An Award, Criticism and Perils for Comcast

Pending government approval, MSNBC will soon have a new parent company, Comcast, and that may prove to be awkward for Keith Olbermann and other TV critics of Fox. As a distributor of cable programming, Comcast is in business with Fox and its parent company, the News Corporation.

The New York Times is reporting the business interests of Comcast and the News Corporation were brought to light in a lawsuit by Barry Nolan, a Comcast employee whose protest of Mr. O’Reilly cost him a $200,000-a-year job two years ago. Mr. Nolan later protested his firing, and last month, he lost the case.

In an extensive review of Mr. Nolan’s case for the Columbia Journalism Review in August, the writer Terry Ann Knopf asserted that Mr. Nolan’s firing reflected the “corrosive influence of over-concentrated corporate power.”

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