Say Anything Blog

Remember a few weeks ago when some General Electric stockholders stood up at a meeting and complained about the fawning coverage the corporate giant’s media arm, NBC Universal, was giving Obama?  That story was broken by a reporter for The Hollywood Reporter, and after the story broke GE used its considerable media clout to try and freeze that publication out.

According to my sources inside and outside Nielsen Business Media, The Hollywood Reporter trade publication ran a story dated April 22nd and updated on April 24th covering the “drama” at the most recent GE shareholders meeting in Orlando. THR’s West Coast Business Editor Paul Bond wasn’t sent to the meeting, but he interviewed about half a dozen people who’d been inside the shareholders meeting and told him what transpired (see below). Bond’s THR story focused on the attempts by stockholders and Fox News Channel and other media to find out whether or not GE Chairman/CEO Jeffrey Immelt ordered his news operations to be less critical of President Obama and his policies.

Bond’s story was immediately picked up by The Drudge Report under the headline “GE shareholders outraged over MSNBC bias; Microphone cut off.” It became a widely posted news story on conservative and liberal and media websites everywhere. That’s when, sources inside and outside Nielsen Business Media tell me, GE Chairman Jeff Immelt ordered a GE company-wide ban on all of THR’s parent company: advertising, editorial, the works. After a few days, the ban was reduced to GE’s NBC Universal which chief Jeff Zucker carried out against Nielsen Business Media’s The Hollywood Reporter and lasted six weeks. My NBC Universal sources believe the ban was lifted yesterday.

My reporting is the first about the ban or what led to it. “People need to know that GE is using its media arm to stifle coverage about its company, and this is coming from Immelt and Zucker,” a Nielsen Business Media insider said. I’d attempted multiple times over several weeks to speak with NBCU about this story but the company won’t discuss it.

Of course, GE is a private company operating in the private sector and can choose to do business or not to do business with anyone they want.  So from a legal standpoint this is kosher.  But from an ethical standpoint?

Not only do we have a corporate giant with its own gigantic media arm in bed with Obama (GE stands to make hundreds of billions off of Obama’s cap and trade policy, for instance), a corporate giant that is using it’s media arm to essentially propagandize for a sitting President, we have that same corporate giant trying to intimidate journalists into not exposing the cozy situation.

That’s not supposed to happen in America.

Imagine if Bush were still President, and Rupert Murdoch somehow stood to benefit from a particular Bush policy that his vast media empire was busy promoting in print, radio and television?  How do you think the rest of the media would be reacting to that relationship?

It’d be criticized, and rightfully so.  But Obama’s relationship with GE and NBC?  Well it’s ok when liberals do it.