BIG MEDIA IS BIG BUSINESS, AND NECESSARILY CONSERVATIVE

From ConsortiumNews:

The Disappearance of Keith Olbermann

The liberal hosts also must remember that MSNBC experimented with liberal-oriented programming only after all other programming strategies, including trying to out-Fox Fox, had failed – and only after it became clear that President George W. Bush’s popularity was slipping.

And

As I wrote in an article last November, “Olbermann and the other liberal hosts are essentially on borrowed time, much the way Phil Donahue was before getting axed in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, when MSNBC wanted to position itself as a ‘patriotic’ war booster.

“Unlike News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who stands solidly behind the right-wing propaganda on Fox News, the corporate owners of MSNBC have no similar commitment to the work of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.

"For the suits at headquarters, it’s just a balancing act between the ratings that those shows get and the trouble they cause as Republicans reclaim control of Washington.”

More here.

And from BuzzFlash:

Olbermann Was Fired Because of Comcast

Comcast is a right-leaning, big media entertainment corporation that is about to control content, television, telephone and Internet service, all through one giant portal. Its interests are in dictating what consumers pay, see and hear by owning the delivery system and what it delivers.

Its acquisition of NBC Universal will accelerate an already-monopolized big media presence on television to include content control that extends even to the Internet.

Anybody who thinks that a company that is the epitome of Pac-Man corporate growth is going to tolerate liberal programming on MSNBC that is critical of corporate governance - well, you're floating down the river of "de-Nile."

More here.

The traditional problems that economists, from all parts of the political spectrum, cite when condemning monopolies is that, when you have only one business serving a single market, you get increased prices, inferior products, and shabby service. That's because a monopoly has no competition, and doesn't have to worry about such trivialities as prices, quality, and service: there will be no competitors to swoop in and offer better deals, no loss of market share; consumers, having no place else to go, have no choice but to do business with the monopoly.

So everybody, whether you're liberal or conservative, hates monopolies. Everybody loves competition. At least, that's what everybody says. For close to twenty years, however, Congress has had a different attitude toward the media business. I mean, Congress, when pressed, continues to say "monopolies are bad," but their votes on rules for media consolidation, mergers, and takeovers don't really match that. The explanation we've been getting since the first Bush era is that technology has been changing the media business landscape so quickly and dramatically that the US media industry stands to fail dramatically if it doesn't hunker down and power up. Only mega media giants can thrive in this climate. Or something to that effect. The long and short here is that we must endure the problems that come with near-monopoly in the media business in order to ensure that we continue to have a media business. I mean, to some extent, if you buy the premise, that's kind of a compelling argument.

Problem is, the media business isn't like the soap business or the automobile business. When media consumers are forced to consume expensive shoddy products that come with shoddy or even no service, it's not that we're having to settle for less: shoddy media products hurt our nation in ways that shoddy soap or shoddy cars never could.

As entertainment products become ever more unsophisticated, bland, and lame, our overall national culture follows suit. Indeed, by some measures, entertainment media is our national culture, and that is frightening in itself. But when what was once called "a vast wasteland" by an FCC commissioner back in the late 1960s, television, starts to offer an endless stream of "reality shows" featuring petty vindictive sex-crazed assholes as real-life protagonists, and such behavior seems to be emulated by an increasing percentage of the population, one begins to feel nostalgia for the programs that prompted the condemnation in the first place, The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched.

But the coarsening of our shopping mall culture isn't really even the worst feature of continual media consolidation: the news, upon which all citizens depend for important political and economic information, is now little more than an entertainment product itself, bearing such passing resemblance to reality that it might as well be lumped in with The Jersey Shore and Cops.

That gets me to Olbermann.

Even though the media industry has not yet achieved monopoly status, it's very close, and I think this merger between NBC/Universal and Comcast brings down the total of individual media businesses to a big whopping five. I mean, it's more complicated than that, and it's hard to keep track, what with the rapid pace of consolidation over the years, but that's more or less the picture. Suffice it to say, the oligopoly-toward-monopoly status of the media industry means we are seeing ever increasing monopolistic effects. So the news necessarily becomes ever more bland and lame.

I like to say that the corporate news is conservative, rather than liberal, as the conservatives are continually shrieking, and it is conservative, if only in that it ideologically reflects the establishment views of big government and big business. But it might be just as precise to say that the news is conventional, in that it reflects the "conventional wisdom" of corporate and government culture, which is indeed conservative by any number of definitions. And as the media business continues to consolidate, monopolistic effects ramp up, and the news becomes even more conventional: it is very important to note that as the right wing has successfully pulled government/corporate conventional wisdom towards itself over the years, so, too, has the news media, being totally bland and conventional, moved to the right.

That is, it's just easier for news programming to be conservative, rather than liberal, in the current economic and political environment.

Keith Olbermann seemingly defied this trend. An unabashed liberal on prime time cable news, not only existing, but thriving, stood in stark contrast to the fairly conservative lineup at CNN, as well as the big three broadcast news shows. It stood in massive contrast, of course, to the psychopaths at Fox, but that's fairly obvious at this point. That Olbermann thrived where Donahue failed only a few short years before is quite remarkable.

The explanation for this anomaly is mentioned in the excerpt above: MSNBC was in the ratings cellar; liberalism was essentially a "hail Mary" that worked. That is, the media business is not quite yet a monopoly, and competition is still possible, if not a regularly occurring phenomenon. So the bottom line reared its ugly head via a weird set of circumstances, and suddenly liberals were on the television where they had not been before.

Enter a new corporate boss with a more conventional and less desperate point of view. Suddenly, the "hail Mary" doesn't seem to be such a good business strategy. Why broadcast ideas and philosophy that run counter to our way of doing business when we can broadcast something else more to our liking? And Olbermann is out, just like that.

At this point we don't know if he was fired or if he quit, and we probably won't know for a while. NBC's not talking, and another article I read earlier today suggests that non-disclosure, for a while at least, is very likely part of Olbermann's severance agreement. But I like to think the old muckraker quit, understanding that he was he was necessarily headed toward conflict with the new corporate order, and would probably end up being ousted in the near future, anyway. So I'm thinking that he got out with his dignity intact, and is now carefully searching for a new television home to disseminate his kind of delicious bile and venom.

That's hopeful, I guess, but the overall tale is depressing. MSNBC's night time lineup has become a weird liberal enclave in a conservative environment. What will become of Rachel Maddow?

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