Is The Progressive Party Over at MSNBC?

By Mark Karlin

As BuzzFlash noted yesterday, we have been pointing out -- among others -- for nearly 10 years the role of the few corporations who own our mass media, particularly television, in shaping public perceptions.  At this moment, for instance, the television networks, in particular, have so aligned themselves with the for-profit healthcare sector that Americans think healthcare reform will hurt them, while agreeing with its specific details!


Yesterday, I wrote about how MSNBC put a partial muzzle on Keith Olbermann pointing out what a Jackass Bill O'Reilly is in order to ensure that FOX and Roger Ailes wouldn't attack GE's overall business, including its role in the defense industry and nuclear power plants.


The Political Carnival website wrote how Glenn Greewald had exposed one of the guest hosts for Olbermann (who has been off a bit lately) as a paid member of a corporate public relations firm, Richard Wolffe. As Greenwald observes:

Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program -- or serving as an almost daily "political analyst" --  is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist.  Wolffe's role in life is to advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including corporations with substantial interests in virtually every political issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover.  Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a guest-host and "political analyst" on one of its prime-time political shows.  What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted, neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this.  

 

This is a conflict so severe that it's incurable by disclosure:  who wouldn't realize that you can't present paid corporate hacks as objective political commentators?  But the fact that they don't even bother to disclose that just serves to illustrate how non-existent is the line between corporate interests and "news reporting" in the United States.

And we're seeing more of the likes of Tom Tancredos show up on the MSNBC progressive programs, thus legitimizing the right wing fringe by giving them a forum.  These placements, we are sure, is coming out of corporate, as well as the continued retention of openly racist Pat Buchanan.


After all, the New York Times article I referenced yesterday noted that a noticeable of GE stockholders were upset that MSNBC was carrying programming that was revealing information that could endanger entrenched wealth and corporations with the truth.


Glenn Greenwald reminds us that NBC and MSNBC hired so-called neutral "military analysts" who were actually employed by defense contractors and other corporations -- and didn't disclose the inherent conflict of interest.


Greenwald also notes:

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. 

UPDATE:  On Richard Wolffe's bio page at Public Strategies, Inc., the role he plays on MSNBC and NBC News is actually touted to the firm's corporate clients and potential clients:

In addition, Wolffe is an NBC political analyst. He provides political commentary on several MSNBC programs, Meet The Press, and TODAY.

They're basically telling their clients and prospective clients:  if you hire us to control and disseminate your political messaging, you'll have someone working for you -- Richard Wolffe -- who has a regular platform on MSNBC and NBC News, where he's presented as an independent "political analyst."  And this is how they describe what he does for the firm:  "Wolffe provides high-level counsel and insight to our clients on how to manage their reputations in a complex public environment."  How much more blatantly sleazy could that be?

BuzzFlash loves Rachel and Keith, and that is why we worry about what appears to be encroaching GE corporate intrusion.


BuzzFlash has always warned that our readers need to personally financially support sites such as BuzzFlash as insurance for democracy, because what may be the golden age of the brilliant Maddow and the acerbic and often eloquently derisive Oblermann may be short-lived. Already, it appears that their freedom has reached its limits.


From now on, it appears we are going to see more "corporate balance," which means the minority and fringe view will appear more in our beloved progressive television "beachhead."  This, in turn, will legitimatize kook thinking, as we have seen with the TV media coverage of the "birthers."


The parents of the corporate parent company trump the truth -- and the growing audience for progressive television programming.


Too much success for the likes of Rachel and Keith in the end are not in GE's interests.


It happened to Edward R. Murrow a half-century ago; it is likely to happen again.


BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG


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Let The Sun Shine In......

The C-Street Family: Sexual Affairs and the Chosen

Just when you think you have heard it all, along comes this gang of "chosen" idiots! This should be enough to scare the hell out of decent, patriotic American who are believers in our constitution. I believe it was JFK who said that there is no place for secret societies in our Democratic Republic. This revelation just proves that point, again.

I read something about this gang of loony tunes several years back. Admittedly I found it hard to believe then, but so much has happened since, it's difficult to not believe anything, no matter how insane it sounds.

Our nation is going to hell in a collection plate!



By Mark Karlin


Kudos to Rachel Maddow for latching on to the captivating and chilling story about not just the lascivious and potentially illegal activities of some of the "C Street" Family, but -- more importantly -- focusing on their belief that they are chosen by God to lead and infiltrate our government.


And she hasn't stopped pursuing this startling story, defying the normal news cycle of a nano-second of coverage unless it's Michael Jackson's death or a blonde white girl disappearing in Aruba.


What gets lost in the disgusting details of Ensign's adulterous affair, Mark Sanford's (an associate member of the Family) lust for an Argentine, and former Congressman Chip Pickering's adulterous bonking on-site at the C Street "Christian fellowship house" is something that Maddow has repeatedly come back to: these men don't believe they are responsible to moral or governmental laws. If they deviate from the "righteous path," God is only testing their strength, because they are the ones divinely chosen to lead -- and it is weakness to succumb to remorse about one's "misbehavior." That is why Mark Sanford said he won't resign and compared himself to King David, who slept adulterously with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed.


The low-key author, Jeff Sharlet, of "The Family:The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" is a credible chronicler of this cabal that is like a dagger in democracy. He writes:

Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ's avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. In the Family's early days, they debated registering as "a lobby for God's Kingdom." Instead, founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. "The more invisible you can make your organization," Vereide's successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, "the more influence you can have." That's true -- which is why we have laws requiring lobbyists to identify themselves as such.

But David Coe, Doug Coe's son and heir apparent, calls himself simply a friend to men such as John Ensign, whom he guided through the coverup of his affair. I met the younger Coe when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family. He's a surprising source of counsel, spiritual or otherwise. Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was -- or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate -- he asked a young man who'd put himself, body and soul, under the Family's authority, "Let's say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?" The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. "No," answered Coe, "I wouldn't." Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he's among what Family leaders refer to as the "new chosen." If you're chosen, the normal rules don't apply.

Yes, you read that right, the son of Doug Coe, the "spiritual leader" of the Family and his heir apparent, would consider a Family member raping a child a test of the member's closeness and to be resolved inside of the fellowship, without reporting it to the law authorities, it appears.

This is how dangerous they are. They apparently believe even child rape is something that God wants them to keep secret amongst themselves!


And the heroes held up for the Family are the likes of great tyrants as Sharlet writes:

If the Family men who stood over John Ensign as he wrote a baldly insincere breakup letter to his mistress were naive about hearts that want what they want, they don't claim ignorance about the strongmen with whom they build bonds of prayer and foreign aid. They admire them. Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ's words, he says, "You know Jesus said 'You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that's what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn't murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom."

Sen. Ensign, facing calls for an investigation of what may have been felony abuses of campaign funds in his attempt to cover up his affair, might not get there. Then again, the Family's preview of a "new kingdom" -- a private club of men protecting each others' secrets -- doesn't sound so different from the old kingdom. That's the awful secret behind the closed doors of the C Street House, the Family's authoritarian rhetoric, and even the Family's real mission: business as usual, fortified by faith in more power for the powerful and privilege itself a form of piety.

The Family on C Street includes Dr. Tom "Execute Abortionists" Coburn who grilled Sonya Sotomayor during her Judiciary Committee hearings -- and who counseled Ensign on his ongoing adulterous affair with a staffer who is the wife of another staffer.

These are dangerous men to the Republic. They think that they are members of some modern Skull and Bones of Sparta, selected by God to inflict a deranged "Christian" government upon the democracy of America -- and for whom immorality and breaking the law are only acts in which God is testing them -- and for which they hold no public responsibility in their hearts and minds.

Keeping secret one of the members who might admit to child rape!


God help us all -- but not their God, who is merely a monstrous, self-serving excuse in their own minds for evading the laws, ethics, and responsibilities of living a civilized and legal life.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (July, 2009 Paperback Edition). Available by clicking here from BuzzFlash.com

IN ACCORDANCE WITH TITLE 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107, THIS MATERIAL IS DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PROFIT TO THOSE WHO HAVE EXPRESSED A PRIOR INTEREST IN RECEIVING THE INCLUDED INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. PELICAN BLOGS HAS NO AFFILIATION WHATSOEVER WITH THE ORIGINATOR OF THIS ARTICLE NOR ARE PELICAN BLOGS ENDORSED OR SPONSORED BY THE ORIGINATOR.


"VIEW SOURCE ARTICLE" LINKS ARE PROVIDED AS A CONVENIENCE TO OUR READERS AND ALLOW FOR VERIFICATION OF AUTHENTICITY. HOWEVER, AS ORIGINATING PAGES ARE OFTEN UPDATED BY THEIR ORIGINATING HOST SITES, THE VERSIONS POSTED ON THIS BLOG MAY NOT MATCH THE VERSIONS OUR READERS VIEW WHEN CLICKING THE "VIEW SOURCE ARTICLE" LINKS.

Let The Sun Shine In......