Glenn Greenwald Confirms 'Win' for O'Reilly Factor

Here's an update to last night's report, "Peace Plan Brokered in Olbermann, O'Reilly Cable Flame War!"

According to the The Agonist, "Fox Wins"!

Well, Glenn Greenwald thinks so too, "GE's Silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's Sleazy Use of Richard Wolffe" (via Memeorandum). But what he really hates is how the "corporate media" are controlling news content:

The New York Times this morning has a remarkable story, and incredibly, the article's author, Brian Stelter, doesn't even acknowledge, let alone examine, what makes the story so significant. In essence, 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 CEOs 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.

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp ...

This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced ....

And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC - ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer - because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE. The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government. Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations "report" on the government - driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional. GE's forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.

Giving Greenwald credit, he's been a vociferous critic of the Obama administration's anti-terrorism policies (see, "The Obama Justice System"). But it's hard not to think that his indictment of "corporate media control" might be a bit less strident had the focus of this story been on Rupert Murdoch capitulating to pressure from Keith Olbermann.

More at Memeorandum. And note how Joe Gandelman summarizes things, "in the end it seems as if Fox News O’Reilly 'won' in his ongoing feud with MSBNC’s Keith Olbermann."