Breaking: Keith Olbermann Announces Abrupt Departure From MSNBC; "Countdown" to End

Two years into Obama's presidency and the right wing is in total control of the media.

At the very least Obama should have stopped the dominance of the right wing media, and he should have helped reverse the trend. Instead he kowtowed, he wavered, he hummed and hawed, he kissed ass, and now the right is so firmly entrenched that progressive ideas are minimalized. Peacenik doesn't know why Olberman left MSNBC, but Peacenik suspects it was either a firing or a complete lack of support. The good news will be if Olberman reappears somewhere else with greater viewership. The bad new is that the progressive cause has lost one of its most effective voices and is on the run. Pretty sad when the voice of the left is led by a fuckin comedian....Jon Stewart.

MSNBC announced Friday night that its marquee "Countdown" anchor and talk show host Keith Olbermann was out. The network did not provide a reason for his abrupt departure.

"MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors," NBC Universal said in a statement.

MSNBC announced Friday night that its marquee "Countdown" anchor and talk show host Keith Olbermann was out. The network did not provide a reason for his abrupt departure.

"MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors," NBC Universal said in a statement.

Read on...

The Shame of the Fourth Estate

Charles Kaiser

Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist—even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so.

What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites… is a manipulation. Not just of a story, not just on behalf of a political philosophy. Manipulation of a society, its intentional redirection from reality and progress, to a paranoid delusion and the fomenting of hatred of Americans by Americans...The assassins of the Right have been enabled on the Left.

— Keith Olbermann's special comment on the Sherrod debacle

Read on...

Peacenik thinks Keith Olbermann is a great American.

The Scope -- and Dangers -- of GE's Control of NBC and MSNBC

This is a complex story. Illustrative of a simple fact. You cannot trust anything you see or hear on tv or read in the newspapers. The media is corrupt. And the media has a corporate slant. The media is in thrall to conservative/republican ideology. The media willfully participates in the brainwashing of society.

So how does Peacenik get information that Peacenik can trust? How does Punditman? How do you? Peacenik isn't sure. Watch any newscast. Pick any story. And think about who is telling the story and why. Filter it. And filter it again. Were the 3 Americans arrested in Iran really only hiking. Peacenik doesn't know. But it doesn't sound plausible does it?

But back to GE. They told Keith Olbermann to stop picking on FOX news and Bill O'Reilly. In return FOX would stop reporting negatively about GE. GE is the company whose financing arm GE Financial is bankrupt and received a huge taxpayer funded bailout. And of course GE is a huge component of the military industrial complex. Read Greenwald's analysis. Is the corporate media doing their job? Do you trust it? Peacenik doesn't.



by Gleen Greenwald

I want to return to the subject of GE's silencing of Keith Olbermann both because there are new facts I've obtained that shed light on what happened here and because this is one of the most blatant examples yet of pernicious corporate control over America's journalism. The most striking aspect of this episode is that GE isn't even bothering any longer to deny the fact that they exert control over MSNBC's journalism. They've brazenly dispensed with the long-held fiction of the sanctity of journalistic independence from interference by the corporate parents that own America's largest news organizations.

Instead, GE is now openly and proudly boasting of their editorial control over the news organizations they own, and publicly rubbing it in the faces of NBC News journalists that they're subservient to GE's corporate agenda. Look at this smug, creepy quote from GE executive spokesman Gary Sheffer explaining in The New York Times why GE issued its gag order preventing Olbermann from criticizing Fox and O'Reilly, all but mocking NBC and MSNBC journalists as nothing more than GE's office of corporate spokespeople:

"We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion," Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. "We’re happy that has happened."

Read on...