The Trouble with Pinch’s Paper

RUSH: Here’s Penny in San Diego. Hi, Penny, nice to have you with us.

CALLER: I gotta tell you, I am here to say that you are not an ordinary man. I heard that gal hitting on you last week, and it was sizzling radio.

RUSH: (laughter) I’ll tell you, the reactions to that that I got ran the gamut, Penny.

CALLER: It was incredible. (laughing)

RUSH: I had people saying, ‘Gosh, get a room! Go take a shower! Don’t do this in public.’ I was minding my own business, here.

CALLER: Well, I am not a feminist, and I don’t think she was, either.

RUSH: No, no way a feminist would behave that way.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: Well, not the way she did it. She was smart.

CALLER: Right. Well, I would like to give a shout out to my two favorite men in Indiana, my father, Larry Preston, and happy birthday to my father-in-law, Henry Hendricks. That’s not why I called you.

RUSH: Good. (laughing)

CALLER: I wanted to call you about the Morgan Stanley situation, with them dumping the New York Times stock.

RUSH: Yeah, go ahead. What were you going to say?

CALLER: Okay. I know you talked about it yesterday, but I have to tell you what I did. About three weeks ago, I called them and told them how upset I was about what they did to General Petraeus. I called their advertising department, I called their circulation department, and I called their subscription department and told these people that I hoped that I would continue to hear of falling advertising revenue, falling subscription rates, and falling share prices.

RUSH: You got what you wanted!

CALLER: Yeah, and so this is another example of the fact that we are winning, because people are listening. It’s really because of you and those like you that are giving us a voice.

RUSH: Well, it’s interesting about the New York Times. I talked about it yesterday. As you said, there are two classes of stock. The family owns one class, and it’s the only class that can vote, and then there’s the other guys. Morgan Stanley, they had a guy there — I forget his name, but he runs a unit — and he’s been expressing his dissatisfaction with the performance of the New York Times Company. They own a lot of things. They own a lot of little newspapers. They own the Boston Globe. I think they still have some TV stations, although they might have sold them. They had some classical radio stations at one time. But stock prices are plummeting, circulation is down, advertising revenues are down. The Sulzberger family is not going to let this paper get out of their hands. Now, it may not look good for ‘Pinch,’ Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., right now, but there are a lot of people on the conservative side that are fantasizing about the New York Times going out of business, or at least leaving the Sulzbergers’ hands. I don’t see that happening. There’s bound to be huge trouble.

One of the financial problems that they’re having, by the way — and people don’t talk about this, there’s a blog out there that spends a lot of time on it. If you really want to find out what’s going on the business side of the New York Times, go to the American Thinker. Thomas Lifson writes about this at suitable intervals. But Pinch went out and spent all kinds of money on a brand-new building in Times Square for the New York Times, and it’s just been a huge drag. Of course, it has nothing to do with generating revenue and they’re having trouble doing that. Their audience, they’re making no attempt to make this a paper for virtually everybody. Their audience is as restricted and niche as anything is, although it’s large because most of their subscribers are in New York City, and they’re liberals. So they’ve decided that’s who their audience is going to be, rather than try to branch out and make it a paper that anybody would like to read from front to back. It’s become the official rag of the Arts and Croissant Crowd, and people who live in dream worlds think they’re important, when they’re not, think they’re relevant when they’re not. I’m not talking about the writers. I’m talking about who reads this paper. The staff has some good journalists there and good reporters, but on the op-ed page you can’t tell the difference between that and the front page. So content is also a factor in what’s happening, but really some pretty poor business decisions have been made by Little Pinch, and they’re coming home to roost. The investors are not dropping out because of the MoveOn.org ad or any of that. That’s a business decision.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hassan Elmasry is the Morgan Stanley guy that tried to force the New York Times and Little Pinch to reform their two-class system of share holding. Since the Times family is not going to give anybody other than family members a vote, Morgan Stanley took out their cash, sold their stock. Now, somebody bought the stock. You know when you dump stock, if you sell it, somebody has to buy it. Wouldn’t it be funny if some Dubai bunch ended up buying the Morgan Stanley shares in the New York Times?