December 11, 1985...GE Buys RCA, A Dark Day For America Begins Why this headline on the sale of RCA to GE? Because on the grander scale, this was the first big corporate media take over...the kind that, until Ronald Reagan became president, would have not been allowed under anti trust laws. Since then, media consolidation has run rampant. By the way, it bears remembering that Reagan was GEs spokesman for eight years...thats where he cut his political teeth. Ironically, RCA was founded in 1919 as a joint venture of General Electric and Westinghouse; NBC itself was born in 1926 as a joint venture of RCA, GE and Westinghouse. Even more ironic...trust busters forced the giants to divest RCA in 1931. Ironies dont stop there though. With all the bellowing about the liberal media, here are a few things you may not know that happened when GEs Bob Wright took over as head of NBC. After firing 400 NBC employees at all levels and cutting the budget from $300 million to $250 million a year, one of the first things he did at NBC was set up a political action committee. Employees were asked to donate money to the fund so NBC could buy seats for republicans in congress. That went over like a lead balloon and was quickly shelved, but Neutron Jack Welch, the head of GE, didnt stop there. Welsh pushed hard to get the cable channel CNBC on the air so that he could give his favorite political commentator a nightly show...that was The McLaughlin Group. In the next week or so, Im going to post an editorial on the state of news and media in the US. Its from a research paper I wrote last month in one of my college courses. Below, is a seven page article from The New York Times written two years after the take over. It gives a very detailed look at how it all happened. The good news is that GE is gone and since they left, there is a definitely a spring in NBCs step at all levels, especially in moral. -Bobby Ellerbee nytimes/1987/09/20/magazine/did-rca-have-to-be-sold.html
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 10:45:22 +0000
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