Leaked Memo from On High to NBC and MSNBC

[kpete]

Leaked Memo from On High to NBC and MSNBC
By: Peterr Saturday February 21, 2009 9:01 am

(The following memo was provided to me by an unnamed senior official in the NBC/Universal media family of networks. I promised anonymity in exchange for the exclusive rights to the memo.

Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this memo without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is strictly prohibited.

Oh, wait a minute . . . wrong disclaimer. Never mind -- if you want to link to it, you have my permission.

Just read the memo. --Peterr)

MEMO

From: The Powers That Be at NBC/Universal

To: Executive Minions of TPTB at NBC News and MSNBC

CC: Executive Minions of TPTB at CNBC

Re: Corporate Use of the Rick Santelli rant from the trading desk

It is good to see that you folks at NBC News and MSNBC are finally getting with the program to boost the ratings of CNBC. In this time of financial uncertainty, it is imperative that CNBC's ratings and market share grow, even as the financial position of many of our advertising customers declines.

To that end, we applaud your use of Erin Burnett as a regular on Morning Joe at MSNBC. Similarly, NBC has done well to bring in Ms. Burnett and her colleague Maria Bartiromo for occasional guest appearances on The Today Show and the NBC News with Brian Williams.

We are especially glad, however, at your quick thinking to make broad use of what we assume was an unplanned outburst* by Rick Santelli in Chicago to boost the CNBC profile across the NBC/Universal stable of networks. Brian Williams led with Santelli, Mike Barnicle (a sub, no less!) featured it on Hardball at MSNBC, and CNBC kept pushing Santelli all day long.

We cannot wait to see what effect this has on our ratings, across the board but especially at CNBC. These have been wonderful unpaid commercials for CNBC! We don't care whether the stimulus plan works or not, or whether the housing sector proposal works or not, or even whether our reporting on these matters is on target -- what matters is that everyone tunes in to CNBC to get their financial news.

We fully expect that this trend will continue. We want to continue to see the CNBC money folks on the other networks, to build the brand. It is especially helpful if the money folks are either attractive women or loud white men. We trust that we will see Santelli's clip on The Today Show in the morning, probably with someone like Ms. Burnett to "interpret" it for the light news/fluff news viewers.

Congratulations on a job well done!

______

* A note from the legal department here: If this was a planned and scripted outburst, keep it to yourselves. We don't want to know about it.

http://firedoglake.com/2009/02/21/leaked-memo-from-on-high-to-nbc-and-msnbc/