Three More Kaplan/Olbermann Perspectives

> “Rick Kaplan doesn’t know me from his car-waxer, but that didn’t stop him from going all postal on me at the Republican National Convention in 2000,” Randy Lilleston writes in a letter to Romenesko. “I was working for CNN.com at the time, and Kaplan came stomping into my work space and started a loud and obscenity-laced tirade because I had not published a web graphic plugging CNN’s TV coverage.” But there was an upside: “Thanks to that experience, I gained dozens of new friends at CNN. It turned out there was a large a club of co-workers who had been Kaplan-bombed…”

> From a trusted producer at MSNBC: “I had heard all of these stories of Kaplan losing his temper in the past, and was expecting a raging bull” when I came to the network. “He has been just the opposite. Kaplan teaches and educates and is a class act.” The producer says Kaplan’s reaction to Olbermann was two-fold: “He it was obvious that Rick cared about his friend Peter Jennings, and he didn’t like the graphic detail and ‘all about me’ ego of Keith. Rick was 100% right on this one, period.”

> “Whether or not what Olbermann said or described was gross or not, his intentions were good, and that can’t be said for too many in the news business nowadays,” a CNNer writes in.

Several other e-mailers, who say they used to work with Kaplan, said they use words like “humiliating,” “horrible temper,” and “classic A-type material.”