Keith Olbermann (placeholder)

Keith Olbermann (born January 27, 1959) is an American news anchor, commentator and radio sportscaster. He currently hosts Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, an hour-long nightly newscast that reviews the top news stories of the day along with political commentary by Olbermann. He also appears on The Dan Patrick Show on ESPN radio during the 2-3 PM EST hour.

Olbermann’s family moved to Westchester County from New York City, and he attended school at Hastings-on-Hudson before attending and graduating from the prominent Hackley School in Tarrytown alongside ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman. Olbermann then earned his Bachelor of Science degree in communications arts from Cornell University in 1979 while serving as sports director for WVBR, a student-run commercial radio station in Ithaca, New York. As a teenager, Keith was a prolific writer of articles about baseball card collecting, appearing in many of the sports card collecting periodicals of the mid-1970’s. He is credited in Sports Collectors Bible, a 1975 book by Bert Randolph Sugar, which is considered one of the important early books for card collectors.

Olbermann began his professional career at UPI and RKO Radio before joining then nascent CNN in 1981. In 1984, he briefly worked as a sports anchor at WCVB-TV in Boston, before heading to Los Angeles to work at KTLA and KCBS. His work there earned him eleven Golden Mike Awards, and he was named Best Sportscaster by the California Associated Press three times.

In 1997, Olbermann left ESPN to host his own primetime show on MSNBC, The Big Show. The news-variety program covered three or four topics in a one-hour broadcast. Olbermann also occasionally hosted the weekend edition of NBC Nightly News, and, along with Hannah Storm, co-hosted NBC Sports’ pre-game coverage of the 1997 World Series.

When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, The Big Show morphed into White House in Crisis. Olbermann became frustrated as his show was consumed by the Lewinsky story. In 1998 he stated that his work at MSNBC would “make me ashamed, make me depressed, make me cry.” He left MSNBC after 17 months to return to sportscasting.

In 1998, Olbermann joined Fox Sports Net as anchor and executive producer for The Keith Olbermann Evening News, a sportscast similar to SportsCenter, airing weekly on Sunday evenings. While at Fox, he again hosted the World Series as well as Fox Broadcasting’s baseball Game of the Week.

On June 17, 2000, Olbermann’s mother, Marie, was hit in the head with a baseball while attending a Yankees game, when Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch made an errant throw that flew into the stands.