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...Microsoft, were useful indicators. Microsoft's emergence bespoke information technology as the driving force in our economy, supplanting consumer goods, aerospace and financial services as the sectors that investors most expected to outperform the rest of the market. The same point could have been made in 1993, when GE surpassed Exxon (consumer goods trumped oil), or a hundred years ago, when John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was a monopolistic market bully and trust-busting wasn't even a slogan for Teddy Roosevelt...
This is mitigated, however, by the fact that GE--again, a partner of Microsoft in MSNBC--is also a partner, with Disney and Hearst (which, along with Dow Jones, owns SmartMoney magazine; more on that later), in A&E, the Arts & Entertainment cable channel, which is showing a made-for-TV movie starring Jeff Daniels as George Washington, which I haven't seen but which is hard not to hold against these companies anyway. What's worse, GE has direct links, via co-ownership of CNBC, the financial-news cable channel, with Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal...
...company that owns a cable channel that competes with another cable channel that is half owned by a company (Dow Jones) that also half owns a magazine (SmartMoney) that competes with another magazine (MONEY) owned by the company that publishes this magazine, and half owned by a company (GE) that also half owns a cable channel (MSNBC) that is half owned by the employer of the author of this article, whose CEO (GE's, that is) nevertheless often appears on the cover of the magazine (FORTUNE) that competes with the magazine (SmartMoney) co-owned by the company that also...
Here, then, is the guts of the issue. If Jack Welch of GE, whom I've never met, were nonetheless to appear at my door and say, "I hear you're writing about the AOL-Time Warner merger. I hope you'll keep in mind that I'm CEO of the company that co-owns a cable channel and a website with the company that writes your paycheck, and the company you're writing about owns a magazine that published a damned fine picture of me recently," would I have the ethical backbone to say, "Obviously that occurred...
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