But the CNN debate on Monday was the first event hosted jointly by a major news organization and a Tea Party group. And their partnership left some questioning whether the network had gone too far in reaching for centrist credibility.

"Is there really a need for another national cable news channel devoted to promoting far-right elements within the Republican Party?" the liberal media watchdog group FAIR said Monday in an e-mail alert to its members in which it labeled the Tea Party "a controversial political group."

Jeremy Peters and Brian Stelter also picked up on CNN's weak attempts to spin their Tea Party connection--despite the fact that questions were being piped in from Tea Party events, and the Tea Party Express picked the audience members inside the auditorium:

Here in Tampa, there were signs the network was sensitive to perceptions that it was being too cozy with Tea Party activists. During a tour of the debate hall, Mr. Feist referred to the gatherings in Arizona, Virginia and Ohio, saying, "We'll have watch parties." He was swiftly corrected by CNN's special events producer, Kate Lunger, who interjected, 'Well, we won’t have watch parties."

That distinction--whatever it might be--was probably lost on most viewers.

Veteran journalist Bob Parry wrote a great piece about "the hidden political reality behind 'centrist' journalism--a never-ending pandering to the right." Parry added that he's seen this kind of thing first-hand:

it's useful to have some specific right-tilted story--or event--to point to, just in case a right-wing critic decides to target you as a "liberal." CNN, which the right has sometimes smeared as the "Communist News Network," can now cite its collaboration with the Tea Party as valuable right-wing "cred."

When I was working at PBS Frontline in the early 1990s, senior producers would sometimes order up pre-ordained right-wing programs--such as a show denouncing Cuba's Fidel Castro--to counter Republican attacks on the documentary series for programs the right didn't like, such as Bill Moyers' analysis of the Iran/Contra scandal.

In essence, the idea was to inject right-wing bias into some programming as "balance" to other serious journalism, which presented facts that Republicans found objectionable. That way, the producers could point to the right-wing show to prove their "objectivity" and, with luck, deter GOP assaults on PBS funding.

NewsCorp upped the ante, as Stelter reports, by blocking Cablevision customers from accessing Fox shows on the popular streaming video site Hulu. While that maneuver didn't last long, it did represent a pretty clear example of what a major media company can do to violate  net neutrality.

These fights (as Megan Tady of Free Press noted in a piece in Extra! in March) are about giant media companies fighting amongst themselves over money, with the public mostly powerless to intervene.

But when I see Fox getting involved in these fights, I can't help but imagine a battle over the carriage fees that cable companies pay for the Fox News Channel--costs that are passed on to you, the consumer, whether or not you watch Fox News. By some counts you pay three times more for Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity than you do for, say,  MSNBC.

So what if a cable company decided that was too much? And what if Fox retaliated by pulling Fox News Channel from your cable system?  Somehow I think we'd all manage to get through the day.

Or, even more drastically, what if customers could choose whether or not they wanted to pay for Fox News Channel in the first place, through an ala carte cable menu? Fox rakes in millions of dollars every year from viewers and non-viewers alike; it seems like a decent media system would give people the right to not contribute to Murdoch's empire.

The series' producer, David deVries, said in a statement to Mr. Getler that "throughout the almost three years it took me to create the series, I was completely unaware of who the funders were." (In response, FAIR said Tuesday that the producer needn't be aware of the funders' identities because the company behind the series, Free to Choose Media, "consistently" produces conservative projects.)

In other words, it's not necessary for the producer to know who the funders are to be affected by the funding; the funders determined that the product would be a conservative-friendly portrayal of their conservative friend when they gave their money to Free to Choose Media, because that's the kind of programming that  Free to Choose makes. As for deVries' insistence that he was totally independent, and that's it's merely a coincidence that his documentary came up with the same kind of message that all other Free to Choose documentaries have, George Seldes said it best:

The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, "I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like."

While GE's official line is that, "while both companies agreed that the tone should be more civil, no one at GE told anyone at NBC News or MSNBC how to report the news," Stelter quotes unnamed Fox employees who "said they were told in June and July not to flagrantly criticize General Electric." Stelter gives more room to Fox management denials--"We've never suppressed any stories about NBC or GE"--before getting to "some watchdog groups" pointing out how

the months-long cease-fire challenged the claims that the two media companies did not interfere in their on-air content.

The advocacy group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting asked its supporters on Friday to contact GE, urging it to renounce the agreement with Fox.

Jeff Cohen, the founder of the group, said the deal between the two networks’ parent companies was a reason to be wary of corporate-owned TV news.

"It should remind news consumers of who calls the tune and pays the bills--and that TV reporters and even loud-mouthed commentators have corporate bosses whose interests are often not about unbridled journalism," Mr. Cohen said.

Salon editor Joan Walsh weighs in too, about how "it appeared that 'the owners of two large news organizations colluded to make sure their audience got less, not more, information, and to promote their business interests, not the public interest.'"

Read FAIR's new Action Alert: "Did GE Stifle Keith Olbermann?: Fox and MSNBC's Gentlemen's Agreement" (8/7/09).