Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-01-06:

"To me, the term 'shareholder value' sounded like Mao's 'right path,' although this was not something I shared at the employee re-ducation meetings. As funny as it seemed to me, the idea that GE was a multinational corporate front for Maoism was not a very widespread or popular view around NBC. It was best if any theory that didn't come straight from the NBC employee manual (a Talmudic tome that largely contained rules for using the GE credit card, most of which boiled down to 'Don't') remained private.

"I did, however, point out to the corporate-integrity people unhelpful details about how NBC News was covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that our GE parent company stood to benefit from as a major defense contractor. I wondered aloud, in the presence of an integrity 'team leader,' how we were to reconcile this larger-scale conflict with the admonitions about free dinners. 'You make an interesting point I had not thought of before,' he told me. 'But I don't know how GE being a defense contractor is really relevant to the way we do our jobs here at NBC news.' Integrity, I guess, doesn't scale."

-- John Hockenberry, former NBC journalist, on the effect on NBC News after being acquired by General Electric. From his article "You Don't Understand Our Audience", in the January/February 2008 issue of Technology Review.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19845/page1/]

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

( John Hockenberry, on media, integrity, corporate culture )

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