OLBERMANN: “I SCREWED UP REALLY BIG”

In a bizarre mea culpa, Keith Olbermann appeared to take responsibility for the debacle at Current TV that ended in his being fired last week. “I screwed up really big on this,” he told David Letterman on Late Show on Tuesday. “It’s my fault that it didn’t succeed, in the sense that I didn’t think the whole thing through.” Alluding to his $10-million annual paycheck at the channel, he said, “If you buy a $10 million chandelier, you should have a house to put it in,” Olbermann said. “Just walking around with a $10 million chandelier isn’t going to do anybody a lot of good.” Olbermann, along with critics of his Countdown show on Current, had complained that it had all the trappings of a public-access production and that it was marred by frequent technical bugs and breakdowns. Olbermann told Letterman that he began thinking about bailing out of Current ten days after he joined the channel.