You can read all the details here via Glenn Greenwald. But the short story is that Charlie Rose brokered a deal between News Corp CEO, Rupert Murdoch and GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, to get Olbermann to stop attacking Bill O’Reilly and to get O’Reilly to stop attacking — GE, the friendly folks who bring good things to light, including numerous defense contracts. I wondered why Olbermann suddenly stopped attacking “Billo the Clown” (as he iconically referred to him) back in June. Something about the reasoning didn’t seem right. Well, guess what? It wasn’t. MsNBC, to protect the interests of its corporate parent, told Olbermann to shut up, and Fox did the same to O’Reilly, who suddenly abandoned his reporting on GE’s legitimate sales of energy and medical technology in Iran.
And they wonder why no one trusts the corporate media. It isn’t a liberal bias or a conservative one (except, obviously, Fox News) so much as it’s a corporate bias. And when GE’s CEO was feeling the heat from Bill O’Reilly he put a muzzle on Keith Olbermann. Now, we have no direct link to the so-called deal the New York Times is reporting and any mesage to Olbermann from his bosses to shut down the attacks on o’Reilly, but as Glenn notes, since June 1 of this year, Olbermann has essentially stopped attacking O’Reilly, not once mentioning him by name.
I’d like to see if Olbermann will address The NY Times’ claim that his program has been censored on air Monday night, but I suspect he values his paycheck too much to do so. After all, Donahue was the highest rated show MsNBC had when they canned him for being too outspoken against the coming Iraq War out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic (and possibly causing a “negative impact” on GE’s contractual dealings with the then Bush led Federal Government). Olbermann makes MsNBC money, but GE’s other business interests far outweigh whatever profit Olbermann adds to their corporate bottom line.
It’s just sad to see how far we have fallen from the days when Ed Murrow stood up to Bill Paley and told him he wasn’t going to stop going after Joe McCarthy.