Glenn Greenwald nails it to the door of the corporate media:
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.
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These dual stories of GE/Olbermann and Wolffe reveal what NBC and MSNBC really are about as vividly as anything since the "military analyst" scandal. Remember that indescribably informative NBC News/MSNBC scandal: when it was revealed that both news outlets (along with most other major television outlets) were presenting as "independent military analysts" a whole slew of former Generals with substantial, undisclosed corporate interests in the policies they were promoting and doing so in coordination with a secret Pentagon propaganda program? Despite front-page NYT promotion, Congressional investigations, and even a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the NYT's David Barstow for uncovering all of that, NBC's Brian Williams (like virtually every other news outlet) to this day has never so much as informed his viewers of this story, and they continue to use some of those very same former generals as "analysts."
There are many reasons why our establishment press exists to do little other than serve the interests of the political and financial establishment and to mindlessly amplify government claims. The virtual disapparance of the line between large corporate interests and journalism (as Richard Wolffe himself noted) is certainly one of the leading factors.
Read the whole thing. "Manufacturing Consent" all over again