Friday, Keith Olbermann gave his last Countdown. He had signed a four year contract in 2008, and apparently part of his buyout deal keeps his off the air for "'maybe not for two years' but for an extended period of time." One day prior, it just so happened that Comcast's purchase of NBC became final, as the FCC and DOJ approved it officially. Of course the NBC execs are stating that the two have nothing to do with each other, but I'm honestly not sure how we're supposed to credit that statement. Even if they weren't doing it with the intention of pleasing their new corporate overlords, Olbermann was fired after the new people took over, and still worked there when the old people were in charge.
Rarely are there such brazen demonstrations of corporate power over our discourse. He was loudest lefty in mainstream discourse, and that's intolerable to large corporations like Comcast, despite crazy right wingers like Beck and Palin staying on the air and inspiring assassination attempts. I'm guessing Comcast just prefers to hear right wing views for their pro-corporate slant rather than some other reason (as opposed to Murdoch, where I really just don't know). By that conjecture, they'd probably keep "centrist" Democrats on too, since they're all corporatist. But regardless, the end result is that now, as Josh Silver of Free Press put it:
The new Comcast will control an obscene number of media outlets, including the NBC broadcast network, numerous cable channels, two dozen local NBC and Telemundo stations, movie studios, online video portals, and the physical network that distributes that media content to millions of Americans through Internet and cable connections.And they have an agenda - to ensure a political climate that grows their profit.
So much for free speech, right? We live in an age where the First Amendment is mostly irrelevant in this arena.* The government doesn't have to silence the press because the press itself is incredibly statist, the government is corporatist, and more and more, there are only a few companies to cut a deal with privately anyway. There are exactly six major media outlets: CBS, Viacom, Comcast/NBCU, Disney, NewsCorp, TimeWarner. And now, as we see with Comcast, the internet/cable providers will own the networks too and one company will tell you what you may and may not watch. ESPN3 (a Disney production) is already only available to participating internet service providers. Is it really so hard to imagine Comcast making certain channels more expensive than others, so maybe MSNBC is on a lower tier, giving more people access to it, and thus making it more attractive to advertisers?
Silver further states: "Culmination of the deal, combined with the FCC's recent, loophole-ridden "Net Neutrality" rules, sets the table for Comcast to turn the Internet into cable television." This reminds me of one of my favorite ways to explain Net Neutrality (note that in late 2009, it was considered a "worst case scenario"):
(graphic by reddit user quink)
Vertical integration is a really dangerous new development for America. Even more than horizontal media consolidation, it threatens the very things the Framers thought to protect with the First Amendment - democracy and free debate. One day in, and we've lost one of the only people on air willing to attack the right without worrying about "balance" (contra even Jon Stewart sometimes), and one of the few media people with integrity, who apologizes and changes course when he goes too far. Keith Olbermann, you will be missed, but I don't think we'll have enough time to mourn before it gets much, much worse.
*There may be an argument, based partly on the same theory as antitrust, that the government allowing huge private corporations to control our discourse and silence dissent could be a First Amendment violation after a point. I'm doing some research on this question this semester, so I will probably write more on it eventually.
