The Slow Death of the Old Grey Lady

The NY Times has been a declining asset for a decade. From the time they brought in Howell Raines and he went on a jihad against the Masters all the way up until the McCain smear piece of a few weeks ago, the quality of the paper has decreased while the liberal bent has increased. The result: disaster:

Moody's Investors Service said late Tuesday it placed the New York Times Co.'s senior unsecured and Prime-2 commercial paper ratings on review for possible downgrade. The review is prompted by double-digit declines in New York Times' newspaper advertising revenue in recent months as well as the rating agency's expectations that the outlook for newspaper advertising remains weak in the near term.

JWF comments that it's a done deal and that means that Pinch Sulzberger won't be able to stave off pissed off shareholders for much longer. They want him bounced, he controls the stock that has the heft and now it's a paper in limbo.

No one wants to see the NY Times shut down, they have excellent reporters on the beat generally. Yet their op/ed page is a liberal paradise the way Sulberger wants it and that's what has all but destroyed them as the Paper of Record.

In my opinion, the straw that broke the Times back was the advent of cable news as a whole and Fox News in particular. Prior to 24-hour news, ABC, CBS and NBC ran the stories that the Times wrote about, thus their collective coverage was left-leaning. In other words, the Times dictated what was news. That ended when people like Rush gained listeners and the Fox News Channel took the cable news world by the short hairs. The Times became irrelevent and then became almost a parody of itself as evident from the McCain hit piece.

The story wasn't that McCain had an affair because the Times said so, the story was that the Times ran a piece that was largely unsourced--they used the power they thought they still possessed to slam a Republican nominee and it backfired on them spectacularly. Amusingly, the Times piece galvanized the GOP around McCain when he desperately needed it.

Update: How far has the Times fallen? This far my friends. When the public believes a career politician twice as much as the "most respected newspaper in America," they're sitting about two notches below used car salesmen on the old trustworthiness scale.