NYT corporate debt cut to junk status

By Ed Lasky

"Garbage-in, garbage-out" finds a new meaning, as the decline of its journalistic practice is now matched by the New York Times Company's financial status.

We at American Thinker, particularly our publisher Tom Lifson, have long chronicled the New York Times' history of journalistic failure and corporate decline. In the incapable hands of family scion, Arthur ("Pinch") Sulzberger, Jr., the paper has taken an agenda-driven approach to the news, trying to "force feed" the Democratic agenda to its readers -- and to the other media outlets that follow its lead. The editorial page has, of course, followed along; the home of several columnists who seem to rewrite their own columns and pass them off as new ones or engage in an emotional frenzy against any and all Republicans.

Readership has declined. The journalistic mistakes have been compounded by a long series of management miscues (bad investments in About.Com, the Boston Globe, and other newspaper properties purchased at top prices just as earnings were about to go over a cliff). Pinch Sulzberger has overseen the decline, cosseted by a shareholder structure that empowers his family at the expense of common shareholders.

Isn't it long past the time that he should accept responsibility for his mistakes, exactly as the paper insists a long line of Republicans do? Time to fall on the sword and let more capable management attempt to save the family patrimony.

Frankly, the Times has become far too predictable -- and so was the latest action by Standard and Poors rating agency, which cut the corporate debt of the New York Times company to "junk" status.