The Story That Ticked Off GM

General Motors has made lots of bad decisions over the years, and its decision to pull its advertising from the LATimes (because of "strongly voiced objections from our dealers in California about factual errors and misrepresentations in the Times' editorial coverage") is another one of them. (here, h/t Captains Quarters).

Neither the car maker or the paper has said which story, or stories, led to GM's decision, but it's probably the one that starts with this headline:

An American idle

The Pontiac G6 is a sales flop. At General Motors, let the impeachment proceedings begin.

In a sweet irony, the story, by Dan Neil, ran on the front page of an advertising section. The story is austensibly a review of the new Pontiac sedan, which Neil pronounced entirely adequate, but only after a dozen paragraphs spent bloodying GM's top three execs who, Neil says, are responsible for GM losing 3% of market share in the last three and a half years. Some of the reasons Neil gives:

Today, GM has no hybrids of consequence on the street, while rivals Toyota and Honda are selling as many as they can build.

... At a time when SUV sales are cliff-diving, GM proposes to speed up big SUV development and 86 the mid-size, rear-drive future products ...

This reallocation of deck chairs seems pointless when the real problem is the massive overhead of a company that cannot find the will to downsize. Capitalism, remember, is creative destruction.

As much as I like seeing LAT being stung because of its editorial stupidity, this isn't such a case. If there were errors in Neil's piece, they are minor quibbles and his point is valid: GM is building bad cars, is missing the market, and can't get its act together. Newspapers shouldn't be afraid to write such stuff, and corporations should be more thick-skinned than GM has been.

Rather than shoot the messenger they should, as Neil sort-of suggests, shoot the senior execs.

I wish GM had canned the LAT for its political bias, its religious bias, its green bias and its self-righteous arrogance. But they pulled their ads because they didn't like the way they looked in the mirror Neil held up to them. It's just another sign of the once-dominant brand's weak management.