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).

Yes, Dick Cheney is forlorn and all alone. Many of the people who advocated taking the gloves off are leaving him out there hanging today. And one of them is Jonathan Alter.

See, he forgot to mention--and Keith apparently didn't know--that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 this torture talk didn't come out of nowhere or even from the dark recesses of Cheney's evil mind. Jonathan Alter himself was one of the people who brought it up almost instantly: "Time to Think About Torture" By Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, November 5, 2001.

Clearly, the Pentagon wasn't alone in advocating torture from the moment 9/11 happened. It was being advocated in the pages of major newsmagazines by so-called liberal columnists who are now commenting on what "Cheney did" as if they weren't even in the country at the time.

Read FAIR's review of such craven commentators at the time Extra!: "Pro-Pain Pundits: Torture Advocates Defy U.S., International Law" (1-2/02) by Steve Rendall

One exception was Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MNSBC (4/21/08). However, for Olbermann, McCaffrey's short-lived stint as a skeptic of Pentagon tactics seemed to be a bigger story than the fact that McCaffrey had been participating in a Pentagon propaganda program and had a financial stake in selling war equipment. Olbermann stated:

Buying the news-gate. First Armstrong Williams and video news releases and Jeff Gannon. Now the New York Times report yesterday that so many of the supposedly ex-military figures you were seeing on this network and CBS and ABC, CNN and Fox, in '03 and '04 and '05 still had business relationships with the Pentagon and were still being wined and dined by DOD brass.

The headline here is not that the administration was trying to corrupt the free press. It's, A, how courageous were the likes of Barry McCaffrey, Monty Meigs and Jack Jacobs when they came on here and said, this is crack--the Pentagon misled everybody?

Indeed, McCaffrey had for a time strayed from his Pentagon talking points. However, as the recent New York Times article documents, he was quickly cut off from access to the Pentagon's secret briefings as punishment, and rapidly reversed course:

Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.

"There is a time when you have to punt," said Mr. Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as General McCaffrey’s friend, not as his spokesman.

Within days General McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his "great respect" for Mr. Rumsfeld to Tim Russert.

Moreover, the Times noted that

For months to come, as an insurgency took root, General McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. "I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq," he told Mr. Williams that June.

Even McCaffrey's own people seem to agree that his role as a TV analyst was inherently compromised, according to the Times:

Mr. Weiner, the general's longtime publicist, said General McCaffrey worked with clients "to get your mission achieved in the media." General McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.

McCaffrey's latter allegiance to the Bush administration line was something Olbermann conveniently seemed to forget.

However, MSNBC's noted liberal host did caution, the day after the New York Times exposed the Pentagon pundits program, that such journalistic improprieties might be ongoing--at least at one cable network: "What makes anybody think this still isn't going on at Fox?" he demanded.

As it turns out, McCaffrey has in recent months been cropping up as an "analyst" much closer to home. And not just on NBC (where he’s appeared seven separate times, offering his expertise everything from the Afghanistan War to the Iraq War to the Colombian hostage rescue to the "drug war" in Mexico); he's also appeared twice on MSNBC--including on the show of Olbermann's fellow liberal MSNBC host, Rachel Maddow (9/9/08).

But then that should come as no surprise. After all, it was on MSNBC that McCaffrey delivered his hallmark line: "Thank God for the Abrams Tank...and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle!" As a FAIR Action Alert pointed out, at the time of that statement,

unbeknownst to viewers, McCaffrey was sitting on the board of a company called IDT, which received multi-million dollar contracts related to both of those pieces of military hardware.

Also since the Times’ broke the pentagon pundits story, CNN has run a story featuring McCaffrey as an expert (Situation Room, 8/4/08), as has PBS (NewsHour, 6/30/08).