MSNBC openly hires longtime team Obama loyalists David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, loses any hint of impartiality.

 
MSNBC has long been as bad as Fox News when it comes to ideological bias. But with the hiring of longtime Team Obama loyalists David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, it’s official: MSNBC is worse.

The cable channel that flies under the banner of NBC News is now all but a bona fide organ of state propaganda, an information channel that speaks in the same dominant voice as the folks running the government–and tries to mask what it is up to.

I didn’t plan on getting all free-press-and-democracy amped up about the hirings until I saw Axelrod with Andrea Mitchell last week in his first appearance on MSNBC. It was Echo Chamber Politics 101 with Axelrod characterizing some Republicans in Congress as irrationally wanting the draconian cuts of the sequester –as “dangerous” as that thinking is.

Mitchell starts out a remote interview with Axelrod, who was in Chicago, by asking about the sequester set to take effect Friday.

“Remember,” he says, “the cuts put into place were so odious it was thought no rational legislator, no rational government official, would allow it to happen.”

As Mitchell starts to pivot to another issue with a new question, Axelrod interrupts her with, “One more thing, Andrea. There is a belief among some Republicans in Congress that maybe this sequester’s all right. Maybe this is another way of shrinking government in a dramatic way. That’s a dangerous idea, but it’s not uncommon in some quarters on Capitol Hill.”

“No doubt,” Mitchell says, placing a cherry atop this propaganda sundae.

Rhetorical Criticism 101:  Republican members of Congress are not rational, they have “dangerous” thoughts and they do “odious” things to the American people.

What is this if not exactly the spin Team Obama seemed to be working on all week? And the White House doesn’t even have to bring in a bunch of out-of-town anchormen for quickie interviews with Obama so that they can carry his message back to their local audiences in the heartland.

Now the message can go forth from the president’s mouth straight to our ears–via Axelrod, the so-called analyst, and MSNBC, the so-called news channel.

That is, by the way, the sane, reasonable, trustworthy president who is working around the clock to avoid sequestration and the hardships that the alleged GOP champions of it in Congress would wreak on American life come Friday.

Howard Kurtz, Washington bureau chief for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, interviewed Axelrod and Gibbs about their new jobs. Both denied they would show bias or be surrogates for the president.

“I don’t see it either as being a cheerleader for the president or as a spokesman for the administration’s point of view,” Gibbs told Kurtz.

“My role is not that of a surrogate, but an analyst and commentator,” Axelrod said. “I’m proud of my work for and with the president. But in this role, I will offer observations, based on my experience over 35 years in journalism and politics, and will call them as I see them.”

In fairness, Axelrod didn’t exactly serve as what Gibbs called a “spokesman for the administration’s point of view” in his first at bat for MSNBC.

He wasn’t that honest.

A spokesman is, at least, transparent about what she or he is up to– serving the interests of the person for whom she or he speaks.

As a senior Obama campaign strategist, Axelrod worked in as rarefied a realm as there is in Democratic electoral politics. But what makes him an expert on what some Republicans in Congress feel or don’t feel about the sequester and what kind of “dangerous” thoughts they hold? Why give him the floor to expound on that, and then slam-dunk his answer with a big “no doubt”?

No, the information that he insisted on imparting to Mitchell is the same kind of oppositional attack-dog stuff Axelrod and Gibbs did when they were on the president’s payroll and went on Sunday morning TV shows to attack Mitt Romney. Or how about the campaign they helped lead in 2009 to discredit Fox News?

And now, they are part of the “team,” as Mitchell put it, that competes with Fox – and serves as  TV mouthpiece for the White House.
http://daily-download.com/msnbc-ex-obama-aides-a-bona-fide-organ-state-propaganda/

Former Obama advisor argues Comcast is a threat to the open Internet:

Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard and a former advisor to President Obama, was not a fan of Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal. In fact, Crawford was so appalled by the transaction that she made the fight over the merger the focus of her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

But Crawford's beef isn't only with Comcast. She sees the cable giant's growing size as a symptom of much larger problems with the telecommunications, media, and technology sectors. In her view, these communications industries fester with monopolies, collusion, and consumer-hostile business practices. A few big companies—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, Apple, Google, and Microsoft—"tacitly cooperate by carving out their separate areas of expertise," leaving customers with low quality and high prices.

A careful reading of Captive Audience gives some hints the industry's major incumbent firms might not be as omnipotent, or as collusive, as Crawford claims. At one point, for example, she describes how programmers like Disney and News Corp. "mercilessly gouged" AT&T and Verizon when they were trying to put together video packages to deliver over their FiOS and U-Verse networks. In another, she describes how cable companies are "slowly losing market share in video," thanks to increased competition from Verizon, AT&T, Dish, and DirecTV. This is not a story of wink-and-nod collusion among the captains of the media industry. Rather, it's a story of big companies fiercely jockeying for position in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Crawford's pessimism is particularly unconvincing in the wireless market. In 2003, she writes, "Americans were left with just three large wireless providers"—Verizon, Cingular, and AT&T Wireless. These three companies controlled about 60 percent of the market, with the other 40 percent controlled by "Sprint PCS, T-Mobile, Nextel Communications, Alltel, and others." In other words, we were "left with" at least seven competitors, not three. That's pretty good for such a capital-intensive industry.

Of course, the market has consolidated somewhat since then. We now have four national carriers. The feds were wise to block AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile. But a market with three or four major carriers is the norm across the industrialized world. And it's certainly not, as Crawford describes it, "in some ways...even less competitive than the wired market." The typical wireless consumer has three or four options, whereas wired customers are lucky to have two choices.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/former-obama-advisor-argues-comcast-is-a-threat-to-the-open-internet/