Well today, some accountability came.
Investors in the New York Times have been outraged as the paper continues to lose market share and bleed money faster than Rosie O'Donnell at a hamburger stand. This has been going on for years and nothing's been done to stop it, in part because the people who own most of the Times stock actually have no control as to who runs the company since their shares can't vote on a majority of the board of directors. That position is reserved for the uber-leftist Sulzberger family (headed by Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr.) who has been running the paper into the ground financially and off a cliff when it comes to bias, all the while stuffing its own pockets.
Fed-up investors finally had enough. Earlier today, they gave the Times a loud vote of no confidence by refusing to vote at all for the small number of director seats that they can vote on:
New York Times Co. shareholders, led by Morgan Stanley, withheld 42 percent of their votes from directors to protest the Sulzberger family's control over the company.
About 52.5 million of the 124.2 million shares voted declined to support the re-election of directors, New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said today at the company's annual shareholder meeting in New York.
The withhold tally compared with 28 percent at last year's meeting, which marked the beginning of a yearlong campaign by Morgan Stanley. The firm and it supporters, concerned about falling profits and a slumping share price, complained that New York Times's two classes of stock give shareholders too little say in the company. Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. should give up one of his roles, they said.
The vote "is a clear mandate for meaningful change," Morgan Stanley said in a statement. "The withhold vote this year is significantly higher than last year and is an emphatic call for accountability."
Commenter allenf makes an astute point here:
The New York Times said of Attorney General Gonzalez last Friday:
We don’t yet know whether Mr. Gonzales is merely so incompetent that he should be fired immediately, or whether he is covering something up.
If Pinch was a man of principle and not politics, he too would resign. After all he has taken one of the greatest franchises in publishing history and driven it straight into the ground.
But Pinch and the Times are not about publishing. They are not about principle. They are there to push a left wing agenda.
