That's The Way It Is

Glenn Greenwald has a very interesting and revealing column about today's New York Times article concerning the now terminated feud between Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olberman. Greenwald expands the subject to the state of the corporate controlled news.

...the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEO's agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.

...

So now GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC. You don't have to agree with the reader's view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

I don't consider Olberman or O'Reilly to be real journalists. Like of much of the media they are only concerned with audiences and advertisers. It expresses the late Walter Cronkite's tagline quite well. Which is a real tragedy.