It was easy to gloss over most of the material in today's New Yorker profile of Keith Olbermann. Namely, the revelation this his name was on the short list of candidates when, in 2005, Les Moonves and then-CBS News president Andrew Heyward (later replaced by Sean McManus) wanted to shake up the newscast following Dan Rather's exit, they reached out to Olbermann. Meeting at his Manhattan apartment, as the Countdown host was nearing the end of his MSNBC contract, he told the duo that he didn't imagine himself completely revamping the broadcast right away, but would do so gradually. And also: He argued networks waste far too much cash on anchors, who so often hand off to correspondents. (For what it's worth, CBS pays Katie Couric an estimated $15 million per year; Olbermann was looking for $4 million per year when he renegotiated with MSNBC.) As you probably surmised from the way history played out, Mr. Olbermann was not offered the job.

Some might find Olbermann’s frequent invocation of Murrow, and, especially, his appropriation of Murrow’s sign-off, wildly presumptuous. But when, in 2005, CBS was looking for a permanent replacement for Dan Rather network executives met with Olbermann twice about the prospect of his becoming the anchor of the “CBS Evening News.”

After Rather’s unhappy departure from CBS, the network’s president, Leslie Moonves, said that he wanted to blow up the “Evening News”—by which he meant, he later explained, that he wanted to do away with the program’s outmoded “broadcast of record” posture, and its accompanying burden of summarizing the world in twenty-two minutes each night. Moonves and Andrew Heyward, then the president of CBS News, held a secret meeting with Olbermann at his apartment, and asked how he would approach the “Evening News” job. Olbermann, who was nearing the end of his contract at MSNBC, said he thought that it was a waste for networks to spend so much money on their anchors, when they shared so much airtime with field correspondents. Olbermann said that he would, of course, be less freewheeling than he had been at “Countdown,” and that he would redirect the broadcast incrementally, beginning with a three-minute block at the end of each newscast to which he would apply his personal touch. “Maybe in a year’s time, after you’ve given me those three minutes to sort of reprogram, maybe I’ll get four or five,” Olbermann says now. “You don’t go in for the full revolution. You do not come on and do ‘Naked News.’ ”

The meeting ended, and Heyward was not convinced that Olbermann was the right choice for an institution where even the use of music in a news report, let alone voice impersonations by the anchor, is strictly forbidden. But soon afterward Heyward was replaced as news-division president by the head of CBS Sports, Sean McManus, who agreed to a second meeting with Olbermann, at CBS News headquarters on West Fifty-seventh Street. In the end, CBS hired Katie Couric—a decision, Olbermann likes to point out, that has not worked as well as had been hoped. (Couric consistently comes in third in the network ratings.)

Asked about the prospect of an Olbermann reign at “CBS Evening News,” Sandy Socolow, Walter Cronkite’s final executive producer, responded emphatically. “Oh, no, no, no, he’s not a newsman,” Socolow said. “He’s not a reporter. I’ve never seen anything that he’s done that was original, in terms of the information. It’s all derivative. I like him, I agree with his perspective, and I think he’s very, very good on television. But he’s not a newsman.” Socolow added, “Ten years ago, if he had done at CBS what he does every day on the air at MSNBC, he would have been fired by the end of the day.”

Olbermann himself thinks that he could succeed in the traditional nightly network-news slot. “I think it would not do any worse than the three that are out there now,” he says. “It would not get more than double the amount of protest that any of the shows have now.”

[New Yorker]