Jeff Zucker as the Next Buck Turgidson? War-Rooming During His Own Apocalypse? Nikki Finke Explains.

So NBC-Uni prexy Jeff Zucker takes his network from first to fourth, and he gets some bad press--a lot of bad press. And of course, his operating units have huge layoffs, which would've been even huger had not parent company been bailed out by the government, through its pipeline into the Treasury, GE Capital.

So what does Zucker do? Work harder to get better shows? Resign? Nope? According to multimedia queen Nikki Finke, he has set up a "war room" to monitor his detractors--I guess now, in the spirit of war, to be defined as enemies. (It was Nikki who did the graphic above.)

It seems that Jeff is going to hire Kevin Goldman of CNBC, to come over the Zuckerbunker to focus full time on batting down bad blogs and the like from their attacks on NBCU's fearless leader:

So NBC Universal is in such terrible trouble these days that its boss Jeff Zucker has now decided that the company should go to DEFCON 1 (the defense readiness condition representing expectation of an imminent attack). The forward position will be at 30 Rockefeller Plaza where a new and broader media strategy will be pursued. So while NBCU is cutting costs and laying off staff, Zucker is expanding his own flak flacks. Under EVP Cory Shields (who is Jeff's mouthpiece) and SVP Kathy Kelly-Brown, I understand that NBCU's corporate communications unit will now include an additional field marshall to monitor New Media, provide rapid response capabilities, and ensure websites, blogs and other media outlets are publishing and capturing appropriate NBCU content. Seriously, that's the real job description for Kevin Goldman, the former VP of CNBC media relations recently promoted to the NBCU war room. Zucker has managed to co-opt many mainstream newspapers and magazines into not writing about most of NBCU's fuck-ups. But he obviously feels the need to seek safety in a bunker surrounded by more human shields taking all the incoming sniper fire from New Media. "As print is becoming less and less relevant, and blogs more and more relevant, we have to have relationships with blogs and a response to what they post," an insider tells me. What Zucker doesn't understand is that the artillery barrage will continue no matter the size of the PR defense perimeter as long as he keeps leading NBCU into oblivion.

If it all seems a bit strange--like something out of Dr. Strangelove, with Zucker playing the part of, say, Buck Turgidson--well, that's the point that Finke is trying to make.

But sometimes movies and satire have a way of converging with the truth. The Cable Gamer can see, for example, that one day General Electric will have four operating units:

1) Support Jeff Immelt and his quest to "golden parachute" himself into some green job in the government somewhere. With GE stock down to 9,Jeff is done for in the private sector, so government is the only place left for him and his ego.

2) Speaking of ego, GE will need a unit--MSNBC is doing fine so far--to care and stroke Keith Olbermann's ego. He is building his own liberal empire of lilliputian leftists, and while ordinary people aren't watching, the Obama White House is, and so for the sake of the next bailout, Keith is a vital profit center.

3) GE's lobbying arm, to make sure that Democrats know how much MSNBC loves them, and so keep the bailout money coming--did you see Rachel Maddow's kissyface interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? that should be worth more billions to MSNBC!

4) Jeff Zucker's war room. As more people get laid off all around him, count on the Zuckerbunker to get bigger and bigger, till the final Zuckerdammerung.

The New York Times On the Spot--Not. All That High-Priced Reportorial "Talent," And Yet The NYT Still Misses The Big Story.

Is The New York Times so busy hatchet-jobbing the parent of Fox News that it doesn't notice a huge story in the making? Are Timesmen Tim Arango and Richard Perez-Pen so determined to stick it to Murdoch & Co. that they don't even see the real news? What exactly does the Times do with itself, anyway?

Yup, there was plenty of big news for Cable Gamers this week--and it's only Tuesday! But perhaps the biggest news was the pending departure of Peter Chernin, as COO of the News Corp, the company that runs Fox News--albeit FNC is pretty much an independent operation within NWS.

But of course, since Rupert Murdoch is the visionary who put Fox in motion, anything that affects News Corp is of interest to Cable Gamers. And so we note that The New York Times, always eager to stir the pot, produced a giant article, negative to the point of hatchet-y,on Murdoch and NWS on Monday.

OK, fair enough--or unfair enough. But what's amusing to insiders, as a great new blog, Nytpicker (get it?) points out, is that the Times missed the big news hiding not so far below the surface. That is, the Times was so busy hatcheting Murdoch and NWS that it missed the news of Chernin's departure, which was announced just hours after the Times story appeared. As Nytpicker puts it:

The NYT's media reporters litter their story today with references to top sources within the company, but they somehow failed to ferret out the scoop that appeared first at 1:30 p.m. New York time on Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, and was confirmed at 3:06 p.m. by the Los Angeles Times on its website.

And then Nytpicker continues:

Remarkably, the NYT didn't post the news of Chernin's exit from News Corp. until some three hours later, and that post -- by Arango -- attributed the news to "a person briefed on the matter who declined to speak publicly because the company had not made a formal announcement."

Wonder how Arango and Perez-Pena explained their failure to get the Chernin scoop to their editors, given that they'd spent much of the previous week interviewing sources with supposed knowledge of the workings of Murdoch's company.

What's all the more interesting is that Arango is a former New York Post reporter, up until just a few years ago. So one can only wonder: What he was doing, as he "sleuthed" out his story? What "sources" were he and Perez-Pena talking to? You would think that two reporters, working away on such a big story, would manage to uncover the really big story. But if you thought that, you would be wrong.

The Cable Game Becomes The Cable War!

"Gibbs blasts cable news"--that's the headline on CNN's website tonight. That's Robert Gibbs, and he means it.

The White House press secretary took the opportunity to blast the medium at Friday's press conference when asked about CNBC reporter Rick Santelli's recent tirade against the president's mortgage plan.

"I…think that it's tremendously important that for people who rant on cable television to be responsible and understand what it is they're talking about," Gibbs said. "I feel assured that Mr. Santelli doesn't know what he's talking about."

Gibbs also went on to criticize cable news coverage of the presidential campaign.

"If I hadn't worked on the campaign but simply watch the cable news scorekeeping of the campaign, we lost virtually every day of the race," he said. "If I would have just watched cable TV, I long would have crawled into a hole and given up this whole prospect of changing the country."

One of the reasons I started this blog four years ago was that I believed that cable news--The Cable Game--was the center of the action for news these days. And I sure feel right tonight! When I heard Chris Matthews refer to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as being "like a child" in his puerile incompetence, that's when I realized that even the Obama suckups at MSNBC would not be able to enforce total loyalty to The One in the face of manifest ineptitude. And now we see signs of freethinking at CNBC and CNN, as well as Fox.

It's going to be a heckuva fight: On the one side, the entire power of the federal government. On the other side, the First Amendment and some pretty big corporations, and millions of loyal fans. So who will win? Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Video, courtesy of Politico.

Dan Abrams, Qorvis, Bob Wright, & Co. The Plot Tangles.

Last year, when Dan Abrams announced the creation of Abrams Research, even as he stayed on at NBC, critics cried foul.

To run a consulting business for freelance media types, even as he continues to be billed as "the Chief Legal Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. He also serves as a contributor to “Dateline” and “Today” and as a MSNBC dayside anchor," struck many as a conflict of interest.

Take a look at the screen grab above, from the Abrams Research home page, offering the promise to customers, "Get bloggers working with you--not against you." Pretty slick that a consulting firm can do such a thing, huh? Well, it helps to have an ongoing big job in the MSM, even as you are selling your services to private clients--right, Dan?

And now, Abrams Research has signed a deal with Qorvis Communications, a big p.r. company. All the while continuing to work at NBC? No doubt Abrams will recuse himself whenever Qorvis comes up directly, but what will he do if a client of Qorvis, or some interest of Qorvis, comes up? Just asking.

And also, The Cable Gamer notes that Abrams lists an advisory board of nine media heavies, including Bryant Gumbel, Steven Brill, and Bonnie Fuller,

And on that list, too, is Bob Wright, listed as the "Fmr. Chairman, NBC Universal" -- that's true, but he is also the current Vice Chairman, one of four, at GE, which is the parent company of NBC Universal. And GE, through its other subsidiary, GE Capital, is a permanent supplicant to Uncle Sam. And surely that's a conflict for Abrams.

Chris Matthews Says Teddy Kennedy is "The greatest U.S. senator of modern times."

Read all about it here, in an article Chris Matthews wrote for The Daily Beast, the new trendy liberal 'zine from Tina Brown.

Rush Limbaugh Takes on the Issue of NBC-U Bailout: "I think there should be a cap on the salaries."

On yesterday's Rush Limbaugh show, a caller asked about NBC/MSNBC salaries, in light of the salary caps that were part of the bailout package. If GE Capital gets the bailout, then why doesn't all of GE, including its NBC-Universal media properties, have to abide by the caps?

Good question!

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here's Mark in Norfolk, Virginia, as we go back to the phones. Well, not "go back." We're just starting. Mark, it's great to have you here. It's nice to have on you at EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Thanks for manning the EIB chair on this holiday.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Question. You know in general, Rush, looking at NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, do you know roughly how much the talking heads make in income a year?

RUSH: Well, yeah. I can guesstimate it, based on the famous faces that you know. You want to know the numbers?

CALLER: Yeah, roughly.

RUSH: Well, just a wild guess. Brian Williams, ten million. Chris Matthews, five or six million.

CALLER: The reason why I say that, Rush, is that I believe -- if my recollection is correct -- that in the first round of TARP money, those particular networks, of course, are owned by GE. I believe that GE took taxpayer money, took TARP money, and if that's the case, Rush, why are taxpayers...?

RUSH: Wait a second. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I just can't go on speculation here. I just can't, because GE's not a bank, and only banks got it.

CALLER: Well, yeah, but see, remember that about 55% of GE's revenue comes from GE Capital.

RUSH: Oh, yeah!

CALLER: It comes from the financial side.

RUSH Oooooooooooooooh m'yeah!

CALLER: They make lots and lots of loans.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: They have lots and lots of money outstanding.

RUSH: That had totally slipped my mind out there. You are right.

CALLER: Well, my question is, if that's the case, Rush, why are taxpayers being asked to subsidize these exorbitant salaries? Can't these people give some back? Can't they do with less? Why are we as taxpayers subsidizing them --

RUSH: Yeah, because --

CALLER: -- especially when their ratings are going down?

RUSH: This is an excellent observation by Mark in Norfolk, Virginia. I think there should be a cap on the salaries.

CALLER: Totally.

RUSH: Brian Williams ought to not be able to make more than a million and a half.

CALLER: Five hundred thousand dollars.

RUSH: Well, that's the bonus. That's the bonus.

CALLER: But his ratings are going down, so obviously they're not doing their job.

RUSH: Well, actually that's not true. Brian, NBC Nightly News, had a pretty good week.

CALLER: Ah. How about MSNBC?

RUSH: Well, now, that's a different thing. For that, we're talking pure Thomas Crapper.

Mike Straka: “As long as we don’t make it look like TV, I’ll be happy.”

The New York Times' Saul Hansell has an interesting piece on Fox News' "Strategy Room" streaming show, and about the larger issue of web streaming in the news biz.

Streaming video is sort of the not-ready-for-prime-time of The Cable Game. As Hansell puts it in his whimsical lede:

So a television producer walks into a bar. He hears a singer crooning. Before long, the producer books the singer to talk about the mortgage market on his daytime talk show.

Maybe that’s not exactly the way things go for most bar jokes or for most talk shows. But it is standard operating procedure for Mike Straka, the producer of “The Strategy Room,” a discussion show that runs eight hours every weekday, streamed from FoxNews.com.

And thus one night at A. J. Maxwell’s, a steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Straka invited the lounge singer Tony D’Ville on the show. Mr. D’Ville sang a Sinatra tune and then discussed the mortgage crisis.

Streaming can be anything, from a motley crew of different guests, gathered around, Charlie Rose-style, to a deep discussion of one topic for a prolonged period. The point is, so long as web streaming is kept cheap--and the Fox effort is compared to "Wayne's World"--then a wide variety of experimentation is possible.

But streaming is no sure thing. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, scooping the world on the retirement of ABC's Sam Donaldson, quotes Donaldson as saying jokey-ruefully about his streaming effort that he was "talking to an audience of dozens."

In other words, in cyberspace, it's easy for a streaming show to get lost. The way to make it succeed is branding, positioning, all the other components of marketing and presentation. That's not where streaming is now, but that's where it will end up.

Uncle Sam Further Limits Pay of Bailout Recipients. Time for GE Lobbyists to Get Busy Looking For Loopholes! Or Will This Force a Spinoff of NBC-U?

It is the clear intent of the US Government to limit the pay of those who have received federal money. Now the devil is in the details, as each corporation plots and schemes to weasel out of the restrictions. The Cable Gamer will be paying particular attention, of course, to General Electric, since it is both an enormous recipient of bailout money AND an enormous media company.

And so, to name one flagrant example, how can NBC-Universal, a subsidiary of GE, continue to pay high salaries and bonuses in the teeth of these restrictions? GE CEO Jeff Immelt might have saved his own job through adroit playing of the bailout game, but it's going to be hard for NBC-Universal to function in such a regulated and salary-capped environment--the sins of the corporate parent are going to be visited on the corporate children.

So TCG repeats her longstanding prediction: NBC-U will be spun off.

But let's take a step back.

Two weeks ago, the Obama Administration put a theoretical cap of $500,000 on the pay of top executives for bailed out companies. TCG wrote about that Obama initiative in three posts, on February 5-6. These restrictions seemed perfectly fair to The Cable Gamer: If you are willing to take huge risks in the entrepreneurial business world, and you succeed, then you ought to be hugely rewarded. But if you fail, well, you ought to fail. Unfortunately, as well all know the big banks, including GE Capital, didn't to fail--they wanted to be bailed out by the government, AND they wanted to keep their multi-multi-million-dollar compensation packages. So fie on them!

But critics quickly pointed out that the Obama caps, as written by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner--a total tool of his past and future employers on Wall Street--were easy to evade, because salary could be called "bonuses" instead.

So, reacting to completely justifiable public outrage, Congress went further on Friday; now the lobbyists are going to have to scramble even more to find loopholes--and maybe, just maybe, there won't be any, and the clear will of the people will be obeyed. This article, in The Washington Post on Saturday morning, byTomoeh Murakami Tse, would seem to be clear enough: The new stimulus package "imposes new limits on executive compensation that could significantly curb multimillion dollar pay packages on Wall Street and goes much further than restrictions proposed by the Obama administration last week."

How much further? Bonuses can only be a third of the salary, so if the maximum salary is $500,000, the maximum bonus would be just $167,000. And here's another kicker: the bonus caps are retroactive. Here's the WaPo:

Unlike the rules issued by the White House, the limits in the stimulus bill would apply to top executives and the highest-paid employees at all 359 banks that have already received government aid.

Now one of those "banks," of course, is GE Capital, which, as The New York Times reported last year, is benefiting from TWO different programs--a $139 billion loan guarantee from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and also, "a new Federal Reserve program aimed at reviving demand for the commercial paper for a wide variety of companies."

So GE Capital is pretty hooked onto the government IV. And that means that the rest of GE is hooked, too, because funds are fungible.

So it is the clear intent of Congress--and the President will, of course, sign this bill--to severely limit top pay at bailed-out firms.

Here's more from the Post:

At firms getting more than half a billion dollars, which would include all of the Wall Street giants, the rules would apply to the top five executives and the 20 highest-paid employees.

There you have it: "top five executives and the 20 highest-paid employees."

Now who does that include, for example? How 'bout Tina Fey, of "30 Rock" and the occasional "Saturday Night Live"? She probably makes a lot of money, but she would undoubtedly argue that she is "talent," and not an executive (and yes, there is, indeed, a wide gap between talented people at NBC and executives at NBC!). Ditto with Jay Leno and the folks at "The Office," or "Heroes." All of them are no doubt working for independent production companies, get a lot of their money in royalties and residuals, and so on.

But what about, say, Keith Olbermann? Surely he is simply an employee of MSNBC, or of its parent, NBC. And he makes a reported $7 million a year. And Brian Williams, and Matt Lauer and that enormous talent, Jeff Zucker? So quick question: Do any of these folks get bonuses, for, say, good ratings? Such incentive provisions in TV contracts are routine; I guess now it will be the mission of corporate watchdogs and muckrakers to go through the public filings of corporations in order to verify that the bailed-out bigs are abiding by these restrictions.

The Cable Gamer can see two scenarios here: First, GE and its NBC-U subsid simply find a bunch of loopholes and ignore the rules. Frankly, that's the most likely scenario.

Second, the government proves to be a lot tougher on these newly regulated companies, and NBC-U realizes that it can no longer function as a subsidiary of GE and its incompetent management.

And that means spinoff, or selloff, or going private.

Shepard Smith in Esquire

The Cable Gamer realizes that magazines are fading--and that's a shame, because there's nothing more fun than a good juicy magazine article, written by someone with some literary style. A great case in point is the new profile, by feature-writing legend Tom Junod, in the current issue of Esquire--on a Cable Game fave, Shepard Smith. The piece begins with a hiliarious, bordering on profound, meditation on Shep's face:

Shepard Smith has a face made for television, a face seemingly created not just for the cameras but by them, a brand-name face that could be made into a mask and worn on Halloween. It's extreme, without being irregular; indeed, its extremity lies in its action-figure regularity, its plane-sawed proportions. Well, that and his eyes. His eyes are points of interest, both on television and in person. They look done, if you want to know the truth. He is the proverbial journalist who goes through life with a raised eyebrow, not out of temperament but rather because he can't get the damned thing down. His right eyebrow is steeply and permanently peaked, like a tattoo of skeptical interest. And his eyes themselves... well, you meet him and you don't even register what color they are. You register their shine. No matter what the light, he is the one guy in the room whose eyes always catch it and return it with a mineral gleam.

And the accompanying photo, from Nigel Parry, perfectly accompanies Junod's prose.

And then it continues, graf after graf of gems:

Indeed, if you followed Shep with a Steadicam through the halls of Fox, you could get a tracking shot like the one Scorsese got of Ray Liotta's Henry Hill walking through the kitchen at the Copa. The handshakes, and what he calls the "cutting up" — these are part of his job, as prescribed by the impresario himself, Roger Ailes. Happiness is part of his job. " 'Unhappy people make happy people unhappy' is something Roger drills into us," he says. "That and 'Remember, you could be selling shoes.' " ……The old idea of the godlike anchor dispensing facts from the unquestioned authority of the anchor's desk: "That's dead, thankfully," he says, and he knows, because he helped kill it.

...

He is such a creature of television that he is able to parody television, both on and off camera. Because he's always the anchorman, he's never the anchorman — indeed, Fox executives call him the "antianchor" — and now, to loosen up his team, he uses his booming anchor voice to comment on the live Fox News feed that's appearing on the monitors and screens all around Shep's Playroom.

...

He reads the way opera singers sing, in a voice whose sudden contrivance is matched only by its sudden force. He reads loud, in a great baritone honk. He reads insinuatingly. He reads with rhythm, he reads with speed, he reads with irony and skepticism and vehemence and maybe a little menace…Inside the institution, by his own insistence, his voice is the voice of "straight news." Outside the institution, however, his voice is the voice of Fox News, and that's something else entirely.

...

He's always been a sport. There are several Shep Smith Creation Myths circulating around Fox — several stories of how Fox brass came to see that he was Their Guy — and what they all have in common is his willingness to do what needed to be done, without standing on ceremony. For John Moody, executive vice-president of news, it was the time when Roger Ailes — Moody's boss and the president and architect of Fox News — looked up at a television and saw footage of O. J. Simpson's civil trial and said, "You know, just once I'd like to hear some reporter have the guts to say that he's here at the O. J. Simpson trial, where there's nothing going on and nothing happened today." Moody: "I called Shepard in L. A., which is where he was at the time. I said, 'Let's think about this.' He said, 'I got it.' I said, 'Well . . .' And he said, 'No, I got it.' It was the kind of thing where he was on the air before I finished my sentence. And Shepard just did this dry, absolutely dead-on thing where he said, 'There's nothing going on at the O. J. trial today. If something happens, we'll let you know about it. But for now, this is Shepard Smith in Los Angeles, at the O. J. trial, where nothing's happening.' That's when you knew, that's when you went, 'Oh yeah, oh yeah. . . .' "

...

"There has to be news at a place called Fox News," he says, and he's not the only one. It's the mantra of the network, the fallback equation that — until the recent entrance of Glenn Beck, anyway — has enabled its employees to distinguish between the programming that takes place between nine in the morning and eight at night, which is called News, and the programming that takes over thereafter, which is called Opinion. "I think we do a pretty good job of labeling it for the viewer," Shep says. "But we are under intense scrutiny because of our opinion shows. Are there people who want the news done a certain way? You bet there are, and some are in this building. But they don't affect what I do. The inner pressure and outer pressure that everyone thinks exists doesn't. When I hear people say that Fox News is right wing, I know that's not true, because I'm the one doing the news. It's my show, and there's no place for opinion on my show. It's uninteresting to me. I don't care what Sean Hannity thinks and I don't care what Alan Colmes thinks and I guarantee they don't care what I think and they don't know, either. You know what's interesting to me? What's interesting to me is that the thing people want to know about is the part on which I spend absolutely no time."

The network has never been just about ideology; it has also been about technology, which is where it has made its ideology stick, where it has earned ideology its style points. And Shep has been part of that. That screen? That infernal Fox screen? That "green screen," as the Fox people call it, or the Screen with a Lot of Shit Going On on It, as it's known in popular parlance? That's Shep's. He pioneered its use on the Fox Report. More important, that's Shep himself. Shep not only believed, before just about anyone else did, that the linear, orderly style of the 6:30 newscast was as dead as the godly anchor; he was also able to handle an emphatically nonlinear way of storytelling. "We push as much stuff — as much video, as much information — on the screen as we can," says Fox's news director, Jay Wallace, who started out as one of Shep's writers. "The thing about Shep is that he can look at that screen for twelve seconds and tell you what's going on in any one of those boxes. And then he can sell it to the viewer in about a second."

And finally, this summation of the Fox gestalt:

And so the funny thing about Fox News is that it's almost a disappointment to visit it, especially if you're of the belief that it's a nefarious force in American life, a greedy beast from whose adamantine jaws the presidency itself had to be wrested. The people are so nice. They're so accommodating. They work so hard. It's almost a Shangri-la of gainful employment, with everybody feeling remunerated and appreciated. ……It's not an angry place so much as it is a happy place notable for its angry prime-time hosts. It's Shep Smith's place, in other words, more than it is Sean Hannity's — but the fact that Shep's a nice guy doesn't mean that its jaws are any less adamantine or any more inclined to loosen their grip.

Not everyone will agree with Junod's assessment, of course--which is the point. Junod's essay is a great example of an entertainingly idiosyncratic discussion of an entertainingly idiosyncratic anchorman.

The Cable Gamer is confident that writer Junod (and photographer--portraitist, really--Parry) will always be busy, even in the digital era. Because good writing and keen observation are surely always in style, and always needed, no matter what the medium.

Breaking News from CNBC: Oops!

"Geithner Comments; CNBC Retracts." That sums up what's happened since Monday night in the ultra-high stakes financial rescue situation.

CNBC is retracting its report from Monday night which threatened to upend Wall Street expectations regarding Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's TARP II address.

In sum up the words of one well-informed financial observer*, CNBC really put its foot in it:

Geithner Comments; CNBC Retracts; Insurers Still In As Targeted Acquirers of Bad-Bank Assets (But Not Clear As Next Recipients of Direct Capital Infusions); Wither Goeth Ring-Fencing?

A preview of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's comments on the Obama administration's new bank stabilization and foreclosure mitigation plan has been released and is available here.

Meanwhile, CNBC has retracted its story of last evening which threatened to upend Wall Street expectations regarding impending Obama administration announcement of one or more "bad banks'" creation to help facilitate the removal of toxic or illiquid assets from commercial bank balance sheets (see Reuters story below).

Still in question, however, is the network's parallel assertion that insurers will be denied participation in TARP's capital infusion program, which other news sources had signaled might be imminent.

And still more eleventh-hour confusion appeared to surround whether the Paulson Treasury's program to "ring-fence" and partially guarantee troubled assets at specific institutions might be extended as part of the new Geithner/Summers "TARP Take II" stabilization plan expected to be revealed at 11 a.m. this morning.

As CNBC now acknowledges, the modified bad bank approach (wherein a new entity and the TALF program might each help to finance and guarantee the purchase of private assets by hedge funds and other private investors, not purchase the assets themselves) is still the centerpiece of the Geithner/Summers plan.

[We would observe that, with the new administration engaging in semantics to try to shift characterization of the new entity or entities as a "bad bank" or banks, perhaps the market news network failed to realize it was being spun.]

On the issue of life companies' access to TARP capital under the Capital Purchase Program, we have long been skeptical of when or on what terms such an event might occur. So we'll remain on point for clarity re when and if troubled insurers may be greenlighted for access to the (in our view mixed-bag) federal financial safety net

Nevertheless, we remain confident that insurers will be expected to play a major role in purchasing assets via the bad bank (likely facilitated in doing so by floor-price or default guarantees provided by the government) -- and, as such, the industry may yet inevitably gain fresh attention to its own capital, accounting and liquidity concerns.

Separately, regarding whether Geithner will announce the extension of Paulson's ring-fencing Asset Guarantee Program (AGP), while one explanation for its recent dropping from discussion might be that it would just be a continuation of an existing program (and thus not merit much fanfare) another could be that it is essentially being de-emphasized or abandoned. Specifically, amid at least some media coverage reflecting criticisms of the AGP as being too generous to specific large banks (i.e., in its first and only usages' guaranteeing over $300b for Citi and $100b+ for BAC), we could foresee such criticisms taking on additional weight -- particularly given the recent unfavorable light shone on Paulson's alleged "over-paying" for assets by the TARP oversight committee.

As a result, it would not come as a shock to us if Geithner quietly announces he may be in the process of dropping the "ring-fencing"/AGP authority -- which was never supposed to be widely used in the first place, and which would be at least partially mimmicked by the floor-price guarantees now envisioned as part of the new public-private bad bank, in any event.

And here's a Reuters story which uses the same fact set, albeit with less edge.

All in all, it's another big dent in CNBC's already shaky credibility this year (Steve Jobs/Mac misreports, Bartiromo non-disclosure, on-air infighting, etc).


* This item was forwarded to me by a fellow Cable Gamer, and so I am not 100% sure of its authorship. But if you, the author of these words, wish to be credited with saying them, drop me a line at thecablegame@gmail.com and I will be sure to give you full credit--name above the title, even!

Watch Your Back, Bill Carter! And Check Your Sources! And Introduce Yourself to Google!

Bill Carter of The New York Times has a problem. The New York Times has a problem, too, and so the two problems are connected, as we shall see.

FTV Livereports that Carter thought he had a scoop about changes at News Corp's MyNetworkTV--moving from a network to a hybrid programming service--when, in fact, it had been announced an hour before. As FTV puts it, Carter "took the bait without bothering to do any actual reporting or even a basic Google search which would have turned up at least two stories within the hour on the programming change."

And so Carter had to massively rewrite his story, which was exiled to the NYT online blog.

The Cable Gamer greatly admires FTVLive--it's a subscription service, but worth it. Indeed, FTVLive has lots more juicy details about how Carter is getting regularly smoked by up-and-coming Cable Gamer Brian Stelter. Maybe that's why Carter was so eager to believe that a run-of-the-mill story coming over the wires was a scoop.

And of course, the Times, overall, is regularly getting smoked by online 'zines and blogs, such as FTVLive, TV Newser, and yes, even sometimes, TCG!

Media Bailout Coming: Put It In the Bank

World Net Daily's Drew Zahn sums up the state of play:

Floundering media and news conglomerates have expressed interest in accepting government bailout money, leading some to object, arguing that strings attached to federal funds will subvert our nation's freedom of the press.

Convergence, and Un-Convergence

For the last 20 years or so, influenced by the visionary George Gilder, The Cable Gamer has accepted the techno-doctrine of Convergence; the idea that all communications media--the telephone, TV, the computer, newspapers--are Converging into a digital One. That is, one machine to link them all, based on the ubiquitous ones and zeros of bits and bytes, tied together by the www prefix of the URL--Uniform Resource Locator. (That phrase alone communicates the sense of oneness in the new technology.)

Convergence is an an appealing notion, and it has made sense to me, as I saw that digitalization increasingly collapsed the categories of TV, radio, newspapers, and even books. Everything is digitalized, and so everything ends up on your iPod or iPhone--or being Napster-ed and Bit Torrent-ed.

This Convergence process has been calamitous for old media. First newspapers and magazines, and now Convergence is similarly ripping up local TV and book publishing.

But now comes a fellow named Gerry Campbell, who blogs at a site called LuckyRobot.com, to tell us that maybe Convergence is not the final world in the digital era.

Campbell is not saying that digitalization is going to be undone, or that the old media can be saved. What he is saying, in a brilliant piece, "Search is broken--really broken,"is that search might not be the Convergence play that everyone thought it would be.

That is, over the last five years or so, everyone has assumed that search--most likely, Google--would be the engine of Convergence, when everything was revealed to the seeking web surfer. The Google Boys (now both in their late 30s, so maybe we should call them the Google Men) declared that their goal was to "organize all the world's information," and for most of this decade, they sure seemed to be on track for doing so. But now, as Campbell points out, there are whole new realms of information, whole new gushing streams, such as social networking, and Twitter, which seem to be outside the scope of Google. (Indeed, Google has not shown as much upward momentum in the category of news as one might have thought--c'mon guys, buy The New York Times!)

So, Campbell is saying, even though everything is digtitalized, and thus fungible-ized, for various reasons, Google can't get to everything. And so while it might be too strong to say that search is "broken," it is apparent that Google will not "organize all the world's information," as the graphic, from Campbell's site, shows.

Henry Blodget to Jim Cramer: Stop Pretending That You're A Good Stock Picker, Just Concentrate on Showmanship

The always shrewd Henry Blodget, of Silicon Alley Insider, has some good advice for CNBC and Jim Cramer: knock off the stock picking, and just stick, instead, to the schticking.

Blodget asks and answers: "Do Cramer's picks actually underperform? Probably." And so, Blodget observes, CNBC is foolish to try to defend Cramer's acuity as a stockpicker. Much better, he advises, to go with the entertainment aspect of his show--which is, after all, called "Mad Money":

Jim Cramer is smart. He's entertaining. He's provocative. He's interesting. He's a one-of-a-kind. In short, he's a brilliant market commentator. And that's all he has to be to be popular with viewers and a major asset to CNBC.

So it's time the network stopped pretending that he's also something else.

Jim Cramer: Hot and Wrong

Barron's Bill Alpert takes apart Jim Cramer's record as a stock-picker. The headline: "Cramer's Star Outshines His Stock Picks," doesn't do justice to the injustice that Cramer does to investors.

As a kind of theater, Cramer's CNBC show has its moments--just as did the late Morton Downey Jr.--but even the Cable Gamer knows enough not to listen to his stock advice.

Here's the bottom line:

Cramer's recommendations underperform the market by most measures. From May to December of last year, for example, the market lost about 30%. Heeding Cramer's Buys and Sells would have added another five percentage points to that loss, according to our latest tally.

The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future

The Cable Gamer has a new fave: Steve Outing. Who? OK, I hadn't heard of him either, but his new piece for Editor & Publisher mag, "The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future," is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of news, and that includes, of course, all Cable Gamers, because nobody in the news biz is going to be exempt from digitalization and Convergence.

He asks:

It now seems likely that some newspapers will abandon print, or be forced to. But what might a digital local news operation look like, and what tools and skills will be required?

And here are the most compelling aspects of his answer:

The transformed newsroom will be filled with multi-functional journalists who are comfortable carrying around a digital camera and tiny video camera; who make it part of their routine to record audio for possible use in podcasts or multimedia project sound clips; who are regular users of social networks and understand how to leverage them to communicate with and attract new readers, and share some personal information about themselves as well as promote their work; and who are comfortable and willing to put in the time to engage and communicate with their readers or viewers, including participating in reader comment threads accompanying their stories.

...

So if every reporter is a blogger, each has his/her own blog on their beat or topic specialty -- and that is the core of the reporter's work life from which all else spins off. Their best stuff may show up on the homepage with a mixture of topics, but everything will be on their personal blog page. For the reader interested in health news, he'll follow the Medical News blog of health reporter Jane Smith, for example. Because the blog will be more interactive than traditional newspaper coverage, Smith's readers will leave comments on her stories, and Smith will be required to respond to comments and questions. She'll announce multiple ways for her digital readers to contact her, including e-mail address or a contact form, and addresses on various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Seesmic, etc.). Smith may even participate in outside healthcare/medical online communities, and will list her address there, too.

A key difference in our newly designed post-paper news experience is that the beat reporter puts herself out there as a personality -- a human being you can get to know by following her, and who is an expert on a topic you care about (like medical news, or crime, state government, and the like). She will communicate with her readers, answer their questions and accept tips about topics she should cover, and accept criticism when she makes mistakes. In my view of the newspaper sans paper, every journalist is a personality, not just an anonymous byline.

...

Every journalist gets a community

To get back to that notion of having to "do more with less," our new digital news operation will offer each reporter/blogger the Web 2.0 tools to create a community of people who are interested in and passionate about the topic, or are experts on it. Just as on Facebook you can become a "fan" of celebrities, brands, products and so on, the reporter can collect fans on her blog. It's a way of collecting individuals to follow your work who are experts on the topic you cover, and you'll find that the niche community experience will turn up story ideas, sources, pointers to relevant external content, and even people willing to volunteer to help out.

...

So imagine a newsroom where each reporter has his or her own passionate community helping out and advising, and you can see how the smaller editorial budget of the digital news operation can still produce a quality product that's actually better than the old newspaper's -- because its reporters have completely cast off we-tell-you journalism in favor of the news-is-a-conversation model, where readers have relationships with their favorite journalists. The print-edition culture is no longer preventing journalists from activities that are mainstream in the pure-Internet media world.

And let me not skip over the revenue potential of a news Web site (and related mobile and other digital services) filled with all these online passionate niche news mini-sites and online communities led by a beat reporter specialist producing content for an appreciative and interested audience. Each represents a valuable niche-advertising venue. Contextual e-commerce product affiliate sales are a no-brainer revenue source. Best yet, each reporter's beat blog/community offers the possibility of selling premium content on the topic; some of it could come from staff journalists, some from (vetted) outside experts or freelancers who can use the new digital news operation as a marketing vehicle and split the sales fees.

There's much more in the article, and here's Steve's blog.

More About That $500,000 Salary Cap for GE, And All Its Media Properties

As the Cable Gamer observed yesterday, it sure seems as if, say, Keith Olbermann, Brian Williams, and Matt Lauer should be covered by President Obama's $500,000 salary cap for bailed out firms. Why? Because NBC and MSNBC are part of GE, and GE also owns GE Capital, which got $139 billion in loan guarantees from the feds last year and seems destined to get a lot more help from Uncle Sam.

But some of my smarter readers have pointed out that despite their multi-million dollar salaries, Olbermann et al. might not be covered by the cap because they "talent," and not executives, and thus might somehow not legally considered "top," or "senior" executives. Now this is legal hairsplitting, obviously, but let's face it--this is a world dominated by legal hairsplitters.

But Jeffrey R. Immelt, Keith S. Sherin, Michael A. Neal, John G. Rice, and Robert C. Wright are most definitely "senior executives." As the page* shown above reveals, all five of them have the word "chairman" in their title; Immelt is the chairman and CEO, while the other four are vice chairs, along with other duties (except for Bob Wright, who seems to have no real duties, at least not for GE). And all of these men were paid at least $10.6 million in 2007, the last year for which data are available.

So they all should be affected by the $500,000 salary cap. And, oh, by the way, what about Jeff Zucker, the chief of NBC-Universal? Surely he's senior! The Cable Gamer hasn't yet figured out how much money he makes a year, but she will bet that it's a big multiple of $500k. So will he be capped? Surely such caps would be within the spirit of what Obama proposed on Wednesday, surely the public has no more sympathy for Immelt, Zucker, et al. than for the likes of Wall Streeters such as John Thain and bankers such as Ken Lewis.

Now, of course, GE has fleets of lawyers and lobbyists who are getting paid to think differently, and they will be pulling all-nighters to show how the caps are not binding on Immelt et al., to say nothing of Olbermann and all the rest. And so GE execs, and the TV talent at all the NBC-U properties, will be lobbying and hairsplitting all over the Beltway to save themselves from the caps. Indeed, Immelt will get to make the case for exempting himself and his friends personally, to the President, now that he is a part of Obama's economic advisory council, the one that was just unveiled at the White House on Friday.

But here's the rub. If the Obamans let themselves get rolled on this issue, if they let GE collect bailout money and then exempt itself from the caps, well, then, the 44th President will look like a hypocrite--one standard for Americans, one standard for his friends.

Or, Obama could be stern and lay down the law, even to political allies, such as Immelt. He could say, bluntly and publicly, "If you get the government bailout, you get the government rules--and the government restrictions. No exceptions."

That would be the right thing to do. We'll see if Obama does it.

* page 20 of GE's 2008 proxy statement

Jeff Immelt Comes To Washington. Why? To Supervise His Further Bailouts? To Fight Against Salary Caps? To Get Talking Points for MSNBC's Hit Men?

The Washington Post and other outlets report this morning that Jeff Immelt, fresh from having tanked his company, General Electric, is now going to spend more time in Washington, advising President Obama on economic policy, as part of a "White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board."

Some of the other names on the economic list are blue chip, such as former SEC chairman Bill Donaldson and former Reagan economic adviser Martin Feldstein. And some are obvious sops to labor--which is, after all, a key Obama constituency--such as United Mine Workers chief Rich Trumka. That's politics.

But what is Immelt doing on this list of economic recovery advisers? What sort of economic recovery credential is it to have presided over the 75% decline in GE stock price? If Immelt was really capable of economic recovery, he would staying in his HQ in Fairfield to make it happen.

Oh wait! GE might be a dog of a company--more precisely, a company that's been poisoned by greedy overspeculation in bad loans--but Immelt's firm has one big asset--a huge pile of IOUs that it piled up last year, when Keith Olbermann & Co. ripped into Obama's rivals, first Hillary Clinton, and then John McCain. So the Obamans owe MSNBC, and the rest of the company connected to it. And now, it looks like, Immelt is coming to Washington to receive payback from a grateful nation--or at least from a grateful Democratic party.

Yes, there has been a partial payback already, in the $139 billion loan guarantee that the feds gave to GE subsidiary GE Capital last year, but obviously GE needs more.

And Obama needs more. As he stumbles around on his stimulus package, to say nothing of his troubled appointments, the 44th President is realizing that this really is the big leagues. By now he is figuring that he is going to need all the help he can get, that the Republicans will not be pushovers. And that realization means further snuggling up to Immelt, who can in turn guarantee that MSNBC's coverage--and maybe CNBC's and NBC's--is nothing but positive and adoring. (Although one might think that it would be hard to get more positive and adoring than Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, as they are now, anything is possible.)

It's a great plan for Immelt, a great plan for Obama. But it's terrible for GE shareholders, and not so good for America.

Does the Obama Administration's $500,000 Salary Cap Apply to TV Stars Who Are Part of Conglomerates Getting Federal Bailouts? We'll Find Out Soon!

Should Keith Olbermann take a 93 percent pay cut? From $7 million a year down to the new limit of $500,000? That sure seems like a reasonable interpretation of the new rules limiting senior executive compensation for firms receiving federal bailouts. And the conglomerate the Olbermann is a part of, General Electric, seems, indeed, to be destined to get more bailouts.

And thus Olbermann--and all the other multi-million-dollar talent at GE media properties, including Brian Williams, Matt Lauer, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeff Zucker--would seem to be covered by the new edict.

Reacting to justified public outrage, President Obama yesterday announced yesterday that his Treasury Department will impose a $500,000 per annum salary cap for executives--variously defined, in the Treasury document, as "senior" and "top"--of firms receiving bailout money. Now the rules are not retroactive, so all the pirates--oops executives--who got federal money in the past can keep their absurd share of it. And looking prospectively, The Cable Gamer has no doubt that there will be loopholes galore that lobbyists will wheel and deal over.

But still, the rules are clear enough--no compensation over $500,000 for "top" or "senior" executives. So let's focus on Olbermann for a second. Whether his pay would seem to hang on the definition of "senior," or "top" executive compensation. So, is Olbermann a "senior executive" at GE? The opinionated MSNBC host sure seems like a top exec to me--after all, he makes a reported $7 million a year.

And in any case, the principle is a good one--if you ask the feds to cover your losses, then the feds should be able to limit your own personal profit in such coverage. And so TCG, and all other Americans who are not in line to receive a "liquidity injection," or have not bee invited to unload "toxic assets" on the taxpayers, will be rooting for the Obamans to make these rules stick. Stick for everyone, including pro-Obama media stars.

MSNBC, the new citadel of Obamaphilic liberal-leftism, is, of course, a subsidiary of GE. And GE has had a terrible year; the stock price has fallen by two-thirds. So even allowing for the bloat of executive salaries, it's going to be hard for too many big shots at GE to pay themselves too much more than $7 million--which puts Olbermann in the "top" ranks, huh? And yet GE would be in a lot more trouble if it hadn't gotten a $139 billion loan guarantee from the FDIC last year.

Looking ahead, all indicators are that GE will need, or at least want, another tranche of federal bailout money. That looming reality--a rendezvous with subsidy--might explain why Jeff Immelt has been so vocal in denouncing the salary caps, because he sees them in his own future, and the future of all top dogs at GE/GE Capital/NBC/CNBC/MSNBC.

It's possible, of course, that the Obama administration won't seek to enforce its own rules against media stars. Maybe there will be a special exemption for TV talent.

But what kind of signal would that send? If the most pro-Obama major media portal, MSNBC, were exempt from the rules capping salaries while the parent company reaped further bailouts?

That would really look bad.

Howard Kurtz Has Got Big Ones

Straight from TV Newser, Howard Kurtz vs. Bernie Goldberg.

Hey, Bernie, if what Howie says is true, that you abruptly canceled an appearance on "Reliable Sources," why did you do that?

Cable Gamers want to know!