“You’ll never be a serious (media) company until you’re in the news business,” CNN founder Ted Turner advised a younger Brian Roberts, now Comcast’s CEO, many years ago.
The past week, even before it becomes majority owner of NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC on Friday, the cable giant has experienced a serious peril common among mammoth corporations with news enterprises part of their asset mix.
Like Time Warner (CNN), News Corp. (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post) and current NBC owner General Electric, Comcast finds itself suspected of manipulating the news.
In nearly real-time with the breaking Keith Olbermann news, a tweeting chorus quickly insinuated that political conservatives in the cable company’s executive suite motivated the liberal Olbermann’s fleeing the coop. Even CNN's Anderson Cooper, in a Twitter-promo of his show, “AC360,” chirped, “Comcast deal is approved. Jeff Zucker leaves. #keitholbermann gets fired. Coincidence?”
So far, the hard evidence exonerates Comcast. Bitter tension between the “Countdown” host and his MSNBC bosses predated Comcast; Olbermann’s negotiated exit was weeks in the making and mutually desirable. And Comcast, as noted in its swift formal reaction to the suspicion, has no legal say at NBC until its $30 billion proposal with GE closes -- and has pledged hands-off the news rooms once its in control.
Still, many bloggers, blog readers and commentators are wary. For good reason.
Skepticism generally is prudent where powerful economic, technological and market forces suddenly are under the same corporate roof with the journalism that can shape them. Comcast, for example, is the largest cable-TV provider, number one in home internet connections and a top supplier of home-phone service. And the stakes are high – the media giant reported 2009 operating income of $7.2 billion on revenues of almost $36 billion.
Ironicially, if Comcast orchestrated L'affair Olbermann, as his partisans insist, it would have been motivated, they believe, by politics, not corporate economic self-interest. Liberal commentators cite Steve Burke, who formally becomes NBCU’s CEO by week’s end.
On the face of it, Comcast’s No. 2 -- a skilled and thoughtful executive whose father is a legend in broadcast management -- doesn’t sound like a person who’d manipulate news. Burke has “everything you want in an executive. He’s high-grade. He’s smart. His judgment is good,” says Warren Buffett, a longtime Burke friend whom the billionaire tapped as a director of his Berkshire Hathaway last year.
And he's also, to quote the blog Political Carnival, “a BIG Conservative Republican Financier.”
He has helped finance in the millions of dollars the campaigns of, among others, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and the White House races of George W. Bush, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and George Romney.
In fact, however, Burke also contributes to Democrats, including Senate majority leader Harry Reid, according OpenSecrets.com. Burke voted for President O’Bama, reports the New York Times.
So Burke hardly is Rupert Murdoch, unabashed global power player, media mogul and political conservative with a reputation for advancing self-interest through his news properties. His
