It's 'Putdown With Keith Olbermann'
"Rita's dumber than a suitcase of rocks."
Dueling hosts Keith -Olbermann and Rita Cosby (below) could hand the network’s new chief, Dan Abrams, his first battle.
Now that Dan Abrams has given up his MSNBC show to run the third-place cable news outlet, he might want to focus on the rising tensions between two of his prime-time personalities: Keith Olbermann and Rita Cosby.
Olbermann, whose "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" airs weeknights at 8, apparently has precious little respect for Cosby, whose "Rita Cosby: Live & Direct" airs at 10 p.m.
"Rita's nice," Olbermann wrote to a fan from his MSNBC E-mail account, "but dumber than a suitcase of rocks." Yesterday Cosby retorted: "Keith got it wrong. I'm not that nice."
But a Cosby intimate gasped when informed of Olbermann's E-mail. "That's incredibly disappointing," he said.
An MSNBC spokesman didn't dispute the authenticity of the months-old E-mail, which came to light this week after the recipient shared it with this column on condition of anonymity.
In his E-mail, Olbermann was also dismissive of then-MSNBC President Rick Kaplan, who left the network last week with six months to go on his three-year contract.
"And Kaplan?" Olbermann wrote to his fan. "He was the producer of that special last night — now known as the Kanye West Show." It was a reference to an embarrassing incident during NBC's Hurricane Katrina telethon on which the popular rapper departed from his script to claim President Bush "doesn't care about black people."
Olbermann, who didn't comment yesterday, was said to be on vacation — though he managed to turn up Monday night at a book party for Al Gore at the American Museum of Natural History.
There, the media blog Jossip.com asked Olbermann — who was accompanied by "his self-described 'friend' Katie" — if he'll now be answering to Abrams.
"I don't answer to anybody," Olbermann insisted.
We'll see.
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