Jeff Zucker's division made about half as much money last quarter as it did the year before. So to judge by the upward-failure arc of his career, he'll be running GE in about three weeks.

Top GE and NBC Universal executives called a dinner meeting with CNBC bigwigs inside 30 Rock recently. This much is agreed upon. Still unclear: Whether CNBC was pressured to bash the president less.

Producing The Office is just not as profitable as building engine rings for billion-dollar bombers or constructing vast Superfund sites—that's the sad fact of being a huge corporate conglomerate. So it's been rumored that General Electric will sell NBC, possibly after the Olympics. But GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt, liberally employing exclamation points, told shareholders that he is planning no such thing: "Should we sell NBCU? The answer is no!" They're the only multinational defense contractor with an in-house propaganda wing and they're gonna keep it, dammit. [NYT]

• Fox to do for business what it's done for the Republican party: Convince gullible yahoos that it isn't a soulless machine out to exploit the most vulnerable members of our society for the benefit of those who were born with all of life's advantages in the first place. [NYT]