The Huffington Post is concerned all of a sudden that General Electric is engaging in top-down control of the news because they tried to stop Keith Olbermann’s attacks on Bill O’Reilly.

The Post is right to be concerned about GE’s control, but they haven’t shown much interest in GE’s network push for green investments and carbon trading that will line their own pockets.

As one of world leaders in wind energy technology and an investor in Greenhouse Gas Services, a joint venture that manages carbon trading, General Electric stands to gain a lot from leftist environmental policies, and it has used its networks to push for those policies.

Their use of top-down corporate control doesn’t stop with promoting green policies. Newscorp and General Electric reached an agreement to have their networks stop attacking each other so viciously last week, but Olbermann wasn’t a part of the deal, so he fired back last night and named O’Reilly one of the word people in the world.

The Huffington Post’s David Sitora said:

Olbermann's own personal lack of involvement in a "deal" is far less important than the simple fact that GE started trying to give blatant news-content orders to MSNBC's newsroom - orders that may have been followed in places well beyond Olbermann's control.

General Electric’s involvement in a petty feud between two egomaniac cable news hosts might not be a big deal, but the fact that they use the news to influence policy—and do it for their own political profit—is.

In promoting their parent company’s investments, NBC has heavily pushed Green Week and the website Green is Universal, along with alarmist global warming news coverage and documentary specials. MSNBC ran the special “Future Earth: Journey to the End of the World,” which predicted that by 2013 the polar ice caps will completely melt.

NBC News has a running segment called “Our Planet” that it uses to report on global warming and highlight sections of ice melting, while ignoring the fact that ice growth in the Arctic and Antartic has been growing at record levels in 2008 and 2009.

In 2007, NBC blamed global warming for California wildfires

In 2008, an NBC segment claimed that sea levels could rise 200 feet, ten times what even the most adamant alarmists claim.

On March 13, Anne Thompson reported for NBC that cap-and-trade would reduce the cost of solar power.

Thompson has a long record of alarmist reporting on global warming. As far back as 2007, she reported that the debate was over. That’s just a sampling of the kind of global warming hysteria that passes for news at NBC daily.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt says that the Obama administration, for which General Electic was a top donor, is an “opportunity of a lifetime” because “capitalism will be ‘reset.’” GE has spent millions of dollars lobbying for global warming bills.

General Electric has tried to silence CNBC, the lone source of Obama skepticism at NBC Universal. Immelt held a secret meeting with CNBC anchors in which he told them to not to voice so much disagreement with Obama.

One source at the meeting said:

"There was a long discussion about whether CNBC has become too conservative and is beating up on Obama too much. There's great concern that CNBC is now the anti-Obama network. The whole meeting was really kind of creepy."

Indeed, the Huffington Post’s Sitora, writing for Open Left about General Electric’s influence over the news said:

The list of examples is endless - and the obvious answer is that none of it is a coincidence, even if most of these conflicts are kept completely hidden from the news-consuming audience.

—Mitchell Blatt is the editor of the foreign affairs blog Bombs and Dollars.