Background on Comcast/MSNBC from the NYT

[mod mom]

An Award, Criticism and Perils for Comcast
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: October 3, 2010


Criticizing Fox News is a year-round sport for many hosts on MSNBC, the cable news channel, and especially for Keith Olbermann, whose verbal spitballs at the Fox host Bill O’Reilly have occasionally put his parent company, NBC Universal, on edge.

Pending government approval, MSNBC will soon have a new parent company, Comcast, and that may prove to be awkward for Mr. Olbermann and other TV critics of Fox. As a distributor of cable programming, Comcast is in business with Fox and its parent company, the News Corporation.

The business interests of Comcast and the News Corporation were brought to light in a lawsuit by Barry Nolan, a Comcast employee whose protest of Mr. O’Reilly cost him a $200,000-a-year job two years ago. Mr. Nolan later protested his firing, and last month, he lost the case.

In an extensive review of Mr. Nolan’s case for the Columbia Journalism Review in August, the writer Terry Ann Knopf asserted that Mr. Nolan’s firing reflected the “corrosive influence of over-concentrated corporate power.”

-snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/business/media/04suit.html?_r=4&dbk

"may prove to be awkward for Mr. Olbermann " Was Griffin setting out to appease his new overlords?

[WCGreen]

1. There you have it....

If this goes through, well, we can expect that the small voice that MSNBC is will be radically changed...

[mod mom]

2. more damage from the Telecom Act of '96!

:mad:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. and not for the better...

[BrklynLiberal]

4. So we know for sure what the priorities are...Constitution second to business interests.

[rhett o rick]

5. What will it take to fire up the American people? nm