Itz News to Me

Greenwald Intentionally Missing the Forest For the Trees

August 1st, 2009

Gleen Greenwald has a post up about how the corporate chiefs got together to put an end to the on-air O’Reilly-Olbermann feud.

Naturally this has him up in arms about corporate censorship of the news. But Greenwald intentionally avoids the huge elephant in the room: GE’s use of its media networks to push its corporate interests. If I asked you to name the cable network best known for its sycophantic coverage of the Obama administration, which one would you choose? MSNBC, of course. And which network recently hosted an entire day of basically sitting on Obama’s lap and asking him to tell them a story? NBC.

Who owns both of these networks? GE.

So it’s pretty safe to say that GE is uniquely pro-Obama. But why? Obama’s anti-business policies and regularly scheduled class warfare against CEOs wasn’t exactly a closely-held secret to anyone who actually did their pre-election homework, and there’s no way GE didn’t do its homework before going all in for Obama. So then what could explain the obvious bias?

How about GE’s wind turbines powering Obama’s energy plan?
How about GE’s healthymagination being the backbone of ObamaCare?
How about the bailout of GE’s finance arm?
How about Obama killing a proposed competitor to its Joint Strike Fighter engine?

How many other ways is GE in bed with the Obama administration? I found these in about 10 minutes of Googling. How much could an actual news organization with dedicated reporters actually dedicated to finding out the truth uncover?

Their TV audience is dwindling quickly on both networks, and GE knows it. Why not go out with a bang and use their control of those networks to promote its other lines of business? And if that means getting in bed with the Obama administration in order to corruptly obtain highly lucrative government contracts, why not?

Especially when pundits like Gleen Greenwald are so eager to look the other way so long as GE keeps pimping for Barack Obama…