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Los Angeles Times Plays Nice With GM After GM Starts Buying Ads Again. Hmmm …

Two weeks after General Motors decided to start buying ads in the Los Angeles Times again (see our post here), the LAT ran the first Dan Neil review of a GM car since the tiff started.

GM pulled corporate advertising from the LAT in April when Neil suggested that GM CEO Rick Waggoner should be fired.

And — surprise! Today’s review is positive. Neil had generally nice things to say about the boy-toy Chevy Cobalt SS-SC. The only sign of trouble in paradise is in the odd final sentence, which doesn’t tie to anything else in the piece:

… The clutch and the brake require no small amount of quadriceps to operate, and generally this car — which weighs nearly 3,000 pounds — feels caulked and screwed down and bolted up in a way that is quite reassuring. And when it comes to Chevrolet, I need reassurance most of all.

We don’t know what that means. Anyone?

More seriously, you’d think the paper that created the Staples Center fiasco of 1999 would be a little more careful about the appearance of a quid pro quo.

I’m sure Neil wasn’t told to write a positive review. But if the LAT has a backlog of unpublished reviews of GM products, did someone think that it would be better if a positive one were the first one printed after the boycott?

Or (as we wrote two weeks ago) is a clue to who’s really running the LAT that when you type “General Motors” into the search box on the LAT home page, the #3 result (today, 8/17) is the list of the paper’s editorial staff? Does that tell us who’s really running things? Is there a chain of command that runs through … Detroit? And then to the U.N.? And why the lack of reporting on the black helicopters …

Sorry. The coincidence of GM buying more ads and the LAT saying something nice about a GM product (we can’t do that: 1, 2, 3) is too much for us this morning.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 11:05 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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3 Responses to “Los Angeles Times Plays Nice With GM After GM Starts Buying Ads Again. Hmmm …”

  1. 1
    Bob Says:
    August 17th, 2005 at 4:52 pm

    Well,

    You’re about as wrong as you can be because Neil drove that car nearly 2 months ago and told me he liked it. He had no reason to gloss over anything in private e-mail.

    As for the graph you quote, what he’s saying is the car feels solid and well attached to the road.

    As for the rest of what you wrote, do really trust search engines to provide intelligent answers?

    Oh, and if I were GM shareholder, I would want Rick Waggoner fired.

  2. 2
    A Senior Administration Official Says:
    August 17th, 2005 at 6:06 pm

    … thought the UN and black helicopter comment would make our intent clear …

    And we couldn’t agree more on GM’s management: see our post here:

    “Twenty years ago this writer sat in a class of MBA students and listened to Roger Smith — yes, the GM Chairman in Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” — state that GM quality was as good as any in the world. This was at the same time that many segments of American manufacturing were collapsing in the face of import competition and auto execs were scurrying to Japan to see how much of Toyota’s system they could copy. Smith lost that class of proto-yuppies right then and there. … it sounds like GM management is still only partially connected to reality.”

    and our most recent post:

    “None of this “let’s agree to disagree” PR-speak obviates the truth of Neil’s April remarks that GM is a “morass of a business case.” GM can cover its ears, shut its eyes, and hum all it wants. But at $36, their current stock price is a little below where it was for much of the 1960’s. In the same period the Dow Jones Industrial Average has grown 16x. That is serious underperformance. And Dan Neil didn’t cause it.”

  3. 3
    L.A. Observed: Los Angeles media, news and sense of place Says:
    August 17th, 2005 at 10:08 pm

    today on the LA Weekly website that movie studios are close to drastically reducing the full-page ads they buy in the Times and other newspapers. They have the wrong demographics for movie audiences, she writes. On a semi-related note, the blogger at Independent Sources thinks there’s something fishy about Dan Neil writing a positive column about Chevrolet soon after General Motors drops its ad boycott of the Times. I don’t.