Friedman Responds to GM

After Tom Friedman called General Motors "dangerous to American's future" and said the company is "like a crack dealer", GM raised a fit and tried to publish a long letter to the editor in the New York Times. Rightly the Times rebuffed their request for 490 words, but wrongly the Times refused to print the word "rubbish" in the letter, suggesting several milder terms that were ultimately rejected by GM. (They instead took their fight to their blog.) Today Friedman responded to GM, but as media critic Dan Kennedy notes,

nowhere does Friedman reveal that GM tried to place a letter in the Times and was told to forget it unless said letter was toned down. (Nor, for that matter, does the online version of his column link to the GM blog.)

This has been a matter of some notoriety on the Web. For Friedman not to acknowledge it (or was it an editor?) is not only wrong -- it's just plain weird.

This is old media thinking at its best--no links, no mentions of what many people know of the backstory--we'll tell you what you need to know), and it's nice to have the Internet with GM's alternative viewpoint. Even if I do mostly agree with Friedman.