Report: Keith Olbermann spent two years lobbying for an MSNBC comeback, with an eye toward replacing Chris Hayes

Puck News

The Daily Beast recently reported that Olbermann was in talks to temporarily replace his protégé Rachel Maddow during her months-long hiatus. Turns out Olbermann has been lobbying to return to MSNBC for two years, according to emails obtained by Puck News' Dylan Byers, who worked as a media reporter for NBC News until last fall. Olbermann sent the emails to Jeff Shell, who became CEO of NBC Universal in 2019. The pair have known each other since the late 1990s, when Shell was the president of Fox’s cable networks and Olbermann was a Fox Sports anchor. "In Shell’s ascension, Olbermann saw an opportunity to engineer a return to the halcyon days of the mid-to-late aughts, when, as host of Countdown, he was MSNBC’s marquee primetime star and one of the most powerful figures in American political media—a pre-Maddow Maddow of the now largely forgotten post-Iraq, Bush years," says Byers. "So began nearly two years of emails, which I obtained today, in which Olbermann repeatedly urged the executive to reinstate him at MSNBC and Shell repeatedly led the former host to believe that he wanted to bring him back to the network—and that it would just take a matter of time." Olbermann particularly wanted to take over Chris Hayes' All In timeslot, writing in an email to Shell: “Your 8 p.m. show is dying of thirst during a flood.” As Mediaite notes, All In hasn't had good ratings, not even in the demo.