Bad News for NBC News Is Great News to Keith Olbermann

NBC News is getting hammered in two of the country's biggest newspapers and Keith Olbermann, who had an acrimonious breakup with MSNBC last year, couldn't be happier. The sweet taste of schadenfreude comes in lengthy features in today's New York Times and Wall Street Journal on the network-wide ratings decline at the Peacock's flagship news programs. On Twitter, the liberal anchor, made sure no one missed out on the news:

The two reports, by Bill Carter and Brian Stelter of The Times and Keach Hagey and Christopher Stewart of The Journal, both home in on the ratings dips of NBC's the Today show, which briefly lost its number one slot in morning-show ratings for the first time in 16 years. But The Journal gets the numbers that really matter: "[Today] collected $485 million in ad revenue during the 7 a.m.-to-9 a.m. time slot in 2011, up 6.6 percent from 2010, according to Kantar Media. Good Morning America took in $299 million last year, down 4.9 percent from 2010." Elsewhere on the NBC News lineup, Meet the Press is regularly getting beaten by old man Schieffer at CBS News' Face the Nation, and NBC Nightly News is slowly losing ground to ABC World News and has lost huge swaths of its coveted 25-to-52 demographic. In short, it's a wonderful day for NBC's best known, unemployed, disgruntled former employee.

RELATED: Keith Olbermann's Not Done with MSNBC Yet

As his Twitter fans took it as an opportunity to bemoan his departure ("We miss your voice on cable," said one "If they made you even a regular panelist on MTP, the ratings would triple," said another) others wondered why he was relishing the network's troubles. As you would expect, Olbermann responded to all of his followers questions in a gentlemanly way.

Paging Aaron Sorkin: a nice plotline for Newsroom's second season?