Keith Olbermann Concedes An O’Reilly Comment On His Show Was ‘Over-The-Top’

Is this Keith Olbermann‘s way of apologizing for taking things too far? In an opening to a segment on Countdown tonight, Olbermann noted that longtime nemesis Bill O’Reilly had done a story regarding his corporate overlords, GE, and categorized it as not newsworthy, but vengeful. The reason for pointing this out? Olbermann was about to do a segment on News Corp, Fox News’ parent company, but he wanted to make clear that it wasn’t a “tit-for-tat” story.

Why would O’Reilly seek retaliation? It seems that a large chunk of Countdown is devoted to attacking Fox News and especially O’Reilly on a regular basis, but Olbermann called the comments that he believe led to O’Reilly’s GE story as “over-the-top.” He didn’t specify which comments those were, however,or who made them):

“Last night on his program, Bill O’Reilly went after MSNBC’s parent company, GE, for something that even O’Reilly acknowledged was ‘hard to be outraged about.’ It was not news, but appears to be a response to some over-the-top remarks made here about O’Reilly.”

He later went on to clarify that his story on News Corp was not of that nature, but did not clarify what the enigmatic “over-the-top” comments were. The best guess? The only thing Olbermann has said on his program lately that is legitimately objectionable despite any political bias: bringing in potential abuses O’Reilly suffered as a child to comment on his silly feud with Jennifer Aniston. Olbermann is not one known to apologize for taking things too far, so even acknowledging that, maybe, something said on his program was a bit of a low blow is noteworthy, even if, in the future, Olbermann doesn’t bother to clarify what he was talking about. We’ll post an update if Olbermann does clarify which comment he was talking about.

The clip from tonight’s Countdown via MSNBC below: