A Goodbye to Olbermann Is a Goodbye to Wingnuts

Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin are “the best-known faces of the … extreme partisanship and the cycle of incitement that [is] dividing our nation instead of trying to unite it.” But now they’re fading away—Olbermann out at MSNBC, Beck’s ratings collapsing, Palin’s approval ratings in a freefall—and that just might signal the end of the wingnut era, writes John Avlon on the Daily Beast.

Even before he was ousted, Olbermann’s ratings, like Beck’s, were in decline. Why? “The American people are smart. They've gotten sick of the predictable hyperpartisan talking points and canned anger,” Avlon writes. And though Democrats and Republicans are still highly polarized—and portrayed that way in the media—Americans think it’s time for something different. “We've slowly come to our senses and flipped around the catchphrase, saying ‘you're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore.’”
(More Keith Olbermann stories.)