IS THIS WHY THE MEDIA IS SO OVER-THE-TOP BIASED?

Network television executives have been murmuring about how detrimental it is for them to drop high draw programming to carry Obama's ponderous press conferences and speeches for months but are they helpless because Rahm Emanuel is bypassing them and going straight to the top?


HOWARD KURTZ reports that Emanuel's sharp elbows are still intact:

Instead of contacting NBC, Emanuel went to Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric. He also spoke with Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS Corp., the company spun off from Viacom.

I seem to remember a time when executives of parent companies stayed out of the programming business.

What if......the shameless sycophancy we're seeing from the likes of MSNBC talking heads is more about placating their parent company bosses than it is a blind and mindless love for a man determined to destroy the country?

The networks "absolutely" feel pressured, says Paul Friedman, CBS's senior vice president: "It's an enormous financial cost when the president replaces one of those prime-time hours. The news divisions also have mixed feelings about whether they are being used."

If I'm a parent company exec and bow to the pressure of Emanuel, don't I send a message all the way down the line to make sure Obama gets GLOWING coverage?

I'd like to take a bit of a sidebar because I've been asserting that it's more than just a little possible that Obama's "(police) acted stupidly" comment was intentional and Alinsky-based. Kurtz actually makes a case for this, albeit likely unintentional on Kurtz' part.

Had Obama not answered the last question that evening -- declaring that the Cambridge police had acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home -- the news conference would have been almost totally devoid of news. And that raises questions about whether the sessions have become mainly a vehicle for Obama to repeat familiar messages.

What was the reason for the presser? To make the case for health care, right? Obama needed to get the constituent pressure off the blue dogs. He did that by saying something stupid. Had he not done that, even Kurtz notes that the whole exercise would have been futile.

Shouldn't we begin asking why Emanuel was so insistent that the networks cover such an innocuous press conference?

Many dynamics at work here for sure....

h/t to MICHELLE MALKIN