Gray Lady Down…Way Down…
 
In my youth, I delivered the Sunday New York Times to many upscale apartment dwellers who were eager and delighted to have this bulky, informative and journalistic gold standard newspaper delivered to their doorstep. In those days (1970’s), there simply was nothing quite like the New York Times: in terms of reach, authority, and thoroughness of its reporting, it had no peers. In fact, it set the standard, to which all other newspapers aspired. Its moniker as the “newspaper of record” was richly deserved, only because it was so aptly descriptive of its exhaustive treatment of the daily news from the sports pages to the financial pages to the front page.
Over the past twenty years, I have watched, as that once venerable broadsheet, has been slowly transformed, under the tutelage of Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger into a mouthpiece of the Democratic National Committee. Although it started slowly at first, its left-wing blandishments currently are so pronounced, that I laugh every time I listen to a mainstream news media anchor or pundit still refer to this incorrigibly biased publication with the reverence of old: as if the New York Times of today is still the newspaper of record.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In the words of a well written article that briefly chronicles the reasons for the Times downfall,
But you can't hold that title while pandering to the political and cultural views of readers on the Upper West Side. And you can't claim "all the news that's fit to print" when you neglect to notice that an American soldier in Iraq just won the Medal of Honor.
How do the clownish and utterly predictable views of a former Times drama critic on the War in Iraq translate into anything resembling authority, accuracy, and gravity for the rest of us who don’t live in Manhattan? Frank Rich may be all the rage in the fashionable coffee-houses and salons of the upper West Side of New York, but in terms of reach, he is but a local chattering box to the New York social elites who have no idea that to the west of the East River lies an entirely different country.
Investment banker Morgan Stanley recently sold its controlling interest in the New York Times as an expression of its disapprobation of the two-tiered voting stock capital structure of the company. The different classes of stock was a means by which the Sulzberger family was able to retain control of the enterprise.
 When Morgan Stanley dumped its New York Times holdings, the stock hit its lowest price ever in a decade. What does that tell you about the faith of investors in the York Times business model?
 
 
 
 
Monday, October 22, 2007
By Johnny K