Gossip Gets Ugly

Several anonymous tipsters have criticized me for “ignoring” yesterday’s N.Y. Daily News column by Lloyd Grove. In the piece, Grove attacks “Krazy Keith” Olbermann for naming him the “Worst Person in the World” on Tuesday.

“How about some fair and balanced cable news coverage, or is Olby only covered when he looks good?,” one person wrote. “If you don’t post the Grove column you are a hypocrit,” another said, spelling the word hypocrite wrong.

These readers apparently didn’t notice that I have ignored the entire Olbermann/Grove spat. Last week, Grove wrote about an affair involving NBC Nightly News employees.

Then on Monday, Grove took Olbermann’s C-SPAN statements out of context, concluding that the MSNBC anchor “deeply distrusts the top brass at NBC and its parent company, General Electric.”

And on Tuesday, Grove reported on Alison Stewart‘s engagement to MSNBC VP Bill Wolff.

You’ll notice that I never posted any of this. To me, the most interesting thing about Grove’s NBC obsession was the fact that his fun and affable assistant, Katherine Thomson, used to work at MSNBC. I thought about pointing this out on the blog, but chose not to.

On Monday afternoon, Olbermann blogged about it, calling it an “extraordinary conflict of interest” that “wouldn’t have gotten past the editor of my 4th Grade Class Newspaper.”

Grove responded with some insults on Wednesday. Trying to avoid this story does not make me an “Olbermann sympathizer” or any of the nasty insults tossed my way via e-mail in the last 24 hours. It just demonstrates my desire to stay a little bit above it, whenever possible.