 I'm Jeff Cohen now in the journalism department of Ithaca College. In 2002 and 2003 I was a full-time employee at MSNBC which is NBC's cable news channel owned by General Electric and I was an on-air pundit debating conservatives every weekday afternoon and I was also a senior producer on the primetime Phil Donahue show and within six months of the invasion of Iraq I was engaged on air in debates about the wisdom of invading Iraq. I was opposed I said it was going to contribute and exacerbate regional instability. I used the word quagmire and of course US troops are still in Iraq but I lost my on-air time slot because MSNBC started a new program called Countdown Iraq hosted by Lester Holt and this program featured a parade of retired military brass and they were presented as analysts, as independent, but we now know they were hardly independent. They were being fed talking points by the Pentagon. They were junketed by the Pentagon. Many of them were military contractors. The reason we know all that is from a front page New York Times expose by David Barstow that won the Pulitzer Prize and it exposed through thousands of pages of internal Pentagon documents this lack of independence. After the expose came out it has almost never been mentioned on these TV channels and many of these military retirees are still on the air. As senior producer of the Phil Donahue show we tried hard to put experts on the air who were ready to challenge the arguments of the Bush administration for why we needed to invade Iraq and invade fast and one of the people we got on the air was a former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and after we got him on the air we learned the next day oh he's not supposed to appear on our channel. So apparently there was some sort of blacklist remember this was 2002 not 1952. We also put on the air the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter who has been totally vindicated in his claims that Iraq represented absolutely no WMD threat. Whenever we put Ritter on the air we would immediately hear these false smears that he was covertly being funded by the Saddam Hussein regime and that false charge without any evidence was put on the air by the general manager of MSNBC. As the invasion of Iraq got closer management at MSNBC basically seized control of the Donahue show and they ordered us to have a quota system where if we booked a guest who was questioning the proposed invasion of Iraq we had to have two guests that were pro invasion. If we had two guests on the left we had to have three on the right. At one meeting when a producer said she could book Michael Moore who was obviously a critic of the proposed invasion she was told she'd have to have three right-wingers for political balance to Michael Moore. The Donahue show was ultimately terminated three weeks before the invasion of Iraq and it was terminated for political reasons. How do we know? God bless a whistleblower inside NBC who got a hold of a document and the day after our show was terminated it was released to the press and this internal MSNBC NBC document that was never supposed to be released it said that Donahue would be quote a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives unquote. Now I got into journalism and journalism in a democracy is supposed to question the motives of the government powers. That memo that leaked went on to say that they fear that and that Donahue would be quote a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity unquote. What was MSNBC solution? Get rid of people like me like Phil Donahue who were acting journalistically and wave the flag. I told this whole story in a 2006 book called Cable News Confidential and immediately heard from journalists across the country from local journalists national journalists all of whom had been silenced or sanctioned or fired for acting journalistically and raising questions about the upcoming invasion of Iraq. One of the emails I received was from the former governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura and in the press we were told that when Donahue was gone we were to be replaced in prime time by a show hosted by Jesse Ventura so the email I received from the former governor was to this effect. I got paid millions of dollars but they didn't want my show ever to launch and the reason for that is they learned that I was as opposed to the invasion of Iraq as was Phil Donahue. Every statement that I have made in the last five minutes is fully documented. Thank you for your attention.