I Wrote A Letter Today

to NBC Nightly News, hosted by Brian Williams. The anger was just piling up too high.

It is bad enough that NBC has yet to report or respond to the New York
Times' revelations concerning the undisclosed conflict of interest of your so-called military advisors.
But then Brian Williams decided to pimp Peggy Noonan's inane column
questioning Barack Obama's patriotism.
Now, you have decided not to offer Arianna Huffington a forum for her new book, presumably because it critiques Tim Russert and other media
inside-the-beltway know-nothings.
It's time you folks began to recognize that this is the new internet world
and millions of your viewers and your advertisers' customers are watching carefully.
We expect to be informed fully and evenly about the news of the day. If you
cannot, will not, provide that, we can easily decide to pull the plug or switch the channel, and I plan to do so and tell everyone I know, including those who read my blog, to avoid NBC whenever possible.
Your market is shrinking, and you cannot expect to make it all up with
reality shows. We want real reality. We have options.

Now I learn that apparently Brian Williams felt forced to respond to blog commenters besieging him about the Noonan thing and the network's decision to ignore the NYT story about its military analysts.
Glenn Greenwald takes a close, detailed look at just how conflicted GE-owned NBC is and, by implication, Williams.
Here's a snippet:

Just consider what is going on here. The core credibility of war reporting by Brian Williams and NBC News has been severely undermined by a major NYT expose. That story involves likely illegal behavior by the Pentagon, in which NBC News appears to have been complicit, resulting in the deceitful presentation of highly biased and conflicted individuals as "independent" news analysts. Yet they refuse to tell their viewers about any of this, and refuse to address any of the questions that have been raised.

Lesson: Don't ever underestimate the degree to which the so-called mainstream media is compromised by its corporate controllers and connections.
P.S. NPR, by the way, also had a military analyst under contract and cited by the NYT story. They seem fairly sure he was not as compromised as suggested by the story, but have in response created a set of pretty strict guidelines for the use of "sources," including disclosing to listeners the source's ties to outside organizations and causes.
This is Journalism 101, something many news organizations have been consistently lax about in recent times.
Who's good at this, there must be some good, right? As far as I know, McClatchy does it righter than most. There are really good people in other organizations, but overall, the organizations themselves are not reliably consistent. The NYT itself took a hard look at its own past use of some of these military advisors as op-ed writers.