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The New York Times’ Everyday Americans?

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  August 22nd, 2011 at 05:30 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

If you saw this “If I were President” article in the NYT that purported to offer up helpful suggestions from non-pundits and political/media types on how to fix the country, you probably rolled your eyes. Certainly FrankJ and Jon Henke did on Twitter (H/T), and for good reason: as ideas go, said ideas were… ah, largely lacking. And kind of provincial. Gimmicky, even. Certainly mostly a narrow focus.

But that’s not the point of this post. No, the point of this post is to introduce you to who the New York Times consider to be “a range of Americans who don’t labor in politics or the media” – largely because if people just let the New York Times get away with claiming nonsense with a straight face then they’ll never stop doing that.

So: let us look at these twelve supposedly representative Americans (one of which, by the way, is probably actually a Brit):

Name Affiliation Noteworthy because?
Michael J Sandel Liberal Harvard Professor/HuffPo
Sharon Olds Liberal “Poet Rebuffs Laura Bush”
Andrew Weil Liberal Alt-med, likes Obamacare
Danny Meyer Liberal Obama supporter/restauranteur
James Q Wilson Conservative Professor/Academic
Jennifer Egan Liberal Author / Thinks Bush ‘criminal’
Str. Mary Walgenbach Liberal Antiwar loon
Geoffrey Canada Liberal All-right school activist
Patricia Ryan Madson Can’t tell Improv advocate
Stephen Hannock Kinda Fascist* Artist
James Dyson Liberal** Big-government industrialist
Neil deGrasse Tyson Liberal PETA-friendly astrophysicist
*Seriously, read his entry.
**By our standards (Brit).

Yes. That is an amazingly comprehensive cross section of typical, everyday Americans, there. If anybody on that list has less than a six-figure income, I’m going to be shocked. Mind you, they’re not at all awful people, by and large – although anybody who voluntarily works in the antiwar movement these days really needs to have either her basic morality, or her native intelligence, questioned – but they are not “a range of Americans who don’t labor in politics or the media.” Click the links and you’ll discover that all of them do so labor, in one form or another.

And they’re all also mostly liberals. Which is to be expected, though: epistemic closure is a big problem among the self-identified ‘elite’ Left these days.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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  • earlgrey

    this media firestorm of bull droppings. It is so biased and I fear that too many people aren’t aware and will never allow themselves to be aware that they are being lied to, misled and indoctrinated.

    A bad news day all around today. I hope tomorrow is better.

  • luvnthebigsites

    What I have taken to heart from an influential member of the new media (founding father) — Run conservative candidates on conservative principals and don’t let the old media define the narrative.

    ;) <— @Moe Lane

  • rightwingmom52

    Does anybody really “labor” in politics or the media? Perhaps there was a nugget of truth in the statement – just not the one they were going for.

  • grateful_red

    will this rag go bankrupt? (and I don’t mean morally bankrupt)

  • luvnthebigsites

    .

  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    I mean RIGHT THIS SECOND I have this wicked crick in my back.

  • luvnthebigsites

    That stuff matters to us….Moe. for real. ;)

  • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

    I firmly believe that the vast majority of folks know that they are being lied to by the LSM, otherwise, Reagan, GHW Bush and GW Bush would never have been elected president. The vast majority of the LSM are bad liars, and it takes a really GOOD liar like Bill Clinton or Barack 0bama to sway enough voters to get a liberal elected.

  • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

    NT

  • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

    This is the REAL “No-Spin” zone.

  • rightwingmom52

    of blogging doesn’t labor. I should have said “liberal media and politics.”

    Hope the crick gets better before Obamacare kicks in.

  • Adjoran

    The massive infusion of cash flowing from the Mexican telecom monopolist billionaire Carlos Slim (not kidding) is what is keeping them afloat – temporarily.

    In 2009, he fronted them $250 million in a series of six-year notes which could be converted to common stock, but also carry interest at 14%, 11% paid annually in cash and the rest with the issuance of new bonds for Slim.

    They have over $1 billion in other debt they cannot pay, and have no business plan which offers any chance of recovery. The company’s problems were evident several years ago when it was noticed that the assets of the NYT company in real estate and capital equipment were worth more than the net equity.

    In other words, the newspaper business made the value of the company go down, not up. They would have been better off to liquidate the assets and call it a day.

    But then the real estate bubble burst, and even that means of cashing out disappeared. Meanwhile, it is estimated that at least 200 members of the Sulzberger-Ochs family are solely dependent on NYT Co. dividends for 100% of their income. Most have never worked a day in their lives.

    How, you might ask, can a company that is losing money hand over fist and has been for years and has to go begging shady foreigners for handouts to keep the doors open pay dividends? Well, the Sulzberger-Ochs families own a special class of preferred stock which pays dividends without respect to the bottom line.

    You know the stock you buy online through Schwab or e-Trade? Well, this is the other kind. You can’t have any.

    Naturally, it can’t go on forever, so sooner or later you’ll be seeing the formerly rich elite panhandling on the streets.

  • wonkish1

    So while the family actually has less than 50% of the shares outstanding, they have more than 50% of the voting power. Which means you still can’t rest any of the power away from the Sulzberger’s crazy liberal hands.

    But lets be clear about something. Carlos Slim is a very conservative Billionaire. He is the anti Buffett. And he has wanted the New York Times for a long time now. He’s tried buying up large quantities of shares so that he could influence their operations and he said it was to no avail.

    So the only way he gets his hands on that company is by being the primary creditor and getting control when it goes into bankruptcy.

    Carlos apparently doesn’t want NYT to close its doors(which is unlikely even if they went through a bankruptcy without Slim’s money), he wants to own it, and he wants the control.

  • lastgopinillinois

    I have been reading a lot of Yahoo news (political tab) the past few weeks.
    Yahoo news allows Yahoo users to post comments and give a thumbs up or down to other commenters of the story.
    For the three days in a row where I bothered to count, the numbers averaged about 20 conservative and anti-obama comments to every one liberal obama supporter.
    There is hope for the future if these people show up at the polls in 2012

  • johnt

    The Times and it’s loyal readers can’t even imagine that that there is dissent & dissenters. Consequently when not spewing bile and seeing racists/haters where Normal People walk, they don’t see anybody at all. Usually though it’s the former rather than the latter, a peculiar tolerance.
    What is remarkable is the total failure of leftism, unseen to these wise folk. Day by day the intellectual edifice rots away while they become more virulent rather than chastened. They never should have based so much of their egos on the politics of power & failure.