Murdoch mediates in war of commentators

News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch has been impelled to intervene in a long-running dispute between two of America's leading and most pungent TV commentators, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC network. The pair have been at odds for years - O'Reilly is an ultra conservative, Olbermann (pictured), a liberal - but the row between them, which in recent times has been focussed on the Iraq war, has now spilled over into the boardrooms of the respective networks, who feel it is affecting wider business relationships.

To offer a flavour of the pundits' dust-ups, O'Reilly recently accused Olbermann of undercutting the US war effort with his comments. Worse, he criticised General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC, for doing business in Iran. For his part, Olbermann takes none of this lying down. He told O'Reilly on the air last month: "After all the shilling and ass-kissing you did for the administration before this phoney war, you are more personally responsible for the 4,000 dead Americans in Iraq than all of America's corporations put together."

But matters came to a head when word leaked that Olbermann planned to air footage taken by a liberal activist outside O'Reilly's home. It was at this point Murdoch was said to have interceded personally, managing to stop the film being shown. Whether this will cease hostilities remains to be seen.