Citigroup/CNBC plane ride is now a "scandal"

Fox News Radio host John Gibson has an editorial about the plane ride given to CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo on a Citigroup corporate jet that apparently led to an executive at the company losing his job.

Gibson makes some excellent points related to business journalism.

He wrote, “Now remember: This is a financial journalist taking a cushy ride halfway around the world on a corporate jet. She says she did nothing wrong, that GE and Citi settled the charges for the flight at the corporate level.

“As a GE shareholder I’d like to know what GE paid Citi for the use of that private jet. My staff made calls today. If I wanted to rent a G4 corporate jet I’d pay $5,700 per hour times the 17.5-hour flight from Beijing to Los Angeles and on to New York. I get a grand total of nearly $100,000. Just by the way, a first-class ticket on Continental Airlines is $3,900. So we seem to have an overcharge on a financial journalists’ air travel of 25 times or a 2,500 percent upcharge.

“Now, did I double-check the figures? Yes. We base our figures on information from airplanning.com, which charters everywhere.

“The conclusion? Somebody seems to have paid a lot of money for CNBC’s financial journalist to fly home from a China junket.

“So who paid? Did GE stockholders pay the full freight to bring the GE employee home? Or did GE stick Citi with the bulk of the bill, and it should be Citi shareholders screaming bloody murder?

“And just by the way: On the journalism issue, why could Citi want to treat a financial journalist to this kind of high-octane perk? Why would GE allow their CNBC financial journalist to be placed in this position of a possible conflict of interest?”

Read more here.