Mitch McConnell: 'The New York Times Monopoly Is Over'
"I think the New York Times monopoly is over...Arthur Sulzberger used to have the biggest megaphone in America. And all you have to do is look at the dwindling size of newspapers, even one as big as his.”
So said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in an interview with BuzzFeed Monday:
“To the extent that there isn’t media domination like there was in the days NBC, ABC, CBS the New York Times, the Washington Post, particularly since most people on my side of the aisle feel they had a pretty obvious bias … those days are over,” he said. “I kind of like this new environment. I think its much more competitive, much more balanced."
“From a conservative point of view we have a better chance of competing in the marketplace of ideas,” he said.
To give you an idea of just how right McConnell was about the Times, take a look at its stock chart courtesy Bigcharts.com:
Pretty pathetic. Conservative talk radio host discussed this Monday:
The New York Times is losing pages, losing ad revenue, losing money, but the family controls the shares. There's nothing anybody can do about it. They're looking for a new CEO at the New York Times, but it doesn't matter 'cause whoever they hire the paper is still gonna be run by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Little Pinch. So the CEO is a position that they have to have to satisfy Wall Street investors, but the CEO really doesn't have any power there. The Sulzberger family does. And the current scion running the place is running it into the ground. Now, for that to happen, the New York Times has to be driving away its own readers, 'cause they only appeal to the hard-core fringe, Upper West Side left.
They have to be driving away their own people. It's not as though conservatives all of a sudden woke up and got tired of reading the drivel that's in the New York Times. And yet they're hunkering down and staying true to the cause, to the agenda, which is different than the way it used to be. I think they got all these media people, even though the monopoly essentially was busted up in the mid-nineties, I still don't think they've adapted. I don't think they've come to grips with the fact that they're no longer a monopoly and they still want to operate according to these old models, and they end up becoming a laughingstock.
As for McConnell, he believes the times they are a changing, and his Party is up to the challenge:
McConnell said politicians need to make “sure you’re right on the cutting edge of the best way to reach your audience. And it’s not as simple as it used to be … When I started my career, you had radio, TV, direct mail and telephone boiler rooms. The message varied, but the techniques were pretty much the same. That couldn’t be said today.”
“We have people paying attention to all these various ways to connect with people. People who are following radio talk shows, people who are concentrating on [Twitter and Facebook],” he added.
Indeed.
