• Host of cable news channel MSNBC weeknight show Countdown With Keith Olbermann
• Former sportscaster for the cable sports network ESPN

Keith Olbermann is the host of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, an hour-long weeknight program on the cable news channel MSNBC.

Born in January 1959 in New York City, Olbermann grew up in upscale Westchester County, New York. His father was an architect, his mother a teacher. A sports enthusiast from an early age, at 14 Olbermann published his first book, The Major League Coaches.

Olbermann attended Cornell University's affiliated College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where he studied history and communications and managed the campus radio station. After graduating in 1979, he found work at UPI Radio Network and then RKO Radio in New York City.

In 1981 the fledgling Cable News Network (CNN) hired Olbermann as a sports anchor and reporter. In 1984 Olbermann quit CNN and spent the next eight years as a sports reporter at local television stations in Boston and Los Angeles.

In 1992 Olbermann was hired by the cable sports network ESPN, where he performed both on television and radio and was soon teamed with Dan Patrick as co-anchor of its flagship highlight show Sports Center. Olbermann, who had studied history as well as communications at Cornell, stood out as an intellectual at ESPN. He packed his reporting and commentaries with far-ranging references to history and literature. In 1995 he won a CableACE Award, and in 1997 he and Patrick co-authored the book The Big Show: Inside ESPN's "Sports Center."

While promoting this book, Olbermann appeared without ESPN's permission on the rival cable network Comedy Central and was suspended for two weeks as punishment. As Michael Freeman's book ESPN: The Uncensored History recounts, Olbermann also testified on behalf of several women who had charged the network with sexual harassment.

In 1997 Olbermann left ESPN for a $650,000 contract at NBC/MSNBC, where he worked as a substitute anchor for the NBC Nightly News, as an anchor of NBC Sports, and as host of the news and interview-oriented The Big Show With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. Olbermann's political views began to surface on his MSNBC show. On one occasion, he described Clinton Special Prosecutor Ken Starr as a "persecutor" whose face reminded him "of [Nazi] Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses."

As the sex scandals involving President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky saturated the headines, Olbermann grew weary of the news business. In late 1998 when Fox Sports News offered to buy out his NBC contract and pay him $1 million a year to be its main anchor, Olbermann agreed.

Olbermann in the new millenium also began writing for the leftwing online magazine Salon.com, where his articles criticized conservatives ranging from former Education Secretary Bill Bennett to the owner of the Fox News Channel and Fox Sports News, Rupert Murdoch.

In 2003 Olbermann left Fox Sports News and returned to MSNBC, where his show Countdown With Keith Olbermann was launched that April. Olbermann describes Countdown as centrist, a show that snipes and laughs at both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. But the shots Olbermann takes at those on the right are far more frequent and ferocious.

For example, during the 2004 presidential campaign, when a book by Democratic candidate John Kerry's fellow Vietnam Swiftboat veterans raised doubts about Kerry's honesty and claims of military heroism, Olbermann told his audience that a right-wing billionaire had bankrolled the book's publisher.

When CBS anchorman Dan Rather did a report attacking Republican President George W. Bush based on fabricated documents, Olbermann was the first national journalist to suggest, without any evidence, that these documents might have been created and planted by Bush Administration officials to discredit CBS. Democrat spokespeople quickly echoed Olbermann's baseless conspiracy theory.

When President Richard Nixon's onetime White House lawyer John Dean published his 2004 screed, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, Olbermann passionately promoted the book on his show. He compared it to George Orwell's novel 1984 and told his audience that Bush's policies were a first step "towards this totalitarian state that Orwell wrote about…."

When the Department of Homeland Security alerted Americans to evidence of a terrorist attack plan days after the close of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Olbermann preached to his audience: "History tells us Presidents have exaggerated threats to the public safety to gain political advantage…. Ask Lyndon Johnson. Ask William McKinley. Do we need to ask George W. Bush?"

From 2005 to August 2007, Olbermann, in addition to his Countdown duties, co-hosted an hour of the syndicated Dan Patrick Show on ESPN radio.

In January 2006, Olbermann interviewed author William Blum shortly after Osama bin Laden had praised Blum's Rogue State as a "useful" book. Blum attributed bin Laden's approval of his work to the al Qaeda leader's conviction that "anti-American terrorism arises from the behavior of U.S. foreign policy." Olbermann praised Blum for explaining the "logic behind the behavior behind Osama bin Laden."

On February 15, 2007, NBC News announced that Olbermann would contribute occasional "essays," i.e., commentary, to NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams. That hiring prompted the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell to write:

NBC just lurched further left politically with its choice of Keith Olbermann, a known 'liberal hero,' to provide occasional commentary on the Nightly News. Commentary, even liberal commentary, by itself is perfectly acceptable, but the problem is that Keith Olbermann is a dishonest commentator....

Mr. Olbermann has consistently misrepresented the facts on a variety of issues, including the Iraq war, the war against terrorism, homeland security, global warming, the Republican Party, President Bush, and on and on. For instance, Mr. Olbermann, without a shred of evidence, has even suggested that the White House uses the terror alert code to manipulate public opinion. That's not commentary. That's delusional paranoia.

Keith Olbermann not only consistently distorts truth, he does so while smearing conservatives he doesn't like with vile ad hominem attacks... NBC could have chosen any number of insightful, thoughtful, fact-centered liberals to provide commentary for the Nightly News. Instead, NBC chose a mean-spirited, truth-distorting leftist …

Also in 2007, Olbermann became co-host of NBC's Football Night in America with Bob Costas.

He continues to host Countdown With Keith Olbermann.