At 10:32 p.m. Tuesday, when the final draft of an agreement between General Motors and NBC cleared the firms' respective fax machines, things began looking up for the world's largest auto maker for the first time in many months.
The NBC apology that followed a few minutes later on national television was the result of what industry observers and GM employees call a new aggressiveness on the part of GM's new management.
Indeed, it may have marked at least a symbolic turning point for a company that has for so long seemed to be drowning in an unending stream of bad news.
In the last several days alone:
* An Atlanta jury found the auto maker liable--to the tune of $105.2 million--in the death of a teen-ager who was driving a GM pickup truck with an alleged design flaw.
* Auto safety and consumer groups launched a wide-ranging campaign to force a federal recall of the trucks.
* A Michigan judge ruled that the company must continue to operate an assembly plant it had planned to close.
* GM announced plans to take a write-off for health care costs that will catapult its 1992 loss to an unheard-of $23 billion.
This is not to mention the previous 12 months, whose highlights included two massive plant closing announcements, several strikes against GM by United Auto Workers union locals and the ouster of the company's chairman and chief executive in a board coup.
"It has not been an easy job lately," concedes GM public relations manager James Crellin.
But in a well-timed and carefully orchestrated public relations effort, GM managed to seize the moral high ground in its face-off with NBC, which admitted late Tuesday that its "Dateline: NBC" TV news program used incendiary devices to ensure that a fire would erupt in a staged test crash of a GM pickup truck.
"It may be a watershed event for the company," said one New York public relations executive. "It was fast and ferocious, and I think it shows people that GM still has clout and still stands for something."
GM general counsel Harry Pearce, who was promoted to executive vice president in charge of GM Hughes Electronics and Electronic Data Systems Corp. in the management shake-up last November, is credited with putting on an intense, persuasive Detroit news conference earlier this week, complete with the trucks NBC had used--extracted from an Indiana junkyard.
