Tea-Free CNBC

Remember how it was CNBC character Rick Santelli who set off the whole tea party furor with his spontaneous (?) on-air rant, lambasting the president's plan to spend a few billions on troubled homeowners? Seems like so long ago. But the tea parties were, at the outset, a CNBC thing, a state of affairs that led John Stewart to try the network in the court of public opinion via an excoriating series of episodes culminating in the humiliation of CNBC personality Jim Cramer. Odd then that the network was so quiet during Wednesday's tea-oriented protests. The intrepid Moe Tkacik reports:

A unnamed source at the network told this morning's New York Post that NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker and Jeff Immelt, CEO of parent company GE, had recently convened a dinner with the network's top brass and some of its high-profile reporters to discuss whether the network that launched a thousand search engine queries into the meaning of teabag should start distancing itself from the "grassroots" war it started with the Obama administration two months ago. Indeed, yesterday the network mentioned the T-word by far the fewest times of any of the major cable news networks. The Post source, an anonymous "insider," said dispatches from the dinner had been filtering down to reporters, who were concerned about being "muzzled by GE."

As Tkacik notes, Immelt has expressed to shareholders that the move from real engineering to financial engineering was a negative one for the economy, and CNBC sister network MSNBC has become known as the liberal cable channel for its employment of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow (and despite the hours allotted to Joe Scarborough every morning). But is this move ideological in nature? Tkacik twitterviews:

@PowerLunch DK: what's this new york post report about you being "muzzled" by NBC honchos at a dinner party the other night?

@moetkacik from dk: that would be, um, bunk! bs! poppycock. i'm way conservative, keep gettg more time not less.

@PowerLunch haha, okay well, do you think it was just intended to put some distance between CNBC and this teabagging stuff?

@moetkacik from dk: you are an intrepid observer. that's all i'm sayin

That dk would be Dennis Kneale, conservative CNBC commentator. Perhaps the adjustments at CNBC are less about embracing the progressive agenda and more about business. Rather than fight Fox for die-hard conservative viewers, GE may be giving CNBC a nudge toward cultivation of the much larger share of the population that's angry with Wall Street and (mostly) supportive of the president's agenda. Distancing itself from the spectacle of the tea parties is a good move in that direction.