The success of Keith Olbermann and Countdown, like the success of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, “is evidence of viewer cocooning — the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. ‘People want to identify,” says MSNBC senior vp Phil Griffin. ‘They want the shortcut. `Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify [or] fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long.” — from Peter J. Boyer‘s New Yorker 6.23 profile of Olbermann, called “One Angry Man.”
