CONFIDER

MSNBC Almost Brought Back Olbermann to Replace Maddow

In this week’s Confider newsletter we reveal how MSNBC almost filled Maddow’s soon-to-be vacant time slot with her own former mentor—until Rachel killed the deal.

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This reporting appears as one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the media newsletter that pulls back the curtain to reveal what’s really going on inside the world’s most powerful navel-gazing industry. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

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To fill its upcoming Rachel Maddow void, MSNBC almost took a time machine back to the good old days of 2011.

Keith Olbermann, who shaped the network’s liberal voice before being canned more than a decade ago, was in lengthy discussions with NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell and news boss Cesar Conde to return to MSNBC and take over the key 9 p.m. time slot, the former Countdown host told Confider.

But any dream of an Olbermann reunion was squashed when Maddow—who recently signed a massive $30 million deal to work less and transition out of her nightly broadcast—stepped in to personally veto him as her successor.

“I offered to have her production company ‘produce’ the show. Would give her some proxy control and a fuckton of money but she and [former MSNBC chief-turned-consultant to Maddow’s production company] Phil Griffin refused,” Olbermann told Confider, claiming that the network also offered him a show in 2016.

“I do not expect to continue negotiations with the successors to this management team,” he added. “Management is worse than asleep at the switch.” MSNBC declined to comment in response.

Maddow’s rejection of Olbermann as her replacement is especially noteworthy considering the role he played in turning her from an Air America radio host into his protégé as an MSNBC regular and eventual star voice of the channel. While the pair were friendly during Olbermann’s glory days with the network, their relationship has soured in recent years.

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Olbermann may have gotten a laugh at MSNBC, however, when this weekend the network became the internet’s “main character” for a day after The Rachel Maddow Show was forced to delete a tweet and issue a groveling apology boosting a claim from Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, that Adolf Hitler didn’t kill “ethnic Germans.”

The offending post drew widespread criticism, including from the Auschwitz Memorial and media stars like Olbermann, who personally emailed the tweet to NBCU’s chief executive.

Last summer, Maddow signed a new deal with MSNBC after The Daily Beast first reported that she was considering leaving the network to spend more time with her family and start her own venture.

The new contract promised Maddow a jaw-dropping eight-figure annual salary to keep her in the NBC family through the 2024 election, as The Daily Beast reported. Her long-running 9 p.m. nightly broadcast is set to end this spring as part of her new arrangement, and Maddow is expected to transition into helping NBCU develop podcasts, documentaries, and other multimedia projects.

Maddow will undoubtedly re-emerge for special broadcasts, however, as she has done in recent weeks interrupting her “hiatus” to cover the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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Lachlan Cartwright

Andrew KirellEditor

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