Carlos Slim, the son of a Lebanese immigrant who married into the Gemayel Maronite Christian clan (now aligned with Hezbollah, an Iranian Shiite proxy, back in the old country), has a Midas-like knack for picking up failing businesses for a song and parleying them into new fortunes. Slim's companies now comprise 40% of those trading on the Mexican stock market.
Both Slim and the Times management loudly proclaim that the Mexican magnate will have no editorial clout and indeed the only measurable change at least here in Mexico since its richest citizen made his move on the NYT is that the newsstand price of the international edition has shot up to $4 (53 pesos a day), twice the two bucks Americano the Times is charging in El Norte where the paper has decreed three price hikes in the past 18 months (from $1 to $1.25 to $1.50 and now $2.)
The story gets curiouser and curiouser. A February 9th in-house overview that appeared on the front page of the business section anticipated a rosy future for the ex-Old Gray Lady of 43rd Street (The Sulzbergers recently sold its new and costly all-glass Eighth Avenue high rise and now rents back office space on the premises.) In fact, the story suggested, the Times really didn't need Slim's bail-out but took it anyway because money is going to cost a lot more for the next few years. Scuttlebutt afoot in the newsroom reveals an alternative rationale: by pursuing the Slim loan, the Sulzbergers sought to dampen the aspirations of ex-movie and music mogul David Geffen to take over the paper and turn it into an NGO!
Such rumors often bloom in the hothouse ambience that stumbling giants exude. Slim's motives for snatching up a paper on the brink of bankruptcy similarly baffles industry insiders and in the spring of 2009 the New Yorker Magazine sent Lawrence Wright to Mexico to poke around inside Slim's skull - with uncertain results.
The Sphinx-like tycoon was not very communicative on long drives with the reporter through Mexico City (Slim drives himself but is closely followed by an SUV packed with armed-to-the-teeth bodyguards.) The richest man at least in Latin America told Wright that he really likes the New York Times. He first began reading it when he came to New York in his early 20s and, although he doesn't browse it every day - his Sanborn's department store and restaurant chain does not carry the NYT and Slim claims not to know how to use a computer to read the Times On-line - he admires the paper's reporting. Carlos Slim is a baseball nut, he confessed to Wright, and like the Times, a die-hard Yankee fan. He particularly enjoys studying the agate type: batting averages, earned runs, RBIs, home runs etc. Carlos Slim likes numbers.
The multi-billionaire also likes brands. Wright tells a story about how Slim went shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue and wound up buying 17% of the company, attracted mostly by Saks' choice Manhattan real estate. Similarly, Slim now holds 17% of Sears. He thinks the New York Times is a good brand.
Carlos Slim is also enamored of monopolies. Telmex, the Mexican phone company that Salinas gifted him with in 1990, has a virtual monopoly on Mexican telephone and Internet traffic and his American Movil is the most powerful cell phone carrier in Latin America with more than 200,000,000 subscribers and 70% of the market, another virtual monopoly.
Reading between the lines of Wright's interview, it seems crystal-clear that Slim - and the Sulzbergers - are banking on the decimation of the newspaper industry to turn the Times around. When and if the current tailspin bottoms out, the field will be winnowed down to a precious few survivors and the New York Times is going to be the tallest tree left standing. Slim and his new partners calculate that their market share will constitute a virtual monopoly. The resuscitation of a stronger-than-ever New York Times will of course greatly buoy Slim's prospects for recapturing the Numero Uno spot on the World's Richest Billionaire list. As Slim told the New Yorker, he likes numbers.
But what's good for Carlos Slim and the New York Times is not good for newspapering and even less so for those who seek to get to the bottom of such flimflam as electoral fraud in Iran and Mexico - those indeed who want real news and not the world-view of the Sulzbergers and their cronies which pretty much boils down to the defense of Israel at any cost. The brand of corporate journalism that the New York Times practices distorts such stories as Iranian resistance to electoral fraud and leaves Mexico 2006 in which millions took to the streets to defy the fraudulent election of a U.S. proxy, in the dust of history.