MSNBC Sliding Towards Chaos

I couldn't figure out how to cut a word from this gem, so here it is in its entirety, from Lloyd Grove's "Lowdown" in the New York Daily News:

It might be a good idea for Keith Olbermann and Rick Kaplan to give each other a wide berth until things cool down.

I hear that MSNBC staffers in the Secaucus newsroom-studio watched in horror Monday night as the volatile Kaplan, the president of the cable outlet, publicly laced into the eccentric Olbermann, anchor of the 8 p.m. show "Countdown," after the latter eulogized lung-cancer victim Peter Jennings with a graphic rant about his own cancer scare.

Olbermann - a former pipe and cigar smoker - is said to have looked stunned as Kaplan raced onto the set and shouted at him after he signed off.

Olbermann had urged viewers to quit smoking and repeatedly mentioned "spitting blood" and "spitting globs of myself into a garbage can" while discussing his bout with a benign tumor in in his mouth.

I'm told that Kaplan erupted angrily and at length, calling Olbermann "out of control" and "not to be trusted," and accusing him of driving away viewers from the 9 p.m. debut of Kaplan hire Rita Cosby's show, "Live and Direct."

Kaplan - a friend and former ABC News colleague of Jennings, and a frequent cigar smoker - apparently got even angrier when Olbermann suggested that the reason he was upset was that "this is about you."

I'm told that the anchor quietly asked the news exec to move the discussion to a private location, but the enraged Kaplan wouldn't hear of it.

"I don't care if you don't come to work tomorrow," Kaplan told Olbermann, according to my spies.

Olbermann - who yesterday defended his much-criticized remarks on Jim Romenesko's media gossip Web site at www.poynter.org - did come to work, but he didn't return my phone call.

Kaplan told me: "I'm not going to discuss it. It's between me and Keith."

Ah yes, the urbane, cosmopolitan, mature Fourth Estate.

h/t Media Bistro