So it was with great relish I saw an article in The Federalist that announced the following:
The Gray Lady is deep in the red, but can anything stop the bleeding? Amid weak advertising revenues, circulation decline and a former Enron advisor pretending to be a columnist, The New York Times Co. announced that it will cut four percent of its total workforce, including 250 jobs for the main operation of the Times itself, the International Herald Tribune and the online Times. New England operations, including The Boston Globe, will lose 160 jobs. This announcement comes on the heels of 200 jobs cut in May. We suspect outsourcing to bloggers and other online news services could be playing a role here. Times' chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and its CEO Janet Robinson called the new round of cuts "a painful process" but a necessary one given the "continued financial challenges and the cloudy economic outlook for the remainder of the year." Further, they promise to manage the cuts "in such a way that we continue to provide our readers...with journalism of the highest quality." Journalism of the highest quality? Now that's news!
It's no surprise that the circulation of the NY Times is in decline. The more they slant their news to the hard left, the more out-of-agreement it is with the general populace of New York. Sure, there are plenty of democrats in New York who want someone like Hillary as senator (although I wouldn't be too surprised to see her ousted in the next election despite her recent efforts to re-mold herself as being more in the mainstream). But there are also plenty of people who are fed up. I think of those who think and vote more conservatively not as Republicans, but as being "normal people"; those who are fed up with "corruption as usual", with the unstated adoption of multi-culturalism/atheism as the only politically correct national religion, and with the persistent trend of local, state and our national government toward anti-religious laws and hateful intolerance of mainstream ideas.
Regular NY Times columnists Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd have been given a pulpit where their anti-American, anti-religious and anti-Republican extremist viewpoints are made to seem legitimate. Without the NY Times supporting them, they'd have to find an actual soapbox in Central Park where they could shout out their vitriol and where people could do the right thing--ignore them and get on with their lives. It doesn't matter if a hundred people send in emails or letters supporting their extremist views (not that they do). It matters that the thousand letters that are sent in protest of their views are scoffed at and dismissed.
If the New York Times wanted to turn itself around financially -- and I don't think it does, I think Sulzberger is one of those suppressive people around whom everything fails because that IS his covert, psychotic agenda, to make everything fail -- it could gain readership by actually reporting news fairly, concisely, and with compassion. Something it was noted for 50 or 75 years ago. Now its voice is catty, shrill, carping and hostile, like some aged burlesque queen who was, once-upon-a-time, Miss New York. The glamour is long gone--now we can see the hostility it was masking. It only ever pretends to be your friend, but it is not and never was.
Its agenda is not your agenda, unless you want the world to be ruled by UN beaureaucrats, unless you want America reduced to the role of cash cow for the third world, and unless you want the US Governement to run every aspect of your life for you. Freedom is not their guidon any more, unless it is "freedom to destroy".
If the institution that is the Gray Lady fails, it will be good for not just New York, but for the country and the world.
