Under the headline, "What Are the Media Celebrating?", The Washington Post's media writer Howard Kurtz provides the answer: The media are celebrating, of course, Barack Obama, and liberalism, of course, but also the ascendancy of people like them.
You know, the best and brightest, those with enlightened opinions. The people who should lead us--and collect bailouts.
And so of course, NBC was there in Washington; after all, its subsidiary MSNBC, was the point of the media spear for Obama in the '08 campaign, and it seems clear (see previous post) that MSNBC aims to continue that role in the Obama administration.
And as for the other NBC properties, well, they tend to have the conventional MSM take on things: reflexively pro-liberal, pro-Democrat.
Yet even so, it was a little surprising to hear the big boss of all those NBC properties, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, "out" himself as a partisan Democrat so completely, with his NBC underling, Jeff Zucker, right there with him at the Inaugural festivities in DC.
Let Kurtz set the scene:
...and NBC chief executive Jeff Zucker hosting a brunch for 800 yesterday at the National Museum for Women in the Arts.
Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of parent company General Electric, addressed the sushi-nibbling crowd from a grand staircase at the museum: "I thought I'd begin by saying, welcome, fellow Democrats." It was, apparently, a joke.
"It was, apparently a joke," says Kurtz of Immelt's "fellow Democrats" salute. Sure. Sure it was. The Cable Gamer guesses that some GE flack saw Kurtz writing it down and came running up to him to insist that Immelt had said it as a joke. That's what p.r. types do, and Kurtz was dutybound to take note of the objections in his piece, but in inserting the word "apparently," the writer signals his skepticism about the rebuttal.
But the performance of the MSNBC/CNBC/NBC combine was no joke, and can't be spun. Not only was their Obamatry evident, but also their special pleading, viz. the shameless shilling for the TARP bailout last fall on CNBC in particular, which has benefited GE Capital (part of the same corporate family) to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
So Immelt knows exactly what he is doing. And what he is saying.
