TTAC has its General Motors Death Watch Series and innumerable daily blogs on The General's fall and fall, but CNBC has it's own GM's Up Shit Creek website. In anticipation of next Wednesday's documentary "Saving GM," the peakcock people have added a new url to their e-arsenal: insidegm.cnbc.com. Of course, the title of this magnum opus and the fact that GM advertises heavily on NBC will have alerted TTAC's Best and Brightest that a major PR job is in the offing. (I'm thinking that if you downed a shot of Jack Daniels a everytime your heard the word "embattled," "beleaguered," "challenge" or similar, you'd be wasted by the first commercial break.) The program's strapline tells the tale: "In this original documentary, CNBC's Phil LeBeau goes inside GM [it was raining at the time] and reports on the company's dramatic struggle to transform its tarnished image and sagging fortunes." Even without whiskey, there's some funny shit coming down. In a clip from the show, Phil says, without irony, that Car Czar Maximum Bob Lutz' first job was getting his employer out of denial. And yet… "The quality gap only remains in the public's awareness," Maximum Bob asserts. "It's gone." Well something's gone; like CNBC's credibility. Wait, did they ever have any?
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“Home of the Chevette” in the opening was a good read -whose current spot by the way is filled by the “bullet-proof” Chevy Aveo.
“The quality gap only remains in the public’s awareness. It’s gone.”
Nope, given the rental Impala I had this week, the quality gap is alive and well. Keep trying GM.
“…the peakcock people…”
Shouldn’t that be “Peacock People”?
No worries. This is only their THIRD WORST quarter on record.
Phew! I thought we were nearing the end there for a minute…
I’m going to miss GM in the same way I miss Al Gore. Both parties have similar levels of integrity and credibility.
Only one problem MGO – Al Gore does have credibility. It’s those folks that like to take things out of context and spin them like the Republican smear campaigns and NBC’s reporting on GM that lose credibility.
Not quite. Once upon NBC had credibilty, and GM made good cars. The Al Goracle NEVER had credibility.
Now pay him his nickel for using his invention the Internet, before he uses his deadly lasers and slideshows to save you from yourself (Futurama reference).
In Ford’s case, the quality gap may well be gone.
In GM’s, not just yet:
http://www.truedelta.com/latest_results.php
We will have some good news about the 2008 Malibu next month, though.
Orian wrote:
Al Gore does have credibility
Please take politics out of this, unless you are auditioning for comic relief.
RF wrote:
And yet… “The quality gap only remains in the public’s awareness. It’s gone.” Well something’s gone; like CNBC’s credibility. Wait, did they ever have any?
Wait a second here. You are misrepresenting what happened. That wasn’t Phil saying it, that was Maximum Bob. Phil was questioning him. The segment immediately preceding it where they were showing GM honchos giving pompous statements about quality while the stock price was plummeting was very telling. I cannot see how this damages CNBC’s credibility. If anything, quite the opposite.
hwyhobo :
Wait a second here. You are misrepresenting what happened.
Not intentionally. Text amended.
I cannot see how this damages CNBC’s credibility. If anything, quite the opposite.
A simple follow-up question about GM’s J.D. Power standings (or some such survey) NEEDED to be asked. It’s not good enough to present the facts. You have to present context and aggressively pursue the truth.
This presentation sounds like its a half a step away from being the broadcast equivalant of those “Special Advertising Section” inserts you see in magazines. Too bad television advertisements/propaganda disguised to look like “news” or editorial doesn’t require the same disclaimer that print media apparantly does.
CNBC has lost almost all of its credibility IMHO. It is nothing more than a spin machine that everyone from the government to individual companies use to their (hopeful) benefit.
In spite of many right-wing reports asserting it, Al Gore never claimed to have “invented” the Internet.
Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn, Internet tech giants, both agree that Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for getting the Internet rolling, which is all Al Gore claimed. As a Senator, he saw an opportunity to get a potentially transformational technology moving, introduced legislation to help get it rolling and… he was right.
And that’s what a good Senator does.
And, of course, Al Gore won the popular vote in ’00 but Bush’s daddy’s Supreme Court fixed that little problem.
Gotta love the video at the 20 second mark where the assembly line worker whacks the door with the rubber mallet.
Car Czar Maximum Bob Lutz’ first job was getting his employer out of denial
Umm…
I think it’s fair to say, if this was the case, that the bodysnatchers got to Bob. GM has some decent products, but the collective self-delusion is still there–and Bob’s the primary mouthpiece.
They needed someone to kick ass an take names, not tow the party line. Bob’s not really cheerleader material.
Can we please give up on the idiotic urban legend about Al Gore having said he “invented the Internet”? He never said that. Never. What he did say–and what is absolutely true and undeniable–is that he was behind the legislation that enabled the creation of the public Internet from the “private” military/DARPAnet.
It’s really ludicrous. If I wrote that Bush once admitted he’s gay, and lots of people repeated that, would saying it over and over again make it true? Probably in some peoples’ minds.
Thanks in large part to Al we can read and debate GM and Al himself today on TTAC. If GM had 1 iota of the anticipation of future Al has had they would probably counting their latest profits instead of reporting yet another humongous loss.
Bush is gay?
But seriously Dan Quayle never misspelled Potato either. But political urban legends tend to be damned hard to kill.
It’s not an urban legend, my friend. Dan Quayle really did urge a student to misspell ‘potato’. We have these modern contraptions called video cameras. They existed back then too.
Stephan is correct. Do those of you who rail against Al Gore realize that you wouldn’t have the capability to even type those words on a website without Gore’s involvement? You’d still be using AOL, if anything. The internet might still have made the transition from research tool to public utility, but it would have been later and in a different form.
Its one thing to say there will be good results from the current 2008 Malibu, the 64,000 dollar question is what will the results be three years down the Road from the present!? That is if GM is still around by then too!
Hmm well then the urban legend that Dan Quayle didn’t misspell potato is the urban legend that is hard to kill.
Thanks KixStart, you beat me to it.
It’s difficult for a lot of Americans to differentiate between inflammatory – and usually incorrect – sound bites fed to them from [insert “fair and balanced” network here] and the real truth. For the naysayers, do a little research on the events leading to the creation of the internet; the truth will set you free.
If I wrote that Bush once admitted he’s gay, and lots of people repeated that, would saying it over and over again make it true?
Hey, it worked for Goebbels. Did wonders for his career, at least for awhile.
“Al Gore won the popular vote in ‘00 but Bush’s daddy’s Supreme Court fixed that little problem” In this particular leftwing mantra, it’s not so much urban legend as rallying cry (“Remember the Maine!”). “That little problem” was Bush’s winning (albeit narrowly) the electoral college vote–the one the Constitution counts. And after exhaustive review, even the NYT had to admit that.
The Supreme Court “fixed the problem” only in the sense that it stepped in to prevent the Florida legislature and supreme court from, first, using selective recounts to help Gore and, secondly, maneuvering to prevent Florida’s vote from being recognized at all in the electoral college.
Major mistakes were made by both sides in 2000. Bush chose Cheney as his running mate. Cheney is a good administrator but was a terrible selection in terms of political appeal and attracting more votes. Bush didn’t disclose and dispose of the issue of his youthful DUI early in the campaign, which allowed the enemy media to release the story as a massive “scandal” just before the election. That cost Bush many votes from evangelicals. The Bush campaign allowed California-raised money to be spent there, though carrying California was hopeless, instead of using the money where it could have switched a state from blue to red. Finally, in Texas the campaign didn’t bother with a get-out-the-vote drive. They figured Texas would go for Bush anyway, so why worry about getting even more votes? They also put too much trust in Jeb to win Florida. In hindsight, the additional votes probably would have kept Gore from winning the popular vote. I’ve never understood why Karl Rove is supposed to be a wizard at running campaigns.
Gore’s campaign had major mistakes too. He didn’t separate himself properly from Clinton, whose sexual escapades disgusted social conservatives and whose subsequent abuses of power fighting to keep office repelled those who knew it wasn’t “all about sex.” Gore veered leftward, disappointing centrist Democrats. That was sufficient to cost him his home state (!) of Tennessee–enough by itself to lose the electoral college. Gore chose Lieberman as running mate; an honorable man but he had no ability to switch red states to blue. Finally, in Florida the Gore campaign financed a tremendous get-out-the-vote drive. But they skimped on follow-through, so lots of new voters who didn’t know how to properly cast their votes.
Nader was a factor, too, but neither Bush nor Gore could do much about that.
Note that I have talked about tactical errors by the campaigns. As in the Super Bowl, if your side loses it doesn’t mean the other side won only because it’s depraved.
Yeah home state in the sense that he has visited it a few times… VBG!
I live in next big town from his family farm. You’d think he would be seen in these parts occasionally. Nope. Never. Doesn’t happen.
Here is to hoping that this year’s election will be more grounded in fact and solutions to our numerous national problems rather than in trivial (in the big, big picture) squabbles over the candidate’s past. None of the candidates do a very good job of telling the truth.
Let the websites like FactCheck.org chase the details and may the mainstream media feed us soundbites (or even whole courses of diatribes) about what our real problems are and how the candidates and their teams will solve them.
Hopefully TTAC can assist with keeping the facts straight when the candidates go off talking about energy policy or rescuing the auto industry at the expense of the tax payers. The fact that we the consumers don’t want to buy their cars might indicate we don’t want to bail them out either. The quickest way to downsize is indeed to go broke and come back as a company of 100 that holds the trademarked names…
I am purposefully avoiding the mainstream press during the remainder of the year b/c I am tired of their “fair and balanced” news. I’m not just picking on that one network – honest. They all have problems, some are more obvious.
Honestly, is this a “MoveOn.org vs. Moral Majority” now? I was under mistaken impression that it was a car-related board. Or is this just trolling for posts? Someone please straighten me out or start moderating.