GE After Shedding NBC/Universal

There's been a lot of news in the past few days regarding the GE deal to sell its NBC/Universal unit to Comcast. I last wrote about the deal's implications for GE here, early last month.

What interested me about CNBC's coverage of the GE deal in the last few days have been the nature of comments by guests on Squawkbox, the morning program, as distinct from those of the program's co-anchors.

AWithin the last few days, New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin called GE after the deal 'another Tyco,' or some phrase very close to that. One of this morning's guests noted that GE ran with way too much short term debt and got caught last year in a refunding squeeze.

From that crisis, he asserted, came the idea to lighten the conglomerate's debt load by jettisoning the media unit. He then lamented that they did it at a time of such a low price for the unit. Finally, he noted, perhaps this would help remove "the conglomerate discount" in GE's price.

I've been writing about this for years. Immelt foolishly maintained the necessity of a value-destroying corporate structure decades after it has become obsolete.

Remember that only months before his people began to explore the sale of GE's media business, Immelt was publicly insisting it was a core business of the needlessly-diversified conglomerate.

Of course, CNBC staffers aren't going near these remarks because, well, they work for Immelt. In fact, co-anchor Joe Kernen regularly jokes about this, to the annoyance of the other on-air staffers.

Yesterday and today, the program brought in ex-anchor and resident CNBC egghead, David Faber, to 'analyze' the GE-Comcast deal situation.

As a news reporter, Faber seems quite proficient. With an apparently large contact list, he has broken some past stories on mergers and acquisitions. But the network overrates his analytic skills. Much as I like Faber, I don't believe I've ever learned anything from his insights that I hadn't already figured out on my own first.

It's the same in this case. People like Sorkin, the other guest this morning, or Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal have all come up with more penetrating insights than Faber. In Faber's defense, on this subject, though, he seems limited, as all CNBC on-air staffers do, by the fact that they (still) work for Immelt's GE.

The interviews they do with their CEO are all puff-ball questions. The interviewer looks appropriately doting and thankful for Jeff's pearls of obfuscation. No tough followup questions to obvious lies or dodges are ever asked.

Thus, on the NBC/Universal deal, you have to look to the guests on CNBC for honest assessments. And their universal opinion, pun intended, is that GE got itself into a mess by mismanaging the duration and size of its debt, had to dump a large unit at the bottom of the market, but, if anything, will be on the way to becoming a more sensible, if still overly-diversified conglomerate in the wake of this sale.

Of course, GE still has the financial services unit to distract its management from the industrial units. And, despite Joe Kernen's quip about becoming like United Technologies, GE probably will never become that well-designed, as I noted in this post.

For me, Sorkin's remarks about this deal's effect on GE have been the most on target. However, he stopped short of simply asking why GE should even exist anymore, in the modern financial environment. The closest he came was to compare it to Tyco, leaving it to viewers to understand that he meant it to be a pointless aggregation of business units having no discernible connection.

Well, in the business media of the past few years, I guess that represents some progress. Analysts and observers are finally beginning to voice opinions about the lack of sense in GE's business composition, and the 'conglomerate discount' its shareholders suffer because of Immelt's ineptitude.