"White House takes swipe at NBC News" -- What Do The Jeffs, Immelt and Zucker, Think About That Headline? And Oh Yes, GE Shareholders. Remember Them?

That was the headline of an article atop the website of The Hill today.

The Hill, as in Capitol Hill, is one of those insider-y publications that normally intimidate The Cable Gamer. But this piece, by Klaus Marre is clear as a bell:

The White House on Monday sent a scathing letter to NBC News, accusing the news network of “deceptively” editing an interview with President Bush on the issue of appeasement and Iran.

At issue were remarks Bush made in front of Israel's parliament earlier this week.

Specifically, White House counselor Ed Gillespie laments that the network edited the interview in a way that “is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that [Bush] agreed with [correspondent Richard Engel's] characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it.

“This deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline is utterly misleading and irresponsible and I hereby request in the interest of fairness and accuracy that the network air the President’s responses to both initial questions in full on the two programs that used the excerpts,” said Gillespie in the letter to NBC News President Steve Capus.

Gillespie used the opportunity to also inquire whether NBC News still believes that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. In November 2006, the network decided to label the infighting in the country a “civil war.”

“I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a ‘civil war,’ ” Gillespie wrote. “Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?”

Gillespie also hit NBC News on its reporting on the state of the economy.

“I’m sure you don’t want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the ‘news’ as reported on NBC and the ‘opinion’ as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines,” Gillespie concluded. “I welcome your response to this letter, and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network’s viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don’t hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division.”

So it will be interesting to see how NBC and MSNBC react to this blast from the White House. Of course, Keith Olbermann will be delighted, because he obviously enjoys being in a war--any war. As Peggy Noonan once said of Bill Clinton, he is a teabag who brings his own hot water. Although in Olbermann's case, it is more apt to say that he brings his own too-small-tea kettle. Or, come to think of it, he is, in fact, his own too-small tea kettle.

So count on Olbermann to blow his stack soon enough, quitting in a media martyred rage, whereupon he will go on to some other gig, paid for by some adoring liberal billionaire groupies.

But I wonder what the Jeffs think about this. They lack Olbermann's pyrotechnics--which some insist on calling "talent"--and besides, they have a lot of stock options to hang on to.

NBC president Jeff Zucker, of course, will be getting high-fives from his fellow MSMers. No doubt they will give him an Emmy, or a Peabody, or a Polk, just for getting under George W. Bush's skin.

But Zucker's boss, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt is in a more complicated situation. Maybe he's a Bush-hating lefty, too. But more likely, he is just your basic non-ideological corporate suit. That is, smart enough, even if he obviously isn't smart enough to fill the shoes of his predecessor Jack Welch.

And now, thanks to MSNBC and now NBC, Immelt finds himself even more over his head--he is in the deep waters of politics. Immelt & Co. find themselves in a war with not only Mark Levin, and now the White House, but soon enough, the entire conservative half of the country. That's not good for advertisers, shareholders, and customers.

If the libs are smart, they will think of some sort of award to give to Immelt, as a consolation prize for getting his corporate you-know-what into the bad-press grinder.

GE will regret the day that MSNBC hired Olbermann, thus introducing the left wing cancer into its body corporate. Heck, GE will eventually regret the day that it bought NBC.

Memo to Jeff Immelt: Listen to Jack Flack, If You Won't Listen to Me--Sell NBC!

Jack Flack is blunt in his "rescue memo" to General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, in Conde Nast Portfolio. It is time for Immelt to de-conglomerate GE. As Flack explains, "The Street has decided to you are too big and complicated for either management or industrial analysts to understand, and that you’ve got businesses with completely different fundamentals that cannot be properly valued within the hull of the aircraft carrier."

And then Flack gets specific, item by item, including this advice on what to do with NBCU:

Sell NBC Universal to an entertainment player. Stop assuming you can get NBC back to its glory days, and get the deal done before the Olympics if you can. I know owning a network, not to mention having the Squawk Box guys on staff, is nice. But the longer you hang onto a show biz operation that is so different from your other sectors, the more it will be perceived as an irrational vanity holding.

The Cable Gamer admits to having a soft spot for pseudonymous bloggers, who need their privacy in order to make full use of what they know. Nobody has to listen to us, of course, unless we in the Blogger Underground have something important to say, based on our insight and experience. And "Jack Flack" is a case in point: He/She obviously knows his/her stuff, in a way that usually comes to one who has worked inside the belly of the beast, and not just reported on it from the outside.

And how do I know that JF is so smart? Because Jack agrees with me! It's quite possible that JF saw the grim truth about GE's over-conglomeration before I did, of course, but coming from our differing duck blind-vantage points, we see the same reality in our crosshairs.

Because I know what I am talking about in my little sliver of the mediaverse. TCG doesn't pretend to know much about corporate high finance, but she does know from branding and message, and it's been obvious for a long time that GE, which is basically an engineering company, had no idea what it's doing with NBC, going back to the days when former GE exec Bob Wright, whose picture belongs in the dictionary next to "irrational vanity holding," managed to persuade his then-boss Jack Welch to buy NBC so that he, Wright, could have some fun on the other coast--if you know what I mean!

Since then, in the best tradition of say, The Vietnam War, in which Uncle Sam dug himself deeper in a vainglorious foreign expedition that did not serve American interests, so GE continues to deepen its commitment to being a media player; just as Richard Nixon extended the war into Cambodia and Laos, so GE expanded from NBC to the misbegotten MSNBC. And then added on Universal, creating the ugly abbreviations NBC-Uni, or NBC-U. And all the while, of course, while top cat Immelt was doing whatever he is doing at GE HQ in Fairfield, CT, the lefty liberal media mice were eating up revenues and corporate good will at their various rodent homes, in Secaucus, Fort Lee, and at The Rock.

And ugly is, as ugly does.

Jeff, listen to Jack. Sell NBCUgh. You will have less glamor, but more money. And believe me, that's what the shareholders want.

"G.E.’s Shortfall Calls Credibility Into Question"

That's the headline in The New York Times today. The Cable Gamer has been predicting since last year that GE was destined to spin off NBC-Universal, probably after the 2008 elections, and now we see the "big mo" for a larger GE breakup is growing. Here are the key grafs:

Once-isolated calls for at least a partial breakup of the conglomerate have become a chorus, with NBC Universal, appliances and GE Money, the consumer finance unit, emerging as prime candidates for a sale or spinoff. Unloading these divisions would return billions to shareholders, advocates say, while allowing G.E. to focus on its booming infrastructure business, which sells big-iron items like locomotives, jet engines and power turbines.

“There’s a point in time when you say this is a big old monster, and parts could be better off on their own,” said Scott Lawson, a portfolio manager at Westwood Capital Management, which owns G.E. shares. “A breakup is looking more viable.”

Interestingly, the piece was co-authored by Nelson D. Schwartz, the Times reporter who had the original GE breakup story nearly a year ago. It's happening, folks.

As the company flies apart, The Cable Gamer wonders if Jeff Immelt will fight to keep custody of Keith Olbermann, and maybe Dan Abrams, too--both MSNBCers were notable tonight for their shameless/relentless shilling of Barack Obama tonight.

Is Jeff Immelt Cheering for Keith Olbemann While His Company Burns?

So Jack Welch, the General Electric corporate legend--one business survey dubbed him "CEO of the century"--has much to be proud of. But one topic that he seems touchy about is the current condition of his corporate alma mater, GE, and the status of GE's farflung holders under the inept leadership of his handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt. But hey, I just report (OK, TV Newser reports); you decide whether or not Jack is defensive about GE.

In fact, GE is in the middle of a lot of controversy these days, not only because its stock price is down, but because as a global conglomerate, it seems to have its fingers in some pies that it shouldn't. Bill O'Reilly has been raising some important new issues, such as whether or not GE is facilitating Iran. That's a strong charge by O'Reilly, worthy of inquiry, both journalistic and governmental.

Now here's where it gets particularly interesting for Cable Gamers: Because Keith Olbermann--who hosts, of course, a show on MSNBC, which is a subsidiary of NBC, which is, in turn a subsidiary of GE--is accusing O'Reilly of targeting GE because of O'Reilly's antipathy toward Olbermann (which, of course, is completely mutual). In other words, because O'Reilly doesn't like Olbermann--and once again, it's important to bear in mind that it's Olbermann who started the feud; he routinely calls O'Reilly "the worst person in the world"--that's why O'Reilly is going after GE, parent to MSNBC.

Now the Cable Gamer doesn't know if Olbermann's allegation is true or not, even in part. But in any case, either the substance of the allegations is true, or it's not true. Is GE playing footsie with the evil regime in Iran? Let's find out! And if it is true that GE is helping, even indirectly, Iran's goal of going nuclear, then GE's action must be investigated, and the activity must be put to a stop.

But in the meantime, it's interesting that Olbermann is getting so enmeshed in corporate politics, in addition, of course, to his usual Republican-bashing politics (and more recently, his Hillary Clinton-bashing politics, as the left-wing KO does everything possible to help his man, Barack Obama, win the Democratic nomination, on the way to winning, Olbermann hopes, the White House).

Olbermann assures his viewers that he is acting--acting out is more like it--with the full acquiescence of the GE top brass. Now that's interesting. The Cable Gamer had always assumed that Immelt and the other GE chieftains were too busy worrying about manufacturing and finance to worry about what's on a dinky subunit such as MSNBC. But maybe that's wrong. Maybe even Immelt himself is cheering Olbermann on. Maybe GE wants Obama to win. Such a Democratic victory might be bad for business overall, but it might be good for GE, in particular, since Immelt is determined, as a matter of corporate grand strategy, to take his company in a politically correct "green" direction. Maybe President Obama and his environmental guru, Al Gore, would mandate that everyone buy GE solar panels. That would be good for GE's bottom line.

Although, of course, some would say that if Obama and the Greens are bad for business overall, they will be bad for GE, too. Maybe Immelt doesn't see it that way. Or maybe Immelt plans to leave GE soon enough--perhaps for a job in the Obama administration or some big environmental/conservation group or maybe some global government group or philanthropy?--and because of that planned exit-strategy, he worries more about his standing in "enlightened society" than he worries about GE shareholders. Immelt may have been a disaster as CEO, but he's made hundreds of millions of dollars in salary and bonuses over the years--he has enough money that he can afford to be a liberal!

So for all The Cable Gamer now knows, maybe Immelt is watching Olbermann every night, hooting and hollering as KO sticks it to Bush and the GOP. That's a little counter-intuitive to most people's understanding of big business, but in fact, lots of corporate big shots--Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros--are not only left-wing, but way left-wing. And maybe Immelt is in that camp--it would certainly explain why Olbermann feels so emboldened to Bush-bash and to Obama-boost.

But there's a catch. Immelt may be good for Olbermann, protecting Olbermann, but as the evidence shows, Immelt is not good for GE. As the chart above demonstrates, GE has underperformed the Dow just in the last year--note the steep plummet in the last week that totally tanked GE stock, to just 32 and change, well less than half of what was as recently as 2001. (Note to Jeff: spend less time on "Countdown," and spend more time counting your corporate beans!)

And so GE is in trouble--maybe terminal trouble for its life as a super-conglomerate. The Cable Gamer can say, "I told you so."

Loyal readers might remember--or might need to be reminded-that TCG first broached this possibility nearly a year ago--on July 24, 2007. Under the headline, "Bye bye NBC-U? And you know what that means, MSNBC and CNBC," I pointed to an earlier New York Times story, in which Jeffrey T. Sprague, a Citigroup analyst, suggested that breaking up General Electric would be a good way to unleash shareholder value currently buried in GE's over-conglomeration and underperformance.

It's one thing if your conglomerate is run by a genius such as Welch, it's another thing if your conglomerate is run by Immelt. Immelt is plenty smart, of course, but one needs to be REALLY smart to beat the market, which consists of lots of smart people, as Welch did for 20 years, 1981-2001. And Immelt is obviously not equal to that task. Adjusted for stock splits, GE stock went up about 3000 percent under Welch, triple the overall market. By contrast, GE stock is down 20 percent during Immelt's six-and-a-half-year tenure, during which GE has significantly under-performed the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

In other words, Immelt is watching MSNBC, when he should be watching his company--and his own back.

Karma Bites GE. General Electric shareholders pay the price of Matthews, Olbermann, Abrams, Shuster, et al.

"GLOOMY" -- that was the big headline atop The Drudge Report this afternoon, underneath an even bigger General Electric logo. Drudge links to Bloomberg's Rachel Layne, who writes this afternoon that GE stock declined by 13 percent today, "wiping out $47 billion in market value." Ouch!

GE stock is worth about half of what it was worth six-and-a-half years ago, when Jeff Immelt took over as CEO from the legendary Jack Welch.

There are lots of reasons why GE is in trouble, but The Cable Gamer firmly believes that a big factor is the bad karma that has come to GE through its NBC subsidiary, specifically, NBC's subsidiary, MSNBC. As Cable Gamers all know, MSNBC has become a lefty playpen for the likes of Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Dan Abrams, and David Shuster. These folks seems to think it's their duty and right to bash Republicans and conservatives every night, although Olbermann and Matthews have gone further--they bash Hillary Clinton every night, too.

The Cable Game has been asking, for a long time, why it is that Immelt--who is presumably trying to run a respectable and profitable corporation--is willing to tolerate such obnoxious jerks within his corporate empire. And I guess that the answer is that Immelt cynically thought that Jeff Zucker could deliver big profits. Well, he can't. And more to the point, they have poisoned the company with their lefty venom.

So, Jeff Immelt, now you know that Karma Bites you, too.

CNN + MSNBC Together At Last? How Jeffs Can Fit Under One Corporate Roof?

Do too many Jeffs spoil the broth? Jeff Bewkes? Jeff Zucker? Jeff Immelt? Could they all wind up in the same executive suite?

Bewkes, of course, is the new CEO of Time-Warner. And Zucker runs NBC Universal. And Immelt runs General Electric, parent company of NBCU.

By almost accounts, Bewkes is a smartie, in the good sense. (By contrast, his predecessor, Dick Parsons, was described, in virtually every profile, as "diplomatic." Well, big deal. Nobody thought of Bill Gates as a charmer, but he was a pretty good CEO in his day.)

So now Bewkes has inherited a mess of a company in T-W. But don't take my word for it:

"If you have been an investor in Time Warner for a one-, two-, three-, five- or seven-year time frame, you have not made money," said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. "Therefore you have to look at the construction of the company and ask, 'Why is the company built like this?'"

The preceding is an excerpt from an interesting piece in the 12/25 edition of The International Herald Tribuneby Tim Arango, who is also, of course a media reporter for the IHT's parent, The New York Times. So maybe the story ran in the Times, too--it's harder and harder to tell what runs where in this new-media environment.

But in any case, Arango goes through some of the options available to Bewkes:

Sell the slow-growth Time Inc.; spin-off the cable unit; beef up the cable networks by acquiring Discovery Communications or the Scripps Networks; merge AOL with Yahoo or MSN to better compete with Google.

"Better compete with Google"? That's an interesting angle. And The Cable Gamer is certainly interested in that angle, but I'll save that for another time. For now, I am more interested in this possibility, also from Arango's piece:

Or, something even more radical: merge with NBC Universal, an idea that has been publicly floated.

Now TCG believes that this is not accurate: I am reliably informed that the plan is in the works for GE (Jeff Immelt) to spin off NBCU (Jeff Zucker) sometime soon after the 2008 presidential election. And I still think that that's the most likely scenario.

But of course, times change; so maybe there's a new plan afoot, to bring Time Warner into the fold with NBCU. GE could afford it: its market cap is around $370 billion, whereas T-W's is around $60 billion. But of course, a big reason why GE stock has been on the downslope for the past six years is because of investor fears about the viability of NBC and its media properties, including Cable Gamers CNBC and MSNBC.

So would Jeff Immelt really want to double his media bet? The Cable Gamer doesn't think so. But one never knows, does one?

I wonder what Jeff Bercovici thinks!

Update: "TW Tops in Media Flops"--that's the headline in The New York Post on Monday.

Bye bye NBC-U? And you know what that means, MSNBC and CNBC.

The New York Times' Nelson Schwartz is too good a reporter to overplay his news, but nonetheless, Schwartz dropped a major bombshell in his big piece on the front page of the Sunday Times business section. And likely to get hit by the shrapnel from that media-explosion are NBC-U and its Cable Gaming sub-unit, CNBC, and the even subbier MSNBC.

Under the headline, "Is G.E. Too Big for Its Own Good?" Schwartz highlighted a recent report from Citigroup analyst Jeffrey T. Sprague, which called for a breakup of GE, the legendary conglomerate founded by Thomas Edison and led for two decades by Jack Welch. GE is a big enchilada, that's for sure--it's got a stock market value north of $420 billion. And yet let the stock is down 30 percent since Jeff Immelt took over the company, from Welch, back in 2001. (See chart above, which shows how GE has underperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the last five years--GE is in blue, the Dow is in red.)

But here, let Schwartz tell it like it is:

So if the heat is on, why not break up the company? Or at least sell off noncore units like NBC Universal or the consumer finance unit, GE Money, which would not only raise billions but also make this colossus a heck of a lot easier for one man to manage? After all, Mr. Sprague says, “when you visualize G.E., you’re thinking about the meat and potatoes: power, aircraft engines, energy. You might get comfortable with GE Money, but hardly anyone is buying the stock because of GE Money.”

And the same holds true, of course, for NBC-U--nobody buys GE stock because they think that Jeff Zucker is going to make them money. The sad truth is that GE's purchase of NBC, and then the acquisition of Universal, were always vanity efforts, aimed at giving Welch crony Bob Wright a glamorous post from which to operate.

That is, the entertainment purchases never made sense for GE, for the most basic of reasons--as Sprague says, GE is an industrial company, not an entertainment company. There's no shortage of Bob Wright-type engineers who want to go to the Oscar party, but there is a shortage of Wright-type engineers who know how to profitably run an entertainment biz. But that doesn't stop them, right Bob? They are happy to have fun, at the expense of their shareholders. Right Bob?

Yet for as long as Welch was CEO of GE, shareholders barely noticed that the media properties were dogs--cuz GE stock rose an astonishing 4000 percent during Welch's two decades. But as noted, GE's stock is down by a third under Immelt. So now the knives are out, for Immelt, and for his over-extended empire.

Nturally Sprague and other Wall Street analysts--not to mention all those unsentimental hedge funders and hard-nosed private-equity boys--are closely examining non-core businesses. That's what happens in corporate restructuring: You figure out what has to say, and what should go. So now GE is under the hot lights, just as were other underperformers, such as Daimler-Chrysler and Cadbury-Schweppesm both of which sold off big assets.

And so, as Schwartz puts it, in the course of a long and superbly reported piece, "G.E. must continue to cut costs at struggling divisions like NBC."

But of course, they've already cut NBC back in prime time--and seen ratings tumble. Nice work, Jeff Z! So what to do with CNBC, which is profitable but underperforming--especially in prime time? (Remember John McEnroe's show? And hey, does Michael Eisner still have a CNBC program? How 'bout Donny Deutsch? Cable Gamers know that it's never a good idea to give no-talents their own show, even if they are buds.

And what to do with MSNBC, which has always been a loser, for 11 years now? Will GE shareholders continue to lose money so that the Democratic National Committee can have its own pro bono cable network?

Here's a Cable Game prediction: Immelt won't be able to protect any of those nets for much longer. He'll have to sell them off, to keep Wall Street happy. Yes, like Wright before him, Immelt will hate to lose the star-bleeping opportunities that come with being an entertainment mogul, but he'll value his job more.

So NBC-U, CNBC, and "MSDNC" will all be on the auction block soon enough. And TCG wouldn't be surprised to see Rupert Murdoch snap up CNBC--perhaps into some sort of merger with the forthcoming Fox Business News--even as someone puts MSNBC out of its misery.

And oh, by the way: Time-Warner, owner of CNN, might well be next to face de-conglomeration.

Another Player in The Wall Streeet Journal Battle?

If the prospect that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation might buy The Wall Street Journal isn't wild enough for you, how 'bout this?

One possible suitor is General Electric Co., which has a relationship to Dow Jones via its CNBC business channel. Wall Street Journal staffers frequently appear on the GE-owned channel to comment on their stories or breaking news. But if GE really feels it needs to have business reporters appear on CNBC, it could just as easily acquire Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times, or Reuters Group and put employees of those outlets on CNBC.

Thanks to Crain's New York Business for providing The Cable Gamer with the most fun she's had in days--the prospect of a genuine bidding war for the premiere business paper in the country.

This is the Convergence we've all been talking about, when your TV set and your computer are One.

Jack Welch: Straight Into Jeff Zucker's Gut

It's always been a mystery to me why Jeff Zucker still has his job. After all, NBC is doing badly, and so is MSNBC and, uh, in case you haven't noticed, CNBC is embroiled in a huge institutional scandal. Maybe Telemundo is doing OK--that channel is a little outside of my purview.

But apparently TCG is not the only one who has noticed what a lousy job Zucker is doing: Here's Jack Welch, interviewed in New York magazine by Arianne Cohen.

Cohen asks Welch, "If NBC isn’t doing so well, why is Jeff Zucker still in his job?" And Welch answers, "’Cause I’m retired." Pow!

One wonders why Welch's successor as General Electric CEO, Jeff Immelt, hasn't gotten the message yet about Zucker; or maybe this interview was Welch's way of sending just such a message. But of course, to get to the incompetence of Zucker, Immelt would have to first get through the incompetence of Bob Wright, and that incompetence has been enormous for a long time, such that even Welch himself couldn't deal with it when he was CEO in the 80s and 90s.