Stanley “May Soon Lose Her ‘Situation'”

Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann offered “today’s top three new nominees for ‘The Worst Person In The World.'” And guess who was #3? Alessandra Stanley. That’s right, Olbermann came to the defense of Tucker Carlson, who was critiqued by the “TV writer or critic or something — it’s hard to tell what — of The New York Times.” Olbermann said: “As her latest article suggests, if she keeps passing off that many dubious opinions as anonymous facts, she may soon lose her…situation.”

In an e-mail to TVNewser, Olbermann says: “I’ve dealt with more TV critics than most given my careers in sports and news, and have maintained at least mutual respect with 99% of them, and all of them in the Times I’ve ever known. But there’s literally a handful of critics who believe that their own hunches about motives and personal reactions are actually omniscience of some kind, or ESP. The Couric piece was like that; now she’s showing the same clairvoyance in this hatchet job on Tucker.

This is to say nothing of the ‘damned-if-you-do’ quality of the thing. For years the primary complaint against MSNBC in the press was, it never gave new shows any chance — now somebody’s writing in the NYT that we should cancel a three-week old show.”