The Blind Leading the Blind

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The WaPo is scouring the business world looking for the perfect talent to lead the failing company. Today, they announced they’ve hired the guy who drovem GM into the ditch to its board.

Rick Wagoner, who was fired as chief executive of General Motors by the White House, has been elected to The Washington Post Co.’s board of directors, increasing the board to 11 members, the education and media company said today.

The Post Co.’s release says that Wagoner “retired from General Motors Corporation in August 2009,” but the White House acknowledged that it forced Wagoner to step down two months before the struggling automaker was forced to declare bankruptcy, following a $51 billion government bailout. As part of the bankruptcy, the federal government took a 61 percent stake in GM, which it still holds. GM plans an IPO in coming months to pay back the taxpayer money.

Because just about the only people with more expertise in dying industries than news executives are automotive ones.

Teddy wants to know, though, whether this makes Newsweek Pontiac.

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14 replies
  1. BoxTurtle says:

    At least people still needed cars. What in the world do we need with the Washington Post?

    Boxturtle (If Rahm wants his own personal spin machine, let him pay for it himself)

  5. allan says:

    Warren Buffet’s reputation has taken a pounding in recent months, and this isn’t going to help.
    Who could have imagined that using a corporate board as a dumping ground for disgraced executives counts as “value investing”?

    Edit: maybe this is corporate “governance in a box”.

    • bmaz says:

      I don’t know that Wagoner is totally disgraced to be honest. Most all lines GM is currently building are, relatively speaking, very good cars for their price targets. None of these cars were shepherded by Phone Boy Whitacre and ALL were shepherded into the production pipeline by Wagoner, Bob Lutz and Fritz Henderson. Pretty much everything the new GM will be now and in the immediate future was set in motion under Wagoner. He may have been tragically and unforgivably slow to have made that turn, but he had made it and it was well underway when the collapse of the economy took the whole effort under.

  6. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Something Mr. Wagoner brings to the WaPoop that it already had plenty of is arrogance and a sense of entitlement. His shaky ability to reorganize a company in the face of rapidly changing circumstances and his mediocre ability to hold people accountable for incompetence and poor judgment will seem like exceptional talents among his new peers, ones they are unlikely to be comfortable with. By adding Mr. Wagoner to their masthead, it’s as if the Post were buying a new buggy whip manufacturer as a response to Dearborn’s up and coming Henry Ford.

  7. Leen says:

    Why we keep going to the web to get our information? Why we go to Democracy Now, Firedoglake etc
    EXCLUSIVE: New Video Smuggled Out from Mavi Marmara of Israel’s Deadly Assault on Gaza Aid Flotilla

    http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/10/exclusive_journalist_smuggles_out_video_of

    We know Chris Matthews will not playing the clip of activist trying to revive the activist shot and dead in this video. Matthews showed that Israeli released clip 8 or 9 times in seven minutes last Tuesday.

    Will Rachel Maddow, Keith, Ed have this American journalist on? Will they show this footage on their programs? They would lose their jobs..chicken shits

    “UAN GONZALEZ: I want to read here just from the Guardian’s coverage in England on Friday, which I think is one of the few that actually attempts to explain what happened. And they’re reporting the forensic report of the Turkish authorities, where they say that, as you were mentioning, a total of—the people, the nine people who are so far identified as dead, thirty times they were shot. Five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head. And interestingly, it says the nineteen-year-old, Furkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, “was shot five times from less than 45 cm […], in the face, the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back.” At less than forty-five centimeters, you’re talking at almost point-blank range that he was shot five times.”

  8. Rayne says:

    If Newsweek is Pontiac, what’s Oldsmobile? what’s Saturn?

    (Oh please, make the speakers’ bureau Olds and terminate it yesterday…)

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