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News is what Joe Shmoe sees on tv or reads in the paper. For JS, what the news is, what is. Someone has to make the news so JS has something to know.
The trick of newsmaking is to select, of all the knowable things, for JS to know what JS should know. Therein lies the first conflict of interest.
The newsmaker-in-the-trenches is financially interested to satisfy his or her bosses because that's what pays the mortgage. Not surprising that Mr Greenwald is still at Salon while David Horowitz no longer is. (I'll lump opinionmaking and newsmaking together because by now there has remained very little difference between the two).
In turn, the newsmaker bosses are politically connected and their goal is to influence JS by nonreporting of events, facts, allegations, doubts, etc, their political pals don't want JS to know. Once people know something, they may act on their knowledge.
Just a small example: the obsessively blog-updating Mr Greenwald still has not updated his blog about the Palin email hack event, where he describes the hacker as a member of a loony band of internet pranksters with no political agenda.
So the first conflict of interest is that the newsmakers are politically connected. This they try to obfuscate and deny.
The second conflict of interest, and that is where the root of the problem is, is that the politicians themselves, all of them in all 3 branches of the government, are financially beholden to special interest groups. Do you want to be concerned about substantial financial stakes? Look at the system of paid lobbying and contributions. That is why the entire system of government in the US is rotten to the core.
NBC can deal with its problem of credibility, in case it still has any left, by disclosing the financial interests of its contributors before they are allowed to talk. The bigger question is: what are we going to do about our government?
