Anchors Away! Keith and Chris Out at MSNBC

MSNBC has finally come to its senses and taken Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews off anchor duty -- and Olbermann's reaction perfectly illustrates why it was necessary to do so.

Throughout the election season, Olbermann and Matthews have co-anchored event coverage even though both function as opinion journalists in their primary roles at the network -- Olbermann as host of Countdown and Matthews as host of Hardball. MSNBC president Phil Griffin has said this arrangement worked because the two men "put on different hats" to anchor straight news coverage.

But no one seems to have briefed Olbermann on the whole hat-switching thing. He capped off two weeks of embarrassing convention hijinx by launching into a lecture on Thursday night after the Republican National Convention featured a tribute to the victims of 9/11. Olbermann decreed the video "inappropriate" and exploitative.

According to The New York Times and The Washington Post, that character break led directly to this weekend's decision to have David Gregory anchor all upcoming election coverage.

Olbermann claims he initiated the conversation about taking himself out of the anchor chair -- but he also tells the Times, "I found it ironic and instructive that I could have easily said exactly what I did say, exactly when I did say it, if I had been wearing a different hat, and nobody would have taken any issue."

But there's nothing the least bit ironic about it, and if it was "instructive" then Olbermann knows frighteningly little about his chosen profession. The divide between news and editorial is one of the fundamentals of journalism. Some people are able to move back and forth across that divide, taking care not to allow their personal views to color their news reportage. Olbermann is evidently not one of those people.

Incidentally, the Times says Olbermann has three years left on his contract, and NBC wants to re-up it through 2013. Here's a prediction: No way is Olbermann still at MSNBC in five years. This is a guy who loves to leave jobs in a mushroom cloud of righteous indignation. One or two more pirouettes by NBC management like the one that happened this weekend and he is out of there.

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