Another NBC'er Joins Team Obama

NBC might as well be renamed to OBC, the Obama Broadcasting Company. We currently have G.E. CEO Jeff Immelt, NBC's parent company, on Obama's Economic Advisory Board, and now we have NBC News Special Correspondent Tom Brokaw being appointed to Obama 's 2009-2010 President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.

Anybody else see any conflict of interests in reporting the news in an unbiased manner here?

[edit on 6/18/09 by Ferris.Bueller.II]

Originally posted by Ferris.Bueller.II
NBC might as well be renamed to OBC, the Obama Broadcasting Company. We currently have G.E. CEO Jeff Immelt, NBC's parent company, on Obama's Economic Advisory Board, and now we have NBC News Special Correspondent Tom Brokaw being appointed to Obama 's 2009-2010 President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.

Anybody else see any conflict of interests in reporting the news in an unbiased manner here?

[edit on 6/18/09 by Ferris.Bueller.II]

At first I didn't think anything of this, since it is only for White House Fellowships. But then I got to thinking, why not a fully RETIRED journalist like Walter Cronkite to head this? Why Brokaw? Why another NBC guy?

reply to post by MOFreemason


Brokaw interviewed Obama June 5th.

Brokaw interviews Obama

Obama is 'buying' NBC.

Oh I can hear Katie Couric already starting to whine over this one. "What about me?"

Just another indicator as to the extent of how much the MSM slobbers over Obama. Brokaw must be in heaven. Perhaps Chris Matthews will be next in line for a new job.

reply to post by jibeho


Fox News is a government SHILL! These guys do nothing but slanted views to ONE side of the political line and just want to bash everyone else! They arent balanced like a news organization should be and everyone that works for them is an agent of the NWO and PTB! ........oh.........wait.......

Did you say NBC and ABC? woops bad call on my part!!!!!!

I love it, the Fox news bashing is going to be so full of hypocrisy now!

reply to post by MOFreemason

Cronkite is too old and too old school. I work in the field and we have been discussing how prefabricated and fraudulent journalism has become, a lot of what you see in print is personally directed by a publisher or editor. Without divulging too many details I'll tell you a true story but first, an opinion. Brokaw is a reputable reporter, he is a good one to have overseeing a fellowship foundation which is an excellent concept since it allows people who have been in the field to work in positions where they will have first hand access to information instead of relying on fax machines and the gossip route which is how most journalists work. It also may be part of an effort to rebuild the White House press corps, Helen Thomas is getting old and most of the old timers are retired or dead. Fellowships are for mid-career reporters, not newbies, so it would be much harder for them to "shape" some reporters ideologies, there actually are lots of competent people in the field.

I do agree that they need outside oversite on such a sensitive project since it is susceptible to corruption and I'll tell you why. Journalism awards and fellowships look good on paper but are NO guarantee of credibility. I once worked with a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter named "Cory L." who covered the Balkan conflict in the early 1990s. She later worked for a very reputable and influential Florida paper but wouldn't discuss why she left (or was let go) aside from saying in a very guarded way that she "needed a change."

When I disclosed to her that our supervisor allowed correspondents
and reporters to falsify quotes and entire stories and that I was being forced into to writing these stories for the correspondents she took one look at me, tossed her fuzzy little head, waved her hand and sniffed "Oh, that's old school journalism."

The paper we worked for has a long history of fraudulent journalism but still maintained official positions with the state journalism foundation. Interestingly enough, they never disclosed the fact that a crime reporter was let go in 2004 after faking quotes for 10 YEARS when an attorney who was present during a sentencing hearing threatened to go public. They retrieved all the copies of the paper they could get their hands on, then turned around and submitted the story with the fake quote in question as part of a package that won one of the organiztion's top writing awards that year. Yet they still had the gall to report on cases where other papers fired reporters who were caught plagiarizing or faking stories.

Our paper's biggest news source since we had virtually none in the community? A rival paper and a local newsstation's web site.....and the publisher's husband, an attorney who (illegally) represented both the paper and numerous municipal clients. Who liberally used the paper to threaten and defame opposing parties to his clients, without censure from the Bar Association.

They also never disclosed the fact that their military issues reporter was demoted from covering city government in 2007 for faking quotes in her stories and threatening members of the public to cover it up. Or that one of their current editors, a purported journalism professor, was caught faking a story in 2002; his first month on the job if memory serves correctly.

One of their biggest community contacts is a journalism instructor at the local college who when I took her class claimed to have been an editor at the Los Angeles Times and the Denver Post. I told so many stories about her class at work that one of our editors, who knew people at those papers, called up and no one could identify her. Then she claimed to be an entertainment editor (no again), then a correspondent. She didn't have much work to bring in for examples, that is for sure, most of them time was spent discussing her husband's alleged friendship with Marcia Clark of OJ Simpson fame. And yet, she is now running an award-winning student publication. It was a dead giveaway for me that she was a fake when we got to discussing the elements of reporting TWO MONTHS into class for about five minutes instead of the first day, which is when a reputable teacher would begin.

For those of you who think all journalists are Obama-loving liberals, you are wrong. Many of the smaller hometown papers are conservative and will not give him positive coverage. The paper I work for now claims to be liberal but they refused to run Obama's photo when he was elected, BIG mistake since we have a large nonwhite population that has pulled their ad dollars (and I can't blame them). We'll be lucky if we last past January.