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Saturday, August 01, 2009

Except that Olbermann doesn't just pull stuff out of his ass and advocate murder
Posted by Jill | 1:56 PM
I couldn't believe this front-page article I read in the New York Times this morning, about how the corporate masters at Faux Noise and MSNBC told their warring on-air personalities, Billo the Clown (I can still call him that because I don't work for MSNBC) and Keith Olbermann to knock it off:
For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

The only part of this feud that's regrettable is that it has resulted in lazy so-called "journalists" like Brian Stelter insisting that the two men are identical except that they come from different sides of the aisle.

Keith Olbermann is opinionated, he can be bombastic and pompous, and his intermittent Special Comments, for all that they are passionate and by their very nature as commentary, sometimes go over-the-top, he knows the difference between his opinion and facts; something Bill O'Reilly does not. In this video, O'Reilly tries to distance himself from his own responsibility in incitement to violence in the murder of Dr. George Tiller:



And you don't see Olbermann pull shit like this (perhaps because wingnuts are too cowardly to appear on his program):



Olbermann has a huge ego. So does O'Reilly. That happens with guys who are on TV and are good at what they do. The issue is not who's more bombastic. The question is who does reporting and commentary on actual facts, and who just pulls stuff out of his ass. And O'Reilly pulls stuff out of his ass.

But the issue isn't about keeping discourse civil, or which of these men is a putz and which is a saint. I probably wouldn't want to know either one of them. The issue is the extent to which corporate ownership controls the media message, and when we are now seeing signs of that same corporate media deciding that the presidency of Barack Obama must be destroyed barely six months into his term because corporate management prefers Republicans, then there is no meaning to democracy in this country.

Glenn Greenwald points out what we've already seen from corporate media, and also notes that Richard Wolffe, who did a reasonably credible job of reading from a teleprompter while subbing for Olbermann last week, is a corporate lobbyist at a company run by former Bush Administration spokesman Dan Bartlett:
So now GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC.  You don't have to agree with the reader's view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced.  Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive."  Katie Couric said that when she was at NBC, "there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations" not to be too critical of the Bush administration.  MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government.  And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE.  The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government.  Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations "report" on the government -- driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional.  GE's forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.

* * * * * 

On a very related note:  this week, former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe was a guest-host on MSNBC's Countdown while Keith Olbermann is on vacation.  When Olbermann is there, Wolffe is a very frequent guest on Countdown, where he is called an "MSNBC political analyst" and comments on political news.  All of this, despite the fact that Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.," the corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, its President and CEO.  According to the Press Release they issued to announce Wolffe's joining the company:



Don't let their allowing Rachel Maddow on the air fool you into thinking MSNBC is on our side. As much as I worship the ground she walks on, Maddow is for better or worse playing the same role in the Corporate States of America that the Democrats play in our political system: to give you the illusion that someone other than rich white guys in executive suites have any say whatsoever in American policy.

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3 Comments:
Anonymous mandt said...
'''Left speechless. Excellent reporting.
8/1/09, 3:53 PM  
Blogger Lakes Umpire said...
Great read......depressing but a great read that I will print and show to conservative friends that keep telling me that the media is "Liberal".
8/3/09, 10:03 AM  
Blogger sheikwil said...
I will pass this along to my many friends so that we can boycott GE products because they are silencing Keith so that Fox can continue to get away with their lies. I will never buy anything made by GE and get my friends to boycott too.
8/3/09, 10:09 AM  
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