In the media story of the week,
former GE boss Jack Welch committed what in baseball would be considered running oneself into a double play.
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Jack Welch
(photo from Reuters) |
Welch jump started the action late last week. He was upset that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produced an unemployment statistic that was highly favorable to President Obama's re-election efforts. Suspicious of the stat's timing, Jumpin' Jack reached for his Twitter account and released a highly critical tweet. His innuendo about Chicago politics and his assertion that the BLS cooked the numbers gained attention for all the wrong reasons. The BLS bureaucrats, whose reputation as being beyond political reach was confirmed by former George W. Bush administration members, came across as blameless. Meanwhile, Welch came across as an arrogant asshole and a witless shill for Mitt Romney.
Well, the empire has struck back against Welch. A story in today's Chicago Tribune notes that Welch and his wife, who co-write a column for Fortune, have parted ways with the magazine. The Welch camp has spun this direction as something of their own choosing. At the same time, Reuters simply dumped Welch.
Once upon a time, this could never have happened to Welch. He and GE carefully cultivated his mystique during General Electric's high-flying days. At that time, GE owned NBC and no one wanted to tangle with the firm's clout. Wall Street analysts shamefully gave GE a golden pass, even though most publicly acknowledged its finances were an unfathomable black box. Welch himself was lionized by a fawning media as a fiscal wizard, while GE managers were considered corporate America's A-team. Their place was subsequently taken over by Goldman Sachs, whose time in the sun is beginning to come to a close.
For Welch to utter his suspicions about the BLS took chutzpah. These remarks came from a man who manipulated GE's performance figures over the years, who "managed" the media so that unwanted questions were rarely asked (and even more rarely answered), and whose firm required a federal bailout after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
I suppose a better question than Welch's being dropped from the media's varsity teams is why
Fortune and Reuters kept him as long as they did.
