Shortly After Major Bush Donor Takes Over MSNBC, Network Selectively Applies Rules To Suspend KO

[jefferson_dem]

Shortly After Major Bush Donor Takes Over MSNBC, Network Selectively Applies Rules To Suspend Olbermann

Earlier today, MSNBC declared that it would be suspending progressive host Keith Olbermann because he violated NBC’s ethics rules by donating to three Democratic candidates for Congress. As many bloggers have noted, conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has donated to Republican candidates for Congress while promoting the same candidate on air, but has never been disciplined. Moreover, Gawker notes that MSNBC has been exempt from the formal NBC ethics rules for years. It is still a mystery why MSNBC selectively applied NBC’s ethics rules to Olbermann. However, it important to realize that MSNBC has undergone a fundamental change in leadership in the last two months.

Late last year, Comcast — the nation’s largest cable provider and second largest Internet service provider — inked a deal taking over NBC Universal, the parent company of MSNBC. Comcast moved swiftly to reshuffle MSNBC’s top staff. On September 26th of this year, Comcast announced perhaps the most dramatic shift, replacing longtime MSNBC chief Jeff Zucker with Comcast executive Steve Burke. Burke has given generous amounts to both parties — providing cash to outgoing Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) as well as to Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and other top Republicans. But as Public Citizen has noted, Burke has deep ties to the Republican Party. Public Citizen’s report reveals that Burke served as a key fundraiser to President George Bush, and even served on Bush’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology:

Comcast – the country’s largest provider of cable TV and broadband Internet services – has increased its political giving along with its mergers and acquisitions. CEO Brian Roberts was a co-chairman of the host committee at the 2000 Republican Convention. Comcast Cable President Stephen Burke has raised at least $200,000 for Bush’s re-election campaign. <...> Comcast’s political giving has increased along with its mergers and acquisitions. The company was a “platinum sponsor” at the 2000 GOP convention, and Roberts was a co-chairman of the host committee at the Philadelphia event. Burke was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology in 2002.

Why would Comcast be interested in silencing progressive voices? Historically, Comcast has boosted its profits by buying up various telecommunication and media content companies — instead of providing faster Internet or better services (overall, American broadband services are far slower than in many industrialized nations). Many of these mergers, as Public Citizen and Free Press have reported, have been allowed by regulators because of Comcast’s considerable political muscle. Comcast’s latest regulatory battle has been to oppose Net Neutrality — a rule allowing a free and open Internet — because

<SNIP>

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/11/05/burke-comcast-msnbc/

[madmax]

1. I never thought that one cycle of news on any given

day could cause ones head to explode but, today is that day for me. :nuke:

Should Pelosi stay or not.

KO suspended

All manor of idiocy being reported regarding the Presidents trip to India

and that's just the political shit storm.

Then there is the usual murders and mayhem.

:nuke: It's time for a meltdown

[SunsetDreams]

dupe

[SunsetDreams]

2. K&R Comcast has an agenda

[femrap]

3. Walter Cronkite

is turning over in his grave. So now corporations are the only ones to retain Free Speech...the little people are to STFU.

We must go after Comcast until their corporate eyeballs bleed.

[Writer]

4. Wait a minute, here's what I think is off about this analysis...

NBCU, now its own unit in the process of being purchased by Comcast, used to be a subsidiary of GE. General Electric, as you know, purchased NBC in 1986 while Jack Welch was CEO of the giant corporation. Constantly we have complained that, because GE is a large contractor to the Pentagon, that they were tainting NBC News and its cable subsidiaries with conservative talking points.

However, they formed MSNBC in 1998 (with Microsoft - hence the MS) or so when Welch was still CEO. Welch since left GE in 2001 or so, but even under Immelt, NBC purchased Universal Studios and, as it became clear that MSNBC wasn't going to survive against Fox and CNN, began airing programs with decidedly liberal viewpoints. The success of those programs in no way stopped GE or NBCU to continue with the format. In fact, they continued the trend by granting Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz their own programs.

I seriously doubt that, because Comcast is stepping in, suddenly they want to silence voices by making one of their newly purchased properties weaker in the ratings. The fact of the matter is - for Fox and MSNBC - political ideology SELLS. It has nothing to do with the ideology itself. They want to ruffle your feathers, make you rabid, and make you continue to watch.

Why Olbermann was suspended has to be due to far more complicated issues than Think Progress is portraying. It's not simple quid pro quo with the FCC.

[JoePhilly]

8. Not necessarily ...

MSNBC only began to allow progressive voices when Bush began to lose support. In effect, they spotted a niche, and targeted it. Fox had the right wing locked up, MSNBC went after the "night-time" left, to a degree.

If you watch MSNBC from 6am to 12am, you notice that there are exactly 3 hours of "progressive programming" ... Ed, Keith, Rachel.

The rest of the day, starting at 6am, is "Right" or "center-right" at best. Joe Scab gets 3 hours to do his Fox News lite show, and most of the shows after are center-right, and Andrea Mitchell, basically all right all the time ... and then, at night, we get to those 3 progressive hours.

Now that the Dems lost the house, MSNBC can easily reduce its progressive line-up. Cut it by 30%. No problem.

We should not be fooled.

[Writer]

11. No, I think viewers tend to project issues of bias onto the programs they're watching.

What empirical data do you have to support that, at certain hours, the regular news programming leans any particular way at all?

[Krakowiak]

14. I agree - the timing of this is obviously not coincidental.

[glitch]

5. What an amazing coincidence! nt

[ProSense]

6. Maybe MSNBC is trying to free up a spot for Breitbart?

Any lying POS can get a job with the networks.

[and-justice-for-all]

7. I love you Rachel, but MSNBC can kiss my ass....

I am going to block ALL the news channels. They are all reich wing lapdogs any way.

[Raine]

9. I don't have a ratings box on my TV

so I'll continue to watch otherwise I would only be hurting myself.

[Armstead]

10. I sure wish there was more concern about the issue of merger-mania

Anti-Trust regulations. Stop the monopolization of the media.

That ought to be something more people should be united against.

But nope -- Let the entire media get taken over (and the infrastructure for little ones too.)

[McCamy Taylor]

12. Good points. But bottom line is GE wants Cap & Trade and that

is why GE is holding KO over a cliff, telling Congressional Dems pass "Cap & TRade" in your lame duck session or we let the only news anchor who likes Democrats fall to his death.

I was always ambivalent about Cap & Trade, but now I believe Congress should tell GE "Go fuck yourself" and spend their lame duck session doing something else.

If KO supporters really want to hurt GE, they should all email their Congressmen right now and tell them "No Cap & Trade!"

[Exilednight]

15. Cap & Trade in its current form is bad. GE wants it because it's the next great

economic bubble. Matt Taibbi explains it quite well.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy futures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/12697/64796?RS_show_page=6

There is good Cap & Trade, and there is bad Cap & Trade. What Taibbi outlines above is the bad version.

[Krakowiak]

13. This is it right here - it's a pretext

Unfortunately, we are going to playing right into their hands with any boycott, as the lower ratings would justify "going in another direction".

Stinks to high heaven. What a miserable day.