Olbermann was joined by Nation blogger Greg Mitchell and Howard Kurtz of CNN/Daily Beast. Olbermann asked Kurtz:

Howard, how far up the tree does it go?  If you and I and Greg can't donate, can our bosses donate?  Can our bosses' boss donate?  Can Rupert Murdoch donate?  Because surely, no matter what you might think of what I did, he must have more influence on what appears on TV news than I do.  And if it's not Rupert, what about the chairman of GE or of Comcast?

Kurtz replied:

Once you get up to the corporate level, where they're not meddling with newsroom decisions, whether it's Time Warner, General Electric, News Corp, then corporations are going to give money.  They lobby.  They have corporate interests.

That left Olbermann to say:

OLBERMANN: Greg, to your experience, is there a part of a company--another part of a company that puts on a news broadcast or publishes a newspaper that isn't involved, to some degree?  Do you know any chairman of the ultimate authorities who don't get involved in news decisions in some large sense, at least?

MITCHELL: You could probably talk about that better than I could, but, again, in the real world, the owners of companies have an interest.

Indeed. The temporary squelching of the Olbermann/Bill O'Reilly feud last year was reportedly arranged at the corporate level, between GE and NewsCorp executives.

And  during an interview with Al Franken (10/25/05), Olbermann once explained how political pressure from inside the news division worked:

You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, either the next day or the day before, Janeane Garofalo had been a guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president's office here and told, "Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on consecutive nights?"

And a recent New York magazine article recounted the fight inside MSNBC over Phil Donahue's program, which was seen by some as too critical of the drive to war with Iraq. MSNBC heavyweights like Chris Matthews seemed to know that going to the bosses was how to change what was on the air:

Donahue's problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews was a rising force at the network, with a reported salary of $5 million. He cultivated former GE CEO Jack Welch and had the ear of NBC CEO Bob Wright. (The two summered together on Nantucket.) Matthews saw himself as MSNBC's biggest star, and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue's show. In the fall of 2002, U.S. News & World Report ran a gossip item that had Matthews saying over lunch in Washington that if Donahue stays on the air, he could bring down the network.

That piece also quotes NBC CEO Robert Wright saying that MSNBC's post-9/11 strategy was to try and outfox Fox News: "We have to be more conservative than they are."

Daily Kos (3/22/10) recalled the January 22 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, in which guest Rep. Alan Grayson (D.-Fla.)  pointed out that the Senate had already passed a healthcare bill, and that the House could approve it and then pass amendments that the Senate could accept via reconciliation. Matthews' response: "OK, OK. OK, you know, this show is about reality."

Matthews continually mocked Grayson for his supposed ignorance of Senate procedure:

What are you talking about? What procedure do you know that Harry Reid doesn't know?... That Dick Durbin doesn't know? That all those top guys, that Ted Kennedy didn't know?... The secret route to the Indies that only you know about?... Why do you think the president and everybody else is dying over the fact that they lost Massachusetts? Because it didn't matter? You think they're all crazy over there, but you're smart?

Matthews' choice of insults was telling: "This is netroots talk!... This is outsider talk, and you're an elected official...and you know you can't do it. You're pandering to the netroots right now. I know what you're doing!"

By contrast, Matthews cited his insider credentials as a former Capitol Hill staffer to dismiss the lawmaker's analysis:

Well, I worked over there for many, many years, and I worked for the speaker for six years, I worked 15 years up there...and I know what I'm talking about! You ask anybody... you ask anybody in the Senate right now.... Go call the Senate legislative counsel's office and ask them if you can do this. Go ask the parliamentarians if you can do this. You haven't bothered to do that.

Matthews made it abundantly clear that only Beltway insiders are worth listening to, and that Grayson, who's only been in Congress for a little more than a year, didn't qualify: "Every night, we deal with two worlds: the real world of Congress, that has to do things and get things passed; and this outside world, represented by the netroots and the other people out there, like yourself, who play this game...and it doesn't get done!"

The host closed with a confident prediction about healthcare reform: "It's not gonna happen. Anyway, Congressman Alan Grayson, a true believer, who believes he can get things done by willing it!"

Corley is discouraged to see that, "for instance, 45 percent believe the false claim that legislation includes 'death panels' while 55 percent believe the false claim that coverage will be extended to illegal immigrants"--and an MSNBC passage says that, in particular,

self-identified viewers of Fox News are disproportionately misinformed":

In our poll, 72 percent of self-identified Fox News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79 percent of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69 percent think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75 percent believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly....

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, Fox News regularly distorts the truth about health care reform.

In fact, just "last week, Media Matters found that over a two day period opponents of health care reform outnumbered supporters by a 6-to-1 margin on Fox." Hear a strong corrective to all this deceit on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Trudy Lieberman on Health Care Reform" (8/14/09).

A few weeks ago, MSNBC's First Read had an item questioning whether President Obama "knows too much" about healthcare policy. The piece complained that the president is willing to offer Americans details about reform....

The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman raised a similar concern today, arguing that Obama cares too much about policy details....

This, apparently, is criticism, not praise. The president who inherited a devastating economic crisis is interested in U6 numbers--a measure that includes the unemployed, those who are working part-time but want full-time employment, and those who've simply given up--and this, we're told, is somehow evidence of excessive interest in detail.

Benen thinks that too-skeptical-for-the-Washington Post Dan Froomkin "has this just right" when writing that "there are all sorts of legitimate reasons to be concerned about Obama's approach to governing" but "intellectual curiosity is one thing journalists in particular should celebrate, not sneer at."

In Benen's closing thoughts he really "can't help but wonder if" reporters might simply "prefer a more superficial president because they have a more superficial perspective?"