“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
– Thomas Jefferson
When ruling families pass their legacies on to their progeny, you can never be sure what kind of leadership you are going to get. Will you be lucky and get a George VI, who was better than merely competent? Or will you be stuck with Uday and Qusay Hussein – psychos reportedly more cruel than even their father who could never have earned what power and prestige they gained by accident of birth? Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger is not as bad as the children of Saddam Hussein, but he does live on that side of the legacy ledger.
As publisher of the “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, Sulzberger fired his recently chosen Executive Editor, Jill Abramson last week. The press has been in conniption fits ever since, and there are some important takeaways for us as observers of this mess about media new and old, as well as that most insidious of diseases, leftism, which has infected the Times for decades, and is now so metastasized as to make recovery impossible. One is at once saddened and appreciative of the ruins Pinch has made of this once-great paper – saddened by what was destroyed, and appreciative that the dishonest actions of the publishers, editors, and reporters have indeed had consequences.
God announces the end of the world, and the three biggest papers published in N.Y. report the news thusly:
New York Daily News: “We’re Gone!” in huge type.
Wall Street Journal: “Markets to Close Early.”
New York Times: “World Will End – Women and Minorities Hardest hit.”
Mort Saul’s classic joke perfectly illuminates the central problem with the “gray lady.” It is intellectually bankrupt, consistently and oh-so-predictably sacrificing honest journalism at the altar of political ideology. The paper has been a reliable cheerleader for the Democrat Party for over half a century. In fact, the last Republican they could hold their noses and endorse for president was Dwight D. Eisenhower – 58 years ago. Think about the kind of party fidelity required to conclude that Jimmy Carter was a better choice to run the country than Ronald Reagan – or even John Anderson – in 1980.
While the New York Times company is publicly traded, it is effectively owned by Sulzberger, because his dad made sure the New York Times operated more like a monarchy than a large corporation. The mechanism by which he exerts near total control is exactly the type of scheme the Times crusades against with guns ablaze when pulled off by other entities. From the horse’s mouth:
Eager to expand the company, he needed a listed stock that the company could use to make deals. But a listed stock had to have voting rights. And that conflicted with another of Sulzberger’s goals: to ensure that his family, which had owned the paper since 1896, would remain in control of the company and its flagship newspaper.
Since the 1950s, the company had given stock to favored employees and others, stock that could be bought and sold but had no voting rights. The solution was to give that stock — Class A shares, they were called — some voting rights, but not enough to threaten the family’s control. The Class B shares, held largely in a family trust, still gave the Sulzbergers the power to elect around 70 percent of the board.
Imagine if the Koch brothers operated this way. How much ink and html would the Times spill bemoaning the lack of ownership input in the running of the company? While you or I might think it crazy to buy stock in such a venture, we can celebrate the freedom of the Times Company to organize as it sees fit, and let the market decide. This, however, is not how the Times operates – when others do what they refused to do, then the sky might as well be falling.
One of the many examples of the Times’ self-righteous crusades revolves around Augusta National Golf Club, the famous site of golf’s Masters tournament. They had no women among their 300 members, virtually all of whom were famous sports figures or Fortune 500 CEO’s. As Ed Driscoll of PJ Media puts it, “From 2001 until mid-2003, the Times ran nearly 100 stories on the Augusta National Golf Course, flooding the zone, Saul Alinksy-style, with the vital national goal of making a golf course go co-ed. This despite other minor stories in the news such as 9/11, and American troops entering Afghanistan and Iraq in the opening stages of the Global War on Terror.”
Perhaps Pinch and the Times would have greater perspective if they practiced what they preached and made way for a bit of intellectual diversity to go along with all the other kinds of diversity they champion. Of course the Times’ problem is that they think sex and race diversity are the only kinds that are important. David Brooks is the Times’ current placeholder of the singular slot of “conservative” op-ed columnist, their lawn jockey for balance. This is a man who, two days after Obama’s second autobiography,The Audacity of Hope, hit bookstores, published a column in The Times entitled “Run, Barack, Run”, urging the Chicago politician to run for president. Brooks is such a textbook RINO, he makes Lindsey Graham look like Ken Cuccinelli. Apparently Sulzberger couldn’t find the phone numbers of Cal Thomas, Charles Krauthammer or any other popular and widely published conservatives…or is he simply afraid of a conservative writer who makes cogent, well-conceived arguments with fidelity to conservative principles? Hint: it’s not a hard answer.
Of course, on the other side, there are so many to choose from among the Times’ bevy of neo-socialists past, like Bob Herbert, and present, like Maureen Dowd. But the worst of the bunch is Nobel prize-winning columnist Paul Krugman (which says far more about the prize than it does the recipient). Don’t get me started on this guy (OK, I guess I started). He is the purveyor of not just the most predictably asinine and vindictive hard left opinions (e.g. pining for a return of the 91% tax rate), but despite being wrong about virtually everything he has ever 1asserted or predicted, remains endowed with an unbearable degree of arrogance and self-importance.
In the end, I don’t know – nobody knows for sure – if Jill Abramson was fired because she was a bossy insufferable, uh, person, or because they wanted to put a black man in the position to demonstrate even greater diversity. I don’t know if it’s because Pinch wouldn’t give her equal pay for equal work. But here is what I do know: when bad things happen to bad actors, sometimes the thing to do is just sit back and enjoy the show.
