Presenting his honest version

When MSNBC moved a couple of months ago from its longtime home in New Jersey to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, Keith Olbermann got his pick of offices.

It was a nice perk for the anchor whose bracing mix of irony and stridency made him the first big star the 11-year-old cable channel can call its own.

Olbermann chose a room looking directly into the street-front studios of MSNBC’s rival, Fox News.

If you’re walking up Sixth Avenue, look for the huge cardboard cutout of Bill O’Reilly’s head gazing out of a third-floor window in the world headquarters of the National Broadcasting Co. That’s Olbermann’s office.

Rare is the night when “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” MSNBC’s highest-rated program, doesn’t take aim at something said on “Fox Noise” or “Fixed News,” Olbermann’s pet names for the channel.

He has more ways of describing O’Reilly than baseball announcers have home-run calls: Bill-O. Bill Orally. Bill ” Oh Really?”

Still, he says, “The reason my computer faces out that window is not for me to stare and think, ‘What am I going to do to him next?’ It’s to remember the lessons learned in that building.”

To Olbermann, Fox News is an object lesson in how not to handle success – something he’s been experiencing quite a bit of lately.

Since mid-2006, when he began inveighing against the Bush administration in a series of on-air editorials, known as “Special Comments,” ratings for “Countdown” have risen 55 percent.

His new book, “Truth and Consequences: Special Comments on the Bush Administration’s War on American Values,” was assembled from a year’s worth of editorials on “Countdown.” This weekend it will enter The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list at No. 19.

“I’ve often thought the real danger in broadcasting is people going on the air without ever stopping to ask: ‘Now why is it again that I think people want to hear me talk about this?’ ” the 6-foot-3 native New Yorker says.

“Inasmuch as it is a responsibility and it is the public airwaves, I think I owe the viewers and the industry and the people who’ve gone before me – who have been role models, who have faced actual dangers to do this in the history of our country – I owe all those things and people my best. To try to present an honest version of what I see around me.”

Detractors contend that Olbermann’s “honesty” has seeped into every corner of his show. With its opinionated take on the news, its mocking tone and its lack of dissenting voices, “Countdown” in some ways is a lot like the radio show hosted by Rush Limbaugh, who is Olbermann’s biggest target after O’Reilly.

“Is this a straight newscast at this point?” Olbermann said. “Probably not. It is, however, entirely news-driven. If there is no daily controversy about the Iraq war, we’re not going to start the show with one.”

Olbermann’s saving grace is that he is funny, which covers a multitude of sins, including self-righteousness.

From years in sportscasting, trying to pump life into look-alike game highlights night after night, he developed a comic cadence and an arsenal of silly voices (his Walter Cronkite is the best).

And “Countdown” is structured less like a traditional newscast and more like “SportsCenter,” where he became a national cable star on ESPN in the 1990s.

One night, he nominated televangelist Pat Robertson for “Worst Person” for calling yoga “evil” and read the offending quote in a passable Pat impersonation: “By repeating common yoga mantras, you’re actually praying to the Hindu god Vishnu.”

He dropped the accent and said to the camera: “Then don’t say the mantras, moron, just stretch!”