Keith Olbermann took a shot at his ex-girlfriend and his former network with a pun that poked fun at her show being renamed. The midafternoon program, previously known as Katy Tur Reports, is being rechristened The Moment with Katy Tur, MS NOW announced on Wednesday. The 67-year-old pundit dated Tur, 42, from 2006 to 2009.
He wrote on social media: 'Finally. Somebody has had the presence of mind to reduce the length of @KatyTurNBC's show to a moment.' In reality, the show will air for two hours, MS NOW said. The network itself was rebranded from MSNBC over the summer.
Olbermann famously fled after less than a year in 1997. He was fired following a second, more lengthy stint in 2011, after he was found donating money to Democratic candidates who later appeared on his show. The Daily Mail has approached MS NOW for comment.
Tur is now married to CBS host Tony Dokoupil, with whom she shares two children. She discussed how the relationship still 'haunted' her and 'made me feel small and worthless' during a June 2022 podcast interview with Molly Jong-Fast.
'That relationship followed me for a long time in my career,' Tur said. She was in her early 20s when the relationship began. 'To this day, when somebody tries to bring me down, they’ll bring up Keith Olbermann. I get it on Twitter every single day, a person telling me that I screwed my way to the top,' Tur added. 'Now, I don’t really care right now. I roll my eyes. But there was a time in my life where it really haunted me and it made me feel small and worthless.' 'It is so the playbook of diminishing women,' she continued.
Olbermann offered his own version in a December 2022 episode of his podcast, a day after Tur's husband, Dokoupil, underwent a vasectomy. Tur posted about it on social media. 'After I asked her to move out, I paid her rent in a New York apartment for a year so she could continue to live and work in New York,' Olbermann said, devoting a segment to his ex and her husband. 'I paid off her college loans... I edited her Trump pieces, often rewriting them.'
He also claimed that Tur asked him to write a book about Donald Trump after their relationship, suggesting they were still on good terms. The book, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History, came out in 2017. 'She was serious. And there are receipts,' Olbermann said, claiming he declined.
Olbermann also claimed that Tur 'started punching and slapping me with intent to do real harm' six days after undergoing an appendectomy in 2008. The longtime anchor claimed it was 'because the living room in our place wasn’t clean enough.' 'She is rapidly turning into a kind of professional martyrdom. I saw this in its first stages 16 years ago and she has now made martyrdom into a brand,' he said. Tur received her show the year before.
Following two stints with ESPN after his MSNBC firing, Olbermann began producing and hosting his weekly podcast, 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' in August 2022. He received flak for a now-deleted post that appeared to threaten Scott Jennings following Jimmy Kimmel's September suspension: 'You're next mother******.' 'But keep mugging to the camera.'
