The most infamous instance of "Yellow Journalism" occurred when newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst allegedly said to his field-correspondent, the artist Fredrick Remington, the following: "You furnish the pictures.  I'll furnish the war".  The Spanish-American War shortly ensued. 

 Last week, against the wishes of a local NAACP leader in Orlando, Al Sharpton lead a demonstration in Sanford Florida to "Escalate" racial tensions over the Treyvon Martin killing.  Could the MSNBC Television News Host Reverend Al Sharpton -- purportedly in his role as liberal-approved "race leader" -- be privately offering his corporate boss, Obama Administration-functionary Jeffrey Immelt, a 21^st Century update of Yellow Journalism in order to influence the 2012 elections?  This occurred to me when I learned that NBC has mounted an internal investigation to discover who was behind a selectively-edited version of the 911 call that made George Zimmerman's remarks to appear much more racist than they actually are. In this imputed modern echo of Hearst's quote we would have Sharpton, in effect, saying to Immelt:

"You furnish the pictures fabricated sound-bites. I'll furnish the (race) war".

Conveniently, Immelt conspicuously distanced himself from Obama last week.    Did he know what was coming? Why should we trust Immelt to investigate himself?  Shouldn't this be a matter for the FCC?  It amounts, after all, to a misleading use of the public airwaves to incite racist sentiments, perhaps leading to violence.

Am I being tendentious?  Am I a nutty conspiracy-theorist?  Perhaps... but let's also recognize that the left has been loudly denouncing Immelt's fellow industrialists, the Koch brothers, as being manipulative of the public sentiment on much less evidence.