GM Blogs Response to New York Times Column

From Master Dave regarding a recent column in the New York Times slamming General Motors:

The basic point that [Thomas] Friedman [author of The World is Flat] is making, rather dramatically, is that it’s ridiculous for GM to offer subsidized gas prices on its existing line of vehicles instead of putting in the effort to promote and produce cars with significantly higher gas mileage.

GM gets panties bunched and wants the Times to print a response:

GM sent in an overly long rebuttal and the NYT responded that 490 words was far too long and asked for a maximum of 175 words. The GM team relents and sends in a revised note of 200 words….. the NYT wants to edit a letter it runs in the newspaper, just as every other letter and op-ed piece is edited before publication. Ah, but that’s another issue that GM can’t accept, so it again complains about the proposed edits.

Result:

[B]y its not allowing the New York Times to own – and edit – the words it publishes in its own newspaper, the GM team has ended up with no response in the media at all and instead has these defensive blog postings instead.

If that freaked out GM, I’m sure they’ll flip out over the slide in the Al Gore global warming movie where he shows strong growth for Toyota and Honda over the past several years due to their offering more efficient cars versus negative catastrophic growth for GM and Ford.