This is a posting about a surprise guest on this morning’s news report on MSNBC and what it tells you about media bias in the cable news business and how one hot-looking news anchor may have just had her close-up.

LAS VEGAS, NV (March 13, 2009) – It was rather shocking to see Deidre Bolton, an anchor on Bloomberg TV, on MSNBC this morning.

She works for the main TV competitor of MSNBC’s sister station, the now embattled, CNBC.

Two things are happening here.

One, NBC has heard the criticism around the nation and the blogosphere about their blatant acts of bias to attract a wider audience and a wider advertising base.

NBC has allowed CNBC to be the screaming poster boys for the Wall Street crowd while having the more liberal MSNBC including Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann rake the financial rakes over the bailout coals.

It all started with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart has been hammering CNBC and especially TV Host Jim Cramer for his poor financial predictions which appeared to be more while acting as the financial industry’s cheerleader. Cramer and most of CNBC’s anchors look hypocritical: they purport to be financial journalists when they’re really acting as shills for Wall Street.

Thanks to Stewart, the NBC advertising model for cable became obvious to the rest of us – myself included. CNBC would look like a right-wing business friendly outlet and compete for the Fox News Channel advertisers while MSNBC would go liberal and compete against CNN.

Let me be clear here. That is good business. No one should criticize NBC for that – from a business point of view.

However, it’s also disingenuous to true news viewers. We are getting biased and distorted reporting to gain advertising revenues. That is only obvious to viewers now. The transparency on the part of NBC is lacking. Promotions like “In Cramer We Trust” are pure entertainment slogans – not what a credible news organization would tout.

Again, the paradox of the news media today is that there are more news outlets than ever before but we news viewers need to work even harder to get the news.

So, having Bloomberg’s Bolton on-air to offer news analysis was possibly a bow to media fairness.

That’s reason number one.

Reason number two is Deidre Bolton. This on-camera de-brief about the Bernie Madoff case may have been an audition. That’s right; you may have seen Deidre’s screen test for the next opening on CNBC.

With fear of sounding sexist here, Deidre is a great looking woman. Plus, if you look at a lot of the anchors on CNBC – namely Erin Burnett – they did their early work at Bloomberg TV. Bloomberg, the lower end of TV financial news, acts as a minor league system for CNBC.

That makes you think: is Bloomberg working with CNBC behind the scenes?

Probably not. A lot of news and broadcast organizations keep their costs low by developing talent and then letting the talent leave when the price tag gets too high. Bloomberg has done a great job in finding new talent.

However, TV news and cable news organizations don’t work in a free-market system.  Ironic when you think about what CNBC and Bloomberg tout.  No, these media outlets are part of an oligarchy.  The lack of media outlets has kept the supply of on-air talent high in comparison to the outlets available.  As a result, most on-air talent take less pay to get on the limited number of news outlets. 

That’s why when you wonder why someone got on TV; they were the lowest bidder.