbermann conducted by Deborah Solomon for the NY Times Magazine)

Two days before his suspension from MSNBC, the anchor talked about his partisanship.

At his Rally to Restore Sanity, Jon Stewart complained about the shrieking tone of cable news. Were you watching when a montage juxtaposed footage from your news show with that of Glenn Beck’s?

I saw that. I was sitting at home, with my notebooks for the election, in that Saturday haze that anybody who does five shows is still in until the middle of the afternoon on Saturday. I was thinking: That’s odd. I wouldn’t think of myself in those terms. Why is my videotape there?

He characterized MSNBC as the lefty version of Fox News.

To present all this as the same is both unfair and injurious to the political system at the moment. One of the big flaws now is that there is all this noise on the right. When I yell there is a reason for it. There is a political and factual discernment behind it. I am not doing it gratuitously.

You wrote on Twitter that Stewart had jumped the shark. Are you suggesting his show is in decline?

I said he jumped a small shark. If he believes he has no political viewpoint, that’s ludicrous. For him to now say, ‘‘I’m not in the media, I’m not poised in this world of political expression, I never take gratuitous shots at people or go over the top and I’m not particularly pointed in one direction,’’ each of those things was ludicrous.

(Click here to read the full Keith Olbermann interview on the NY Times website.)