Less than two months after Keith Olbermann made his debut on Current TV, the progressive television network has made another high-profile hire.
David Bohrman, formerly CNN’s vice president of programming and Washington bureau chief, has been tapped as president of Current TV. And he’ll have his work cut out for him. The network is planning to build its programming around Olbermann’s “Countdown” — currently its flagship program.
After securing “Countdown” in the lineup, Current co-founder and CEO Joel Hyatt told TPM “we realized what we needed, at the senior level of leadership at the company … someone with the expertise in TV news programming and production. We set out to find the very best person, and all roads led to David Bohrman.”
Bohrman told TPM he’s up to the task, saying it will be “a ton of work, a lot of fun and really rewarding.”
Bohrman and Hyatt said they have big plans for the network — they promise it won’t be “business as usual” — but since they’re just getting the ball rolling, they were somewhat short on specifics.
“We want to be nimble, we want to be thinking forward,” Bohrman said. “What we’ve got is an overwhelming willingness to approach things with a fresh set of eyes and create something important and fun to watch.”
For the most part, they said, that will mean focusing on news analysis, commentary and opinion. News has become a commodity, Bohrman said, that people can access all day, everyday. And it would be difficult to compete with operations like the Associated Press or CNN.
“We’re not going to build a mega news gathering machine,” Bohrman said. “What we’re going to do is be aware of what’s happening in the world, talk about it, analyze it and let people decide what they think.”
The country lacks contextualization, Hyatt added, not an awareness of what’s happening in the world. “If we can bring insightful, intelligent analysis and opinion that helps people create a context around what’s going on, that would be an extraordinarily valuable service,” he said.
But do they worry that’s a lot of weight for one anchor to carry? Hyatt said Olbermann is up to the task, already having done that twice — at MSNBC, and ESPN before that. “Keith knows exactly what it’s like to come in and do that anchor show that gets the network off and running,” he said.
Next, Current will prioritize rounding out the programs before and after “Countdown.” The executives were tight-lipped about any potential hires, but they said things will move quickly.
“It’s like the first inning in the game,” Bohrman said. “Countdown” is the first flag that we’ve planted in a direction. “You’ll see this thing unfold and develop.”
