Comcast Close to Deal With NBC Universal

A month ago, the rumor that Comcast wanted to buy Vivendi's stake in NBC Universal (first reported by Sharon Waxman's The Wrap) was seen as so outside the realm of possibility, CNBC's David Faber took to the air to criticize the initial report as follows: "You can call it a big story, but there may not be much of a story at all at this point. It's very hard to say where speculation and actual news lies on this. Nonetheless, an entertainment gossip site—this is where we are in journalism today—started a great deal of speculation on whether Comcast would buy or take control of NBC Universal. That is not the case." (That transcription comes from Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke, who similarly pooh-poohed the report, mostly because of her longstanding grudge match with Waxman.)

Today the New York Times' Michael J. de la Merced and Andrew Ross Sorkin (last week's Times palace intrigue villain) are reporting that, far from being a rumor, the deal could be happening next week.

Per de la Merced and Sorkin, "Comcast would own about 51 percent of NBC Universal, contributing several billions of dollars in cash and its own stable of cable networks to the new venture. GE, which currently owns 80 percent of the entertainment company, would retain the other 49 percent and would contribute about $12 billion in debt to the new entity, though it is expected eventually to sell its ownership interest over several years."

Among many other changes this new ownership scheme might put into effect, the writers on NBC's 30 Rock, which takes place in a (not quite) Bizarro World version of NBC, will have to come up with a new job title for Alec Baldwin's character Jack Donaghy, the Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming for General Electric.

As the deal gets closer to being realized, Waxman's "entertainment gossip site" looks like it caught its first truly enormous scoop. And CNBC's Faber looks an awful lot like Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, aka, "Baghdad Bob," impotently spinning the "official" narrative as the real events unfolded right behind him.

Someone with an online-media evangelical streak might even be forgiven for calling something like that a paradigm shift.