CurrentTV Fires Keith Olbermann

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CurrentTV Fires Keith Olbermann

Tim Groseclose · March 31, 2012 at 1:54am

This just in: CurrentTV fired Keith Olbermann. The station will not even let Olbermann appear on his show tonight to sign off. Instead, Elliot Spitzer will take his place.

CurrentTV said that Olbermann failed to honor the terms of his contract.

According to many sources, Olbermann's salary was $10 million a year. Meanwhile, his show was only getting about 50,000 viewers per night.

In contrast, according to Newsweek, Bill O'Reilly makes about $20 million a year (not counting outside salary such as books and speeches). The viewership for his show is about 3 million per night, and it is 5 million if you count the two times it is re-broadcast each night. (However, Fox plans to discontinue one of the re-broadcasts and instead begin Fox & Friends an hour earlier.)

This means that Olbermann's viewer-per-salary-dollar was about fifty times that of Bill O'Reilly. I suspect that Joel Hyatt, who used to teach at Stanford Business School (while I taught there), realized that Olbermann was not a good investment. He and co-founder Al Gore were probably looking for a reason to fire Olbermann, regardless how well Olbermann fulfilled the letter of his contract.