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RUSH: Folks, I need to talk about something here. I\u2019m always uncomfortable talking about this, and I haven\u2019t even seen it. I was out playing golf over the weekend and friend of mine says, “By the way, what about these stories about how you\u2019ve lost audience in April?”<\/p>\n
I said, “What?”<\/p>\n
“Oh, yeah, these stories are everywhere.”<\/p>\n
“I haven\u2019t seen one.”<\/p>\n
“Oh, yeah. The story is all about how your audience is shrinking.”<\/p>\n
“What? It\u2019s not. It\u2019s increasing. It\u2019s incredible!”<\/p>\n
It\u2019s laughable to hear about this stuff, but it\u2019s also instructive because even my friends reading this stuff think it\u2019s true. One of them gets it, one of them didn\u2019t, but it\u2019s just the power of the printed word. Over the weekend there happened to be a story in New York Magazine by a guy named Joe Hagan, and it\u2019s a story about the New York Times and what happened when they got rid of their CEO Janet Robinson. Janet Robinson was Arthur Sulzberger Jr.\u2019s right hand.<\/p>\n
She ran the newspaper. They were inseparable, a platonic married couple. They were that close. She was the one who was trying to help the paper recover from all the lost advertising revenue. You want to talk about ratings down, revenue down? It\u2019s the New York Times, and this story New York Magazine makes it very clear. But before I get to the details of that, what happened was that Little Pinch got a girlfriend that he met over at Davos. She had something to do with the World Economic Forum.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s her name? I can\u2019t think of her name right now. It\u2019s Claudia Gonzalez. She\u2019s a Mexican marketing executive who formerly worked for the World Economic Forum in Davos. Well, it turns out she didn\u2019t like Janet Robinson. Little Pinch gets a girlfriend. He fell madly in love with her. (I guess he just got divorced in 2008.) He fell madly in love with this babe, and this babe then started telling him that she didn\u2019t like the way Janet Robinson ran paper.<\/p>\n
The upshot is, Robinson gets canned with a $24 million golden parachute to get her to go away. The rest of the Times employees were fit to be tied over this because the unions are having to give things up. They\u2019re giving up pensions and they\u2019re giving up health care — no wage increases and so forth — and the CEO (an exec, a suit) was paid $24 million to go away \u2019cause Pinch\u2019s girlfriend didn\u2019t like her! That is the essentially the upshot of the story. But here the details in New York Times.<\/p>\n
The next time you read about supposed problems here, let me just give you the real truth. “In the era of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. …” I\u2019m reading from New York Magazine. “In the era of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., when newspapers have flailed under new digital realities, the New York Times Company has shrunk dramatically. Once it was a wide-ranging media empire of newspapers and TV stations and websites, and even a baseball team, that was worth almost $7 billion; today it\u00c2\u2019s essentially two struggling newspapers and a much-reduced web company, all worth less than $1 billion…”<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve ever heard of the Internet company or music company called Pandora, it\u2019s worth twice what the New York Times is worth. Pandora, a music streaming outfit! “Despite the shrinkage, the company has retained essentially the same top-heavy management, which it has kept well compensated.” So I don\u2019t mean to hit on Little Pinch here, but since he took over, they\u2019ve built this new building that they couldn\u2019t afford and they\u2019ve done all this crazy stuff. Now they paid $24 million to their CEO to go away.<\/p>\n
And a $7 billion company is now worth $1 billion, and you know who\u2019s really upset? Apparently there are 40 members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family who live off the dividends, and there aren\u2019t any anymore. And they\u2019re all upset. The magazine describes them as people who have “admirable but low-paying jobs,” like academics, artists, and so forth. They went from $7 billion to less than $1 billion in less than ten years. Now, if you want to know who\u2019s in trouble media-wise, it\u2019s newspapers and liberalism, folks.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: I just want to read you one more little excerpt here from the New York Magazine piece on the New York Times. “That was fine for Sulzberger and the five other family members with salaried positions at the company, but the wider family of sons and daughters, nieces and nephews…” and there are 40 of \u2019em. See, what happened was that every year the Times company paid dividends, and the family, described here as academics, novelists, musicians, and psychotherapists, divvied up — there are 40 of them — they divvied up the $20 million dividends that were paid every year, and now the dividend\u2019s been suspended because there isn\u2019t the money for it, and so this story describes the pain and suffering of the family members. They\u2019re now “forced to sell stock at a historical low to raise money. Most of them have admirable if low-wage jobs.”<\/p>\n
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<\/a>The heartstrings are being tugged here over the circumstances for the family members that feed off the New York Times. Meanwhile, you have a newspaper here that rips the hell out of people that work and claims they\u2019re not being taxed enough. You have a newspaper company that\u2019s value has shrunk from over seven billion to under one billion. The dividends been suspended. The family are having to sell stock at low prices just to be able to live. And this is not unique. This is happening. The Times-Picayune, I didn\u2019t know this. I didn\u2019t know this until yesterday. Have you ever heard the Times-Picayune, the newspaper in New Orleans, is only going to publication three days a week? I didn\u2019t find that out \u2019til last night. Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday I think. They have an online version but the printed paper… Super Bowl is gonna be there this year. <\/p>\n