Interesting that NBC and CNBC are owned by GE. You know....the ones

[PretzelWarrior]

who make a lot of money when there are wars on and who were eyeball deep into credit default swaps, mortgage derivatives, etc?

It kind of puts a sad shade on what NBC family of networks is all about when you realize how they are the face of all the shallowness, warmongering, and excess of our mentally crippled United States of America in 2009.

GE Financial is dragging down the rest of their war and propaganda machine. But something tells me they will pull out of this steep dive and continue to destroy America.

[hellbound-liberal]

1. Kinda makes you wonder why on earth they would broadcast Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann

I guess they are probably secure in their grip on the politicians that they already own.

[Auggie]

3. Beat me to it

[PretzelWarrior]

6. moving with the zeitgeist. it's about "people control" and reaching a market segment.

they aren't interested in bettering or worsening life for you or me. They just want our undying loyalty and our money.

You've got your Ayn Rand capitalists watching CNBC, your core of progressives watching MSNBC late in day while conservative hockey moms watch Joe and Mika. Blah blah. It's so full of crap.

I disconnected my cable and satellite. I use my TV to watch DVDs. I watch Daily Show and Colbert and other video segments online.

FUCK GE! I hope they go bankrupt.

[Occam Bandage]

8. Yes. Just like every other television station. They're ensuring people watch their ads,

by telling them what they want to hear. It ain't "propaganda" any more than Nickelodeon, Food Network, or Comedy Central are "propaganda." It's showbiz.

[PretzelWarrior]

10. line between propaganda and new forms of advertising within shows

means that the line between propaganda and advertising and access and messaging is lost.

Morning Joe pimping Starbucks is not a coincidence. Is it coincidental when oil companies and Saudi Arabia and Halliburton advertise on cable news shows and then those news shows are somehow able to spin stories in their direction? I think not.

Let's not be naive. We have corporate/government propaganda.

[Occam Bandage]

13. We have exactly what we want to watch.

If significant numbers of American television viewers wanted to watch news from an Anarcho-Syndicalist viewpoint, then we'd have news shows broadcasting from an Anarcho-Syndicalist perspective, and they'd be owned by the exact same people that own the news now (just like we have FNC hosts complaining about sex and violence in movies, as 20th Century Fox releases Guns and Cleavage II to a theater near you).

We as Americans generally like to watch corporatist/pseudopopulist news shows, because most Americans are corporatist/pseudopopulist in ideology. It's no more "propaganda" than it is "propaganda" that Cartoon Network shows ads for toys aimed at 8-14 males during their Star Wars: The Clone Wars television series.

[Auggie]

2. I wonder how GE rationalizes keeping K.O. and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC

when they're among the few who actually report the truth. But then I realize their ratings are pretty good -- for news shows.

GE is a money whore.

[JuniperLea]

4. Token Lefties... eom

[Occam Bandage]

9. Yes, just like Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck are FNC's Token Righties.

MSNBC's television lineup is 100% liberal from early afternoon until late night. MSNBC's current target demographic is young, reasonably affluent, and liberal, so they court them with shows designed to attract that audience, just as FNC does with its target demographics.

[PretzelWarrior]

12. nope. if there was a FoxNews version of Joe Scarborough, you'd have a point.

There's a complete rightward bias to FauxNews and we're constantly disappointed when MSNBC has pockets of right wing nuttery.

[Occam Bandage]

14. My point was not "there are no 'pockets of right-wing nuttery' on MSNBC"

My point was that both target specific demographics with their shows, and so referring to them as "tokens" makes absolutely no sense when those "tokens" would be better be called "major draws." You'll note that Scar got moved out of the evening lineup a long time ago, as did Tucker--they began to clash with the viewership of the shows surrounding them, ratings suffered, and so they got the boot. Now MSNBC goes hard left in the evenings, because they can draw viewers by doing so. Fox News goes hard right all the time, because they can draw viewers by doing so. "Tokenism" and "propaganda" are bizarre attempts to bring near-obsolete political terms to bear in what should be a simple discussion of showbiz.

[PretzelWarrior]

16. except I believe the power of the microphone has been used repeatedly by the government

for official government propaganda (but in a more sophisticated and nuanced way so as to not disturb the sheeple).

If it was JUST showbiz, then those channels would be off the air and we'd have a couple more Cartoon Networks that draw much better ratings than any of the cable chatter.

[hellbound-liberal]

5. Probably trying to appear "fair and balanced". You're right, it's all about the money!

[Occam Bandage]

7. Er, yeah. And so is MSNBC, which has the only outright liberal hosts in America.

What's more, they run four of them in a row, each with their own angle. You've got your brash left-wing populist Ed, you've got your Democratic-party-establishment Tweety, you've got your liberal demagogue KO, and you've got your progressive tele-blogger Maddow.

Claiming GE is a "propaganda machine" doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense when they run the only left-wing propaganda on television.

[PretzelWarrior]

11. I guess you don't understand how it works.

But the fact that you are singing GE's praises vis a vis MSNBC primetime line up shows me they are good at what they do.

[Occam Bandage]

15. It's not that hard to understand.

Television stations exist to make money. They are businesses like any other, treated as investments by their owners. They make money by selling advertisement revenue. Their rates for ad revenue are set by the market as a function of viewership. Television stations therefore are under enormous pressure to maximize viewership.

I'm not singing anyone's praises. I don't watch MSNBC. I just think that calling GE's media output "propaganda" is garbage when it covers the left, center, and right of American politics depending on the station. If it's propaganda, it's the shittiest, most back-assward-confused propaganda anyone's ever come up with. I think it's just a mite bit simpler to assume that GE's stations run whatever they find draws viewers: wall-street knobslobbing on CNBC, lefty political talk on MSNBC, and centrist fluff-news on NBC.