Shakespeare: "What's past is prologue."

If it's Sunday, it must be NYT columnist Frank Rich for the second Sunday in a row dredging the MSNBC outhouse of cable TV talent to illustrate how people still think Big Guv'mint's invisible Wizard of Oz - even in the transparent Age of Obama - is still pulling the strings.  To wit:  "The drug industry has authorized its lobbyists to spend as much as $150 million on television commercials supporting President Obama’s health care overhaul, beginning over the August Congressional recess.  NYT August 9, 2009

Frank Rich:  "What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media."

Frank continues:  It’s a cynicism confirmed almost daily by events. Last week Brian Stelter of The Times reported that the corporate bosses of MSNBC and Fox News, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric and Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, had sanctioned their lieutenants to broker what a G.E. spokesman called a new “level of civility” between their brawling cable stars, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. A Fox spokesman later confirmed to Howard Kurtz of The Post that “there was an agreement” at least at the corporate level. Olbermann said he was a “party to no deal,” and in any event what looked like a temporary truce ended after The Times article was published. But the whole scrape only fed legitimate suspicions on the right and left alike that even their loudest public voices can be silenced if the business interests of the real American elite decree it.

You might wonder whether networks could some day cut out the middlemen — anchors — and just put covert lobbyists and publicists on the air to deliver the news. Actually, that has already happened. The most notorious example was the flock of retired military officers who served as television “news analysts” during the Iraq war while clandestinely lobbying for defense contractors eager to sell their costly wares to the Pentagon.

The revelation of that scandal did not end the practice. Last week MSNBC had to apologize for deploying the former Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe as a substitute host for Olbermann without mentioning his new career as a corporate flack. Wolffe might still be anchoring on MSNBC if the blogger Glenn Greenwald hadn’t called attention to his day job. MSNBC assured its viewers that there were no conflicts of interest, but we must take that on faith, since we still don’t know which clients Wolffe represents as a senior strategist for his firm, Public Strategies, whose chief executive is the former Bush White House spin artist, Dan Bartlett.

Let’s presume that Wolffe’s clients do not include the corporate interests with billions at stake in MSNBC and Washington’s Topic A, the health care debate. If so, he’s about the only player in the political-corporate culture who’s not riding that gravy train.

I have two words to counter the Richard Wolffe trashing:  Arianna Huffington.  Liberal corporate media titaness Huffington strong-armed VCs (not Viet Cong - Venture Capitalists) into poring millions into her news aggregator site Huffington Post; has substitute-hosted, albeit ghastly and stiff, for Rachel Maddow; was once a fixture on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC "Countdown." 

Let me repeat:  GE and News Corp. thought they had a deal to reign in non-journalist Keith Olbermann who wasn't engaging in thoughtful Edward R. Murrow news and commentary, but frivolous personal attacks on rival time slot FOX host Bill O'Reilly.

This MSNBC/FOX imbroglio has absolutely nothing to do with chilling freedom of speech by corporate censorship like the liberals would like you to believe. 

I find it ironic that self-styled Murrow apparition Olbermann is creating the same scenario Ed Murrow did back in the 1950s that precipitated his fall from grace at CBS News.  Murrow put together a piece on Red-baiter Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954 by taking McCarthy soundbites and ramming them down the Wisconsin senator's throat.  Hailed:  a new era in TV news reporting and the end of McCarthy. Murrow's "See It Now" lost its weekly slot in 1955 when angry sponsor Alcoa - targeted by Murrow in an on-air piece - bailed. Three years later Murrow got into an argument with CBS boss William Paley over airing of opinions countering Murrow's and the now-sporadic"See It Now" went off the air in 1958. That same year Murrow sabotaged himself  in a speech before the RTNDA attacking TV broadcasters  as ""fat, comfortable, and complacent" and television for "being used to detract, delude, amuse and insulate us."

Museum of Broadcast Communications: The tragedy of Murrow's rapid enervation at CBS after this latest tumult was implicit in his apparent need to ascribe higher motives to his own profession. Murrow had long reveled in his role as broadcasting's Jeremiah. His urgent and inspirational style of presentation fit the life-and-death psychological milieu of a world war, as it was later appropriate for the McCarthy crisis. By 1958, though, the viewing public and the television industry were less inclined to accept yet another of his ethical lambastes, especially since his RTNDA speech was directed at them and their shortcomings. As the business of TV grew astronomically during the 1950s, Murrow's priorities fell progressively out-of-step.

Olbermann's priorities have fallen progressively out-of-step as evidenced by declining ratings.  This is...Olbermann as cipher.