The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz weighs in on the feud between Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann. As he always does, Howie add detail to the story, including the fact that General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt Immelt's parents in Cincinnati, OH, watch "The O'Reilly Factor" and were upset that Bill was trashing their son's company, which, of course, owns MSNBC. As TCG observed when this story first broke, even at the commanding heights of corporate America, the personal still matters a lot. And so if Immelt's parents were upset, Immelt was upset. (The question of whether or not Jeff's company should be trading with Iran, as O'Reilly reported, is another matter, as is the question of whether or not General Electric should be one of the leading recipients of bailout money.)
Kurtz adds other juicy details, including revelation of secret meetings between Fox chief Roger Ailes and . As a study in corporate protocol, it's interesting that Ailes was negotiating directly with Immelt, as opposed to his supposed counterpart in the Cable Game, MSNBC chief Phil Griffin, or Griffin's boss, NBC News chief Steve Capus, or Capus' boss, NBC chief Jeff Zucker. Ailes is smarter than all of them put together, of course, including Immelt, but that's not something that the GE/NBC/MSNBC suits can be expected to address.
Two years ago, TCG predicted that GE would spin off NBC, after the Olympics and after the 2008 presidential election. The financial meltdown last year changed that calculus, because all of a sudden the political suck-up potential of MSNBC/NBC--to help the parent company ingratiate itself with federal bailer-outers, and also to enact a "cap and trade" bill to pump up GE's renewable-energy biz--became so obvious. But now that the worst of the financial crisis seems to have passed, and the "cap and trade" legislation is stalled, the pressure to de-conglomerate GE will revive. Pressure joined by Immelt's parents, back in Cincy!
A final note: Kurtz, of course, works for CNN--he hosts their "Reliable Sources" media critique show. It's a conflict of interest, to be sure, for any media story, but it's an especially huge conflict of interest because CNN is the third party to any fight between Fox and MSNBC. So TCG feels obligated to note that, even if Kurtz himself doesn't always bother. Having caveated that, TCG thinks that Kurtz does a good job covering The Cable Game, and this story is a good example.
