From Casavaria.com

Liberal cable news powerhouse Keith Olbermann, one of the staunchest and most successful critics of the Republican party’s politics, as abruptly resigned from his show Countdown, on MSNBC. Olbermann’s success had driven MSNBC, which had dismissed then top-rated host Phil Donohue for criticizing the Iraq war effort, to re-orient its editorial stance toward the more progressive end of the political spectrum.

In the words of one Huffington Post report:

It was Olbermann’s principled and sincere outrage at the warmongering and lies coming from the George W. Bush administration as it pushed the nation into war and recession that established his “brand.” But the fact that Olbermann was a “brand” in the first place points to the intrinsic limitations of corporate media.

That Comcast, which has pushed both as a corporation funding political campaigns and through its programming, a decidedly pro-Republican agenda, was aiming to get rid of Olbermann had long been a source of controversy regarding the cable service’s planned takeover of NBC Universal. Everyone from Forbes to Wired toNewsBusters is speculating about whether it was Comcast driving for a more right-wing network that led to Olbermann’s ouster.

Any media observer can’t help but feel that this incident, the second in as many months involving an MSNBC decision to remove Olbermann, during the controversial merger negotiations with Comcast, reads like the bad old days of one-party, one-wing dominance of the national media, roughly from 2001 through 2005, or rather, spanning the gap between the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the debacle of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Casavaria

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