Free Republic

Ever since the Congressional Budget Office released its findings that the Kennedy Health Care Bill would not only cost a trillion dollars over ten years but would only cover one third of those currently uninsured, the Democrats have been scrambling to find something to shift the debate back in their favor. The Democrats may have found it in a poll done by the New York Times. The poll found that 85% of respondents favored an overhaul of our health care system. (no surprise there) It furthermore found that 72% of respondents favored the public option including 52% of Republicans. Can...

FOR SALE: 142-year-old, once-thriving Central Massachusetts business. Future potential and revenue stream uncertain, but general agreement that product produced is valuable, even necessary. Business last sold for $296 million; current asking price TBD. While there is no for sale sign in front of the Telegram & Gazette building at 20 Franklin St. in Worcester or its printing operation in Millbury, newspaper industry analysts say it is abundantly clear that the New York Times Co., the T&G’s parent company, wants to divest itself of the region’s largest daily newspaper. The Times Co. bought the T&G in 2000, putting it under the...

JUST after Iran’s rigged elections last week, with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets, it looked as if a new revolution was in the offing. Five days later, the uprising is little more than a symbolic protest, crushed by the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Meanwhile, the real revolution has gone unnoticed: the guard has effected a silent coup d’état. The seeds of this coup were planted four years ago with the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And while he has since disappointed his public, failing to deliver on promised economic and political reforms, his allies now...

Another day... Another biased state-run media poll... The New York Times over sampled democrats to pretend that Americans want nationalized health care: Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the health care system and are strongly behind one of the most contentious proposals Congress is considering, a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found that most Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes so everyone could have health insurance and that they said the government could do a better job of holding down health-care costs than the...

The New York Times finally got around to reporting that the White House fired Inspector General Gerald Walpin, a week after it happened, when the Associated Press — to which the Times belongs — first put in on the wires. They managed to include the Obama administration’s accusation of mental illness, and even threw in the part about Senators Claire McCaskill and Charles Grassley objecting to the firing. But what did Neil Lewis and the Times forget to include in the story (via The Right Scoop)? The White House said Wednesday that President Obama had dismissed a government agency’s internal...

Talks between the Boston Globe's largest union and management wrapped up around 4 a.m. today, after two marathon sessions in two days failed to resolve disagreement over how to achieve $10 million in cuts. Globe spokesman Robert Powers said that talks are tentatively scheduled to resume next Monday. Boston Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten released a statement early Wednesday saying, "We are optimistic about the prospects for reaching an agreement after our most recent talks with the Company. The discussions will continue today." The two sides are scheduled to talk informally by phone today, with formal negotiations resuming next week....

Not that long ago, owning a metropolitan newspaper guaranteed a seat at the civic table, immediate respectability and, given that many papers were near-monopolies, a press practically capable of printing money. Now it seems that the dollar that buys you a copy on a newsstand may buy you the whole organization behind it. And it doesn’t help that the last three big sales involving metropolitan newspapers — the Tribune Company, the Philadelphia papers and The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis — all ended in bankruptcy. It appears that The Boston Globe may be put in play by its owner, The New York...

Gray Lady Wakes Up by: Malcolm A. Kline, June 15, 2009 The dearth of history courses in American colleges and universities has become so obvious that even the New York Times has noticed. “In 1975, for example, three-quarters of college history departments employed at least one diplomatic historian; in 2005 fewer than half did,” Patricia Cohen reported in an article that appeared in The New York Times on June 11, 2009. “The number of departments with an economic historian fell to 31.7 percent from 54.7 percent. By contrast the biggest gains were in women’s history, which now has a representative...

Some of us have speculated that many newsrooms in America are so hell-bent on maintaining their supposedly hallowed positions -- and that by their way of "thinking" they are exempt from the normal laws of economics -- that they will have be dragged kicking and screaming from their keyboards when the repo men come around to turn out the lights. This week's events at the Boston Globe give validity to that theory. Let's take it on faith that the Globe, the onetime New England jewel of the New York Times, really has been losing money at the rate of...

Three Boston businessmen - a Boston Celtics owner, a former advertising mogul, and a member of the family that ran the Globe for generations - have emerged as prominent potential buyers of the Globe, according to people knowledgeable about their interest in the city's leading daily. Actively mulling bids for the newspaper, according to these people, are Stephen Pagliuca, a private equity executive and Celtics co-owner; Jack Connors, cofounder of a major advertising firm and chairman of Partners HealthCare; and Stephen Taylor, a former Globe executive and member of the family that sold the Globe to the New York Times...

Boston Globe employees, in rejecting contract concessions, let anger trump self-interest. Now, says Alex S. Jones, a longtime observer of The New York Times Company, their future looks even dimmer. The Boston Globe Newspaper Guild’s narrow defeat of the New York Times Company’s demands for contract concessions has almost certainly made it less likely that the paper can be sold. This is a bitter irony, as many of those casting "no" votes presumably want a sale to happen. The Globe reports that The Times has put the paper up for sale and hired Goldman Sachs to manage the process. But...

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 NY Times Airbrushes Letterman's Willow Palin Sex Jokes From Their Website Shocker! The New York Times and CBS airbrushed David Letterman's Willow Palin sex jokes from their website: Here's what The New York Times wrote: ‘The Newest Nominee’ Monologue | Aired Monday night on CBS: You know who was in town this weekend, went to a Yankee game? Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska. And she was up there with Rudy Giuliani. They were sitting together. And their seats were, well, let me tell you where their seats were. They were way, way in far right field....

The New York Times Co. has hired an investment bank to manage the possible sale of The Boston Globe, and the company plans to request bids for Boston's major daily in the next couple of weeks, according to two people who say they may make offers on the newspaper. The Times Co., which has declined to comment in recent months on whether it is selling the Globe, has hired Goldman Sachs, the same Wall Street investment bank the Times Co. has hired to sell its 17.5 percent stake in the Boston Red Sox, the potential bidders say. In recent weeks,...

Boston Globe staffers' letter to Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; send on June 9 Dear Mr. Sulzberger, We have long admired your commitment to producing the world’s best journalism. We know, as a former reporter, that you appreciate the work we do and how we have continued to publish hard-hitting, thoughtful papers throughout these hard times. Despite all the rhetoric of the last few weeks, we believe you want to do the right thing – that, at bottom, you’re a mensch. We’re all too aware of the awful economic climate and the precipitous challenges to the newspaper industry. Most of us went...

Now that the largest union representing employees of the Boston Globe has rejected management's final contract offer, observers wonder if the parent New York Times Co. will make good on its threat to shut down the 137-year-old Globe. "It's clear the Times doesn't want to go that route," said Ed Atorino, newspaper analyst at Benchmark & Co. But if the Globe is on a pace to lose $85 million in 2009, as has been reported, it will be tempting, he said. "They would substantially cut their losses by shutting it down. Now, there may be major costs related to shutting...

The Boston Globe’s corporate masters in New York plan to make good on their threat to whack members of the newspaper’s biggest union with a 23 percent pay cut next week after the Boston Newspaper Guild rejected the company’s demands. By a close 277-265 vote, Guild members tonight refused to bow to contract concessions and dared management to impose the 23-percent pay cut or even shutter the struggling broadsheet.

The vote was 277 "no" to 265 "yes."

One of Mark Twain’s well-known quotes is this: “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The humor works because it is based on truth. We all know there are those who play games with statistics to support a false conclusion. One of Twain’s own examples was that “the number of Methodists and murderers is rising at the same rate in the Nebraska Territory.” That “proved,” of course, that Methodists are murderers. It is also possible, however, to present a lie by constructing a discussion with nothing but hard, provable facts. The New York Times demonstrated that fact today (Sunday) with...

FEC dismisses complaint on MoveOn's "Betray Us" ad @ 2:38 pm by Aaron Blake The Federal Election Commission (FEC) ruled Thursday that The New York Times did not provide MoveOn.org with a special rate for its 2007 full-page ad critical of Gen. David Petraeus. The ad, which ran in 2007 and called Petraeus "General Betray Us," caused a lot of controversy when it first ran, and Democrats were forced to separate themselves from the liberal group. Conservative commentators also alleged that MoveOn was given a special rate for the ad - evidence of the New York Times's supposed liberal bias...

Shunned By Media, Levin Book Set To Sell One Million CopiesWhile the state-controlled media continues to shun him, syndicated radio talk host Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto is on track to sell a stunning one million copies, if it hasn't already done so. More than that number have now been printed by Simon and Schuster, its publisher. And late today, it was revealed that the book will appear as number one on the New York Times Bestseller List for the ninth time in the past ten weeks. . . . To get a sense of what it...

Five days before the Boston Newspaper Guild votes on a new contract that would cut members' pay and benefits at The Boston Globe, the head of the union posted a letter criticizing The New York Times Co. for "wretched" management decisions and "its unwillingness to share the pain of overcoming this crisis." "That's incredible," said Gary Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "He's painting acceptance of the agreement almost as a surrender. ... By not endorsing it and painting it in such a negative light, he's asking them to turn it down." Chaison said...

Caterpillar, the heavy equipment manufacturer, is moving to lay off more than 20,000 workers. These days such mass layoffs are sadly unsurprising, but are they ethical? If Caterpillar is to relegate legions of employees to the care of the public, it may not simply echo Ebenezer Scrooge: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Is there no COBRA?” Instead, it must use its considerable political clout to ensure that those programs are robustly funded, hardly a priority either for Caterpillar or its confreres among the Fortune 500. That is, if Caterpillar is to deprive thousands of people of a...

Here’s a little game for you on this post-holiday Tuesday. See if you can identify which phrases, taken from New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s column this weekend, describe Times journalists—and which describe bloggers. 1. “those outside” A. bloggers B. Times journalists 2. “ready to pounce on transgressions by Times journalists” A. bloggers B. Times journalists 3. “aflame with charges of plagiarism” A. bloggers B. Times journalists 4. “burned to illuminate a national crisis through his personal experience” A. bloggers B. Times journalists 5. “the star columnist” A. bloggers B. Times journalists 6. “roughed up” A. bloggers B. Times...

His latest work is set in a public toilet and plays on Japanese superstitions that ghosts and evil spirits inhabit the smallest room in the house, which is why they were traditionally relegated to the most distant part of the home. Parents still tell naughty children that a hairy hand will seize them when they have their pants around their ankles if they misbehave and drag them down into the dark water below. The nine-chapter tale is appropriately titled "Drop," and is the alarming story of an evil spirit that inhabits a toilet bowl, according to Takaki Hayashi, vice president...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Standard & Poor's on Thursday cut its rating on the New York Times Co (NYT.N) deeper into junk status, citing rising leverage in the midst of a newspaper industry slump. A drop in ad revenue aggravated by the long U.S. recession will likely lead to a spike in leverage at the Times by 2010, S&P said in a statement. The rating agency said it expects the economy to begin to recover late this year, but there is significant uncertainty about when the newspaper ad slump will begin to heal. S&P downgraded the Times' corporate credit rating...

You gotta’ love the New York Times and its hyper-politically correct sensitivities about revealing the ethnic or religious backgrounds of criminal suspects. Thus we have today’s front-pager: “4 Accused of Bombing Plot at Bronx Synagogues.” Who were these four, I wondered? Could they be Chrysler shareholders upset that they are getting stiffed in bailout proceedings? ACLU lawyers mad that President Obama has refused to release interrogation photos? Possibly Greenwich hedge-fund managers furious about plans to regulate their industries? Or maybe just random nuts who like to set off bombs for the fun of it? Nope. It turns out–get ready for...

Inconvenient Emails from the NY Times by: Bethany Stotts, May 19, 2009 Now that New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has published his official story of the events surrounding the decision to spike Stephanie Strom’s investigation of ACORN’s alleged fundraising connections to the Obama campaign, it becomes imperative for this correspondent to reiterate that Strom personally attempted to mislead AIM just days after she cut off contact with Anita Moncrief. “The story involved allegations that Barack Obama’s campaign, in league with Acorn, a left-leaning community activist group, was guilty of technical violations of campaign finance law. Evidence supplied by...

Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad. But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom's reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady's "public editor." Hoyt used the word "nonsense" to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against...

A series of cover sheets for intelligence reports written for Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials during the early days of the war in Iraq in 2003 were adorned with biblical quotations, and appeared Sunday, six years later, on the Web site of GQ magazine. The daily briefings were called the “Worldwide Intelligence Update,” one of several intelligence reports compiled overnight and presented in a folder for Mr. Rumsfeld and other officials as they came to work. In the selection of the cover sheets that GQ placed on its Web site, photographs of soldiers praying...

By the end of June, The New York Times will come to a decision on how to charge for some of its content on the Web, The Observer has learned. Executive editor Bill Keller said at a meeting with staff on Wednesday that two proposals are being strongly considered. One includes a "meter system," in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter. He warned staff at the meeting that this...

The sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives has accused the CIA of lying to Congress. She is ensnared in a web of conflicting accounts. Her very hold on power could be under a cloud. Meh. Guess we can find some room on A20. But pot pies need to be heated to 165 degrees to be safe? Hold the presses: put it on the front page! Such is the news judgment of the New York Times. The Morning Joe crowd had a field day with Gray Lady and Pelosi’s travails during the show’s opening half-hour today, Joe Scarborough having great...

After weeks of rumors that The New York Times Co. is trying to sell The Boston Globe, one financial analyst said she met this week with Times Co. executives and came away with a different impression. Despite the Globe's mounting financial losses, she wrote, the company appears committed to the Globe "long term." "Management did not indicate the time frame needed to turn around the profitability of The Boston Globe and did highlight that this property has been hit much harder than some of its other properties due to its larger exposure to classified revenues," wrote Alexia Quadrani, an analyst...

* NY Times board member denies he approached Google's Page * Says has not talked to any Google executive about NYT NEW YORK, May 12 (Reuters) - New York Times Co (NYT.N) board member Scott Galloway said on Tuesday he did not contact Google Inc (GOOG.O) Co-founder Larry Page to try to get the Internet company to buy the newspaper publisher. Galloway told Reuters he has not talked to anyone else at Google about buying the Times, denying a report in Fortune.com on Monday that said Galloway had made an overture to Page. "I've never been in same room with...

Hey Kristof... You're Late! Posted in: Gerald A. Honigman By Gerald A. Honigman Monday, March 23, 2009 While The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof is no stranger to these positions throughout the year, he frequently comes out with his gems of Middle East wisdom right around Bike Week here in Daytona Beach, Florida, when tens of thousands of Harley enthusiasts arrive to also spread their hot air exhaust around town. This year Nick was a few weeks late. Like others of his ilk--Thomas Friedman (better of late), David Ignatius, Richard Cohen, just to name a few, who are also obsessed...

WHEN The NY Times Company said it was prepared to start the clock on a shutdown of The Boston Globe, it was front-page news in last Monday’s Washington Post. In The Times, it made the second paragraph of a short article inside the business section. In early April, when the company first threatened to close The Globe unless the paper’s unions agreed to big concessions, it was at the top of the front page in Boston — huge news about the 137-year-old paper. The Times, which only learned about the story on deadline, after it popped up on The Globe’s...

SULZBERGERS' FIRM-BASED INCOME SLIPS TO $4.5M The Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896 has run the venerable NY Times empire has now lost more than 86% of its fortune and may have to sell their controlling stake to get out of debt......about two dozen descendants had comfortable lifestyles, living on wealth valued as high as $425M....down to a paltry $4.5M, which could shrink even more. Soaring losses amid a devastating media slump have drained corporate cash, pushed the company deeper into $1.3B debt and beckoned a stock vulture -- Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who bailed out the Times with a high-interest $250M...

A May 2nd analysis piece from New York Times Russia correspondent Clifford Levy highlighted the paper's hopeless inability to offer readers real insights about Vladimir Putin's neo-Soviet regime. As the paper attempts to carry out a demented effort to collect $2/copy for its daily edition at the newsstand, it's appropriate to take a moment to reflect on its actual value. I've previously documented egregious flaws in the paper's reporting on Russia, for instance regarding Putin's war in Chechnya and on protest movements in Moldova, and I've shown how Times editorials have shamelessly perverted history in order to cover up their...

globe "Layoffs or staff reductions or force reductions are probably part of the way we operate this newspaper for at least the foreseeable future. ...But we can't cut ourselves to success. No business can," says Globe publisher Steven Ainsley. He also says: * "I've asked every person in this building to make enormous personal sacrifices in the name of this institution. That's hard to do." * "We do have to have healing. We've got to get to the point that we're comfortable with the notion that these type of sacrifices that the company has asked of all of us are...

If you ask anybody why they got into this business and they say it was for the money, they are either certifiably insane or no longer in the business. Funny. Few in journalism call it a business. We like to think we forfeited bigger paychecks to pursue something that is essential: speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable. And there is a lot of truth to that. Most people in newsrooms are idealistic. They think of their work more as a vocation than a job. But at the end of the day, we produce something - journalism...

NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times is raising its prices for the second time in less than a year to help the newspaper offset a steep drop in advertising revenue. The newsstand price for the Times' weekday and Saturday editions will go up to $2 effective June 1, up from $1.50. The 33 percent increase comes just 11 months after the third largest U.S. daily newspaper last raised its prices. The price for the national edition of the Sunday newspaper will rise to $6,

That said, I still must stand up for A-Rod as he's facing the worst smear job of his career. Yes, he shamed the game by using steroids but the latest allegations are a different story and the person making those allegations is the same one who tried and convicted the Duke lacrosse players before they even were able to speak before a judge. Once they were exonerated, she never once wrote a word retracting her slurs or apologizing to the players. She ruined the lives of three young men because they were rich, white and, well, men. That person is...

Boston Globe unions’ resolve to protect lifetime job guarantees began to crumble this morning as the mailers union agreed to modify the perk under threat of a shutdown of the paper. “We want to keep the newspaper open and we believe the New York Times [NYT] threat, that if we didn’t come to some sort of agreement, that we would close,” said Mary White, president of Teamsters Local 1 which represents the mailers. The breakthrough development came at about 3:30 a.m. during marathon talks and left just two major unions - the Boston Newspaper Guild and the pressmen - clinging...

Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post is covering the apparent demise of another ancient American newspaper; the Boston Globe. Yes, it was a liberal rag - a laughably small minded, mini-me imitation of its parent, the New York Times. But if one believes that a city's newspapers are more than mouthpieces for one political party or another, that covering art, culture, sports, fashion, and local business is an important task beyond politics that helps unite and define a metro area - then we may be suitably chastened by the demise even of a paper that thought John Kerry was the...

Boston Globe negotiators gave union leaders copies of a 60-day shutdown warning notice they said they would file Monday if talks were not successful with one hour left to go before the midnight deadline. The notice, required by the federal Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, gives workers 60 days warning before the closure of a business. “Filing the WARN notice is a difficult step that we would like to avoid but, unfortunately, given the state of the negotiations, it is one we must be prepared to take if negotiations are not successful,” the Globe said in a statement. Negotiators...

The New York Times must be getting increasingly desperate. The publisher of the Times, Arthur Sulzberger, writes a paean in Time Magazine to Carlos Slim, the billionaire Mexican monopolist who threw the flailing Times a lifeline via a 250 million dollar loan earlier in the year. This is a man who has set back development in Mexico by his monopoly (or near monopoly) of the telecommunications system in that nation. He has been milking his profits for decades, blocking technological development of competitors by using his influence with politicians. The Times has historically derided this type of crony capitalism, especially...

The New York Times is expected to announce a newsstand price increase for its flagship newspaper early next week as it races to shore up liquidity amid industry-wide falls in advertising revenues and circulation. The announcement comes as the New York Times is pushing for cost cuts from the struggling Boston Globe, which the New York Times purchased in 1993 for $1.1bn. The New York Times set the unions at the Globe a deadline, due to expire last night, to start talks about $20m in cuts. It has threatened to close the Globe, which is expected to lose $85m this...

I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Carlos Slim. He had decided to invest in the New York Times Co. and thought it would be a good idea to get to know me and my senior colleagues. It was obvious from the moment we met that he was a true Times loyalist. We had an enjoyable conversation about what was happening in this country and everywhere else in the world. Carlos, a very shrewd businessman with an appreciation for great brands, showed a deep understanding of the role that news, information and education play in our interconnected global society....

Paper Cuts: 'New York Times' Union Agrees In another sign of the dire situation facing American newspapers, the Newspaper Guild in New York City agreed to a 5% cut in salary for members at The New York Times, clearing the way for reductions that will affect newsroom staff and a number of other salaried professionals. The pay cut is meant to be temporary -- ending Dec. 3 -- but given current revenue trends, may become permanent. The union faced a choice between the pay cut and the loss of 80 jobs in the newsroom and elsewhere -- an increasingly common...

It was only five years ago that opposition to gay marriage was so strong that Republicans explicitly turned to the issue as a way to energize conservative voters. Yet today, as the party contemplates the task of rebuilding itself, some Republicans say the issue of gay marriage may be turning into more of a hindrance than a help. The fact that a run of states have legalized gay marriage in recent months — either by court decision or by legislative action — with little backlash is only one indication of how public attitudes about this subject appear to be changing....

Most of the Massachusetts congressional delegation, including Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, have sent a letter to New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger, expressing concerns about the threatened shutdown of The Boston Globe and urging him to work toward a solution that "preserves the newspaper for the future." The letter was released by the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Globe's largest union, representing more than 600 editorial, advertising and business office workers. The Times Co. has threatened to shutter the Globe unless the Guild and other unions agree to $20 million in concessions by the end of...