Over the last year and a half, particularly since the labor dispute between the state of Wisconsin and its public employees, there has been a lot of effort at MSNBC aimed at casting the Koch brothers as billionaires trying to interfere with the democratic process. But a case could be made that MSNBC isn’t so far removed from money influencing the democratic process either.
A Washington Post story by Perry Bacon Jr. and Cecilia Kang reports $1.2 million was raised for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign at the home of Comcast’s Executive Vice President David L. Cohen. MSNBC is a unit of Comcast’s NBC Universal.
“Campaign officials said about 800 people, each giving at least $100, attended the first event, at a Hyatt hotel,” Bacon and Kang wrote. “Later in the evening, Comcast’s executive vice president, David L. Cohen, hosted about 120 people in his home for a dinner, each of the attendees giving at least $10,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign.”
The story also pointed out that Cohen had “successfully shepherded the regulatory review of Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal earlier this year.”
The timing is curious because on Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney directly intervened on the president’s behalf with MSNBC management after Time magazine editor-at-large Mark Halperin called Obama “a dick” while appearing on the network. That intervention is believed to have led to the immediate indefinite suspension of Halperin.