More than any other news show on cable, MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" is us.
This has less to do with the host than the format, which is all about ranking things and listing things, prioritizing information in the way we've become acclimated to consume it: as somebody's -- anybody's -- best-of.
Olbermann, the host of "Countdown" since its inception in 2003, tonight moderates a Democratic presidential debate in Chicago sponsored by the AFL-CIO amid a year of improved ratings for "Countdown" that has seen one of its competition (no, not Bill O'Reilly, but CNN's Paula Zahn) drummed out of the race.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the former sports guy comes from a world of list-obsession plays of the day, players of the year and teams of the decade. Five years after his last full-time sports gig at Fox Sports Net, Olbermann has come to symbolize the quirky omniscience that broadcast news might very well demand in the future.
But it's the structure of "Countdown," which averaged 721,000 viewers in July, a bump for the show, that seems so savant-like.
The form does what CBS tried to do when it hired Katie Couric: It makes news feel like pop culture. Nick Hornby did this with love in his novel "High Fidelity" ("my desert island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order," the book begins).
Putatively, "Countdown" counts down the day's top five stories, ending with No. 1. But this is really just artifice to make the medicine go down. The No. 5 story, which leads the broadcast, is the longest segment and usually concerns the biggest political story of the day (read: Olbermann calling out the latest Bush administration imbroglio). The so-called No. 1 story (read: Olbermann calling out Lindsay Lohan's latest imbroglio) is often puffery, or what Olbermann calls "water-cooler."
A day like, say, Thursday, July 26, neatly expresses the show's explication of pop culture's triumph over news: On the same day when the White House is beating back a perjury probe into its attorney general (the No. 5 story), more people will know about -- and, by extension, care about -- the No. 1 story, a teased "Today" show interview with J.K. Rowling on the final installment in the "Harry Potter" series.
But on "Countdown," there isn't just the über-list, there are lists within lists. Each night Olbermann does the "Worst Person in the World," a cheeky feature that crams brief nuggets of information into a daily top three of ignominy -- "worse, worser, and worst."
