GE Flubs Tax Pushback Against the New York Times

Columbia Journalism Review, GE Flubs a Pushback Against The New York Times: The Company Can’t—or Won’t—Get its Story Straight on Taxes, by Ryan Chittum:

General Electric went into full public-relations pushback mode after The New York Times’s damaging story Friday on how it avoids paying U.S. corporate income taxes. But in doing so, the company, unable to get its own story straight, just compounded the damage.

Its pushback included putting up a fact-check on its own site, commenting on a post I wrote, and getting into an embarrassing back-and-forth on Twitter and on Business Insider with Henry Blodget.

First, its response on its GE Reports website, where it calls the Times piece a “particularly distorted and misleading account,” is chock full of red herrings and straw men. Let’s take these one by one. ...

(Hat Tip: Ed Kleinbard.)