I was pretty surprised while watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann to hear Olbermann, in a rather matter-of-fact way, tell his viewers that tonight would be his last show. It takes years to build up a TV news show "brand." And Keith Olbermann's MSNBC show dated back to the darkest days of the one-party Republican state. It was Olbermann's principled and sincere outrage at the warmongering and lies coming from the George W. Bush administration as it pushed the nation into war and recession that established his "brand." But the fact that Olbermann was a "brand" in the first place points to the intrinsic limitations of corporate media.
The only winners in the Comcast/MSNBC decision to drop Countdown with Keith Olbermann are Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and all the other bloviators over at Fox News. Their noise machine just got a lot louder. And just in time for CNN and the networks to focus the bulk of their attention on John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Darrell Issa. The Federal Communications Commission should have blocked Comcast's buyout of NBC. The one thing the corporate media didn't need was more consolidation regardless if the move had anything to do with purging Olbermann.
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