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McCain/Palin Get Olbermann Censored, Bask in Media Double Standard

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So during the presidential debates and on election night, the American public will not have the factually rigorous political commentary of Keith Olbermann on tap, but it will still have the biting bias of the Republican Party's foot soldiers at Fox -- O'Reilly, Hannity, Hume, Rove, or whomever else is willing and able to create misgivings about Obama and company.

The problem is therefore one that Fox has claimed to have solved, namely how to be "fair and balanced." The coverage of the presidential debates and election night that we can expect during the crucial months ahead can best be described as "censored."

There is now a chill in the air -- a sense of the impending danger that we are about to enter another dark tunnel in American history in which McCain will take up where Bush left off in shutting down the free press. NBC has so far kept Olbermann's Countdown on the air, but not because it shares his political viewpoints. It did so because it is part of the GE corporate culture, which cares about dollar signs, not peace signs. Now it's afraid of what being called "the liberal media" by the McCain campaign might do to its bottom line -- and maybe even what McCain might do to it if he should manage to get himself "elected."

It was, in fact, Sarah Palin who made the charge of media bias in her speech at the Republican National Convention against a well-timed, concert pitched chorus of attendees who in uncanny unison chanted "NBC." In her speech, Palin never herself uttered the word "NBC," but the clear and distinct chant of it, overpowering the background noise of thousands of attendees, coming in on seeming cue, gave the impression of a staged event.

Well poisoning and intimidation from an aggressive government party is not supposed to determine what political commentary gets aired in a democratic nation. This sounds more like Pravda in its heyday.

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Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is a political analyst and media critic. His most recent book is Technology of Oppression: Preserving Freedom and Dignity in an Age of Mass, Warrantless Surveillance(Palegrave Macmillan, 2014.) He is a Fellow at the (more...)
 

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