In July, the NY Times reported about a secret meeting between General Electric and News Corp. The stated reason for the meeting was to call and end to the feud between MSNBC and Fox News. However, as we have seen, MSNBC and Fox still take shots at each other. Heck, today, MSNBC was practically playing re-runs of Fox News segments.
What
has happened is that Fox News and MSNBC have increasingly started to attacking Democrats while giving Republicans a free pass. Tonight, for example, hardly a word was mentioned about Republican opposition to health care reform, and the focus was on Democrats and the White House, and how corporations are having significant influence on the health care debate. However, what about the Republicans? Why are they getting a free pass? It is almost as bad as the insurance industry report warning that health care reform will cause increased premiums, because the insurance industry is going to retaliate by raising premiums.
What we have seen in recent months is MSNBC and Fox starting to attack Democrats and the White House from both the left and right. Is this just a coincidence? Or, is General Electric/NBC using its media assets to also kill health care reform and climate change legislation by weakening support on the left while Fox News attacks from the right?
Fox says President Obama is a socialist who will kill business and MSNBC is pushing the meme that President Obama is a corporate shill even as U.S. Chamber of Commerce takes an increasingly aggressive approach toward the Obama administration. Sadly, the talking points start to coalesce and say the same thing: health care, climate change, financial regulations are all bad. From the right, its because it goes to far. From the left, because it does not go far enough. My take is that if the bottom line talking point is the same, then you know the same actors are pulling the strings, albeit from different ends of the political spectrum. If the right wing can be astro-turfed, why not the left?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/business/media/01feud.html###
It was a media cage fight, televised every weeknight at 8 p.m. But the match was halted when the blood started to spray executives in the high-priced seats.
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).
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