Nobody at a Pontiac dealership would call the G8 a good car. To them it is career and family killer that takes food out of their offsprings mouths. In many ways it is a far worse car than the Grand Prix.

POS.

The Wall Street Journal’s position is the classic big business position. They favor illegal immigrants because they’re easy to exploit and they drive down the price of all labor. The Journal favors low taxes, low services, and a balanced budget. Those positions used to be those of the Republican Party before the fundamentalist Christian wing started to dominate it in the 1980s.

They’ve always been biased; this is nothing new. The problem they have is twofold:
* The providers are too large. Between substantial costs and unsustainable debt, big media is not financially viable.
* News is a commodity. When you have any number of organizations providing shallow, low-offense coverage with little or no value-add, you do two things: no one has any core market to fall back on, and the viewing public becomes extremely fickle.

There’s no compelling reason to stick with any one provider of news, not when the differentiation is non-existent and no one company provides anything above and beyond it’s competitors. And now they’re in a death spiral: they can’t grow by being better, so they have to grow by getting bigger and outlasting their competition in one big, ugly game of attrition. This leads to more consolidation, more debt, and more pablum-style content.

And then it all comes crashing down. Or at least that’s my hope. What I don’t want is a media landscape that consists of two companies and a gentlemen’s agreement to not ‘rock the boat’.

And MSM, Main Stream Media loves to play this role. It’s like they are playing with the ant colony. They feed ant killing chemicals but not enough to kill them all. When the ant’s number diminishes, they stop the chemical, and let the ants number grow. Then, they apply ant killing chemical again. They do this over and over. However, this time around, they might have killed the whole thing. They regret that they actually have killed the ants and maybe wishing it back so they can play with the ants.

Every news story is like playing god to them.

And this is exactly why newspapers are failing and network news programs are losing viewers. Because of the blatent bias and crap reporting that is given.

Well, many have been selling the stock down (most likely on the basis of analysis) for a good few years, so someone has been doing their job/reading.

I agree on the press side, but within our company the investment advisers/analysts have had all our clients OUT of GM (and Ford) for the past 7 years at least (that’s as far back as the onscreen records go).

BTW, we’ve been “in” Toyota for exactly the same amount of time, and I personally bought some Toyota a few weeks ago below $60/share.

That’s a libertarian, pro-business stance. Free flow of labor and capital, free trade with minimal restraints on the ability of workers to enter and leave to serve demand.

The WSJ view may not mesh with the populists within the GOP or with the Christian Right, but that is not “liberal,” either. It is more closely aligned with the values held by the Republican party before Reagan turned it into a Christian movement that appealed to former Dixiecrats. The motivations and mechanisms are different.

Part of the problem with these sorts of discussions is the penchant on the right for black-and-white thinking, with the “if it ain’t with us, it must be against us” ethos. Just because its something that the Bible thumpers haven’t blessed doesn’t necessarily make it socialist, left, pinko commie, etc.

The reality is that there are various shades of both wings. They may have largely vanished from the planet, but we even used to have liberal Republicans, who were socially liberal but fiscal conservatives. Once upon a time, the differences between the parties were economic, not moralistic, and the WSJ has come from that place for a very long time.

This is a joke… you’d have to be asleep at the wheel to miss the gross bias in most media outlets. As for the WSJ, interestingly, they are not consistently conservative. For example, they are clearly pro-”illegal” immigration due to the financial benefit to companies – something most conservatives find antithetical to core conservative principles.

The Journal is a curious creature. Many of its reporters appear quite liberal. Its editorial page is pro-immigration, usually supports a neo-conservative foreign policy, but also supports fiscal conservatism. Sometimes they do very good work: the Madoff coverage was first rate, for instance. Usually you do not find “feel good” stories based on emotion (as is common in other papers), and the overall content is geared toward a thinking person with more than a basic education. It is probably the best mass market paper out there, in spite of its faults.

People should remember even when the market was 16 million cars in 2006, GM still turned a 2 billion loss on 207 billion in sales.

The $64,000 question is if they go bankrupt can I get a car at a steep discount or will the new company during bankruptcy not help to do that? Circuit City went bankrupt and prices went up! Do the dealers have to foot the bill if GM goes belly up for the cars on their lots?

WTF? Sat in the new Camaro. Quality car. Don’t know what you were looking at…

Bankruptcy isn’t going to occur next week. But down the road–say, past 2006 –its probability is high. That point of view seems supported by the opinions of the bond-rating agencies, which troubled companies must keep informed and which become virtual insiders in their understanding of a company’s finances and operations. In recent months both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have made increasingly grim statements, bald in their talk of bankruptcy and laden with doubts that GM can turn around its reeling North American auto operations, now reduced to an embarrassing market share of 26%.

“It took time and money – tens of billions of dollars- to set all of that right”. For Pontiac? For GM ? Does the G3 count? The Torrent?, The Red Toe Tag Events every month ? The $10,000 apiece lost on the Solstice and the Sky? The GTO ? Astra? The crossover clones, the mini van clones the SUV clones? Saab? Just offer another division’s product from another country, slap a domestic name on it and that’s “getting all of that fixed” ?

Sorry RF. This clown is in no danger of “getting it” any time soon. Unless “it” is a head cold.

Very good point. A lot of what we call news is really just a summary of what occurred at a planned event or a press conference.

Since there was no GM Is Melting Down press conference held five years ago, they didn’t talk about it. That’s why you can’t turn to mainstream media to spot trends in advance; they are almost always late, because they are reactive by nature.

Who should have caught it were the business press and the stock analysts. The bond rating, market share and earnings were all falling, so those should have been big hints. But like the regular news crews, they tend to limit themselves to summarizing official statements, so since Rick Wagoner didn’t tell them that the wheels were falling off, most of them didn’t try to prove otherwise.

Anytime you read a story from AP, or a major newspaper (WSJ sometimes excepted), it is there to back up a political point.

The Wall Street Journal is now owned by Murdoch, the same people who brought you Fox News. Sorry, but if there is a biased paper out there, it’s the WSJ. I read it and find useful things from it, but it clearly has a political agenda, and that ship is tilting starboard.