A fine piece on Slate by Andres Martinez about the unsavory company the Times is giving itself by taking Mexican mogul Carlos Slim Helu's $250 million. Key excerpt:
a government-sanctioned monopoly, is scandalously unique. This Wall Street Journal profile
provides the background on how Slim leveraged his personal ties to
then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (and his financial backing of
the ruling party) not only to prevail as a bidder in the early 1990s
privatization of Mexico's telephone monopoly but to ensure that Telmex
remained a poorly regulated monopoly long after its privatization.
Slim's companies still control more than 90 percent of all landlines in
Mexico and more than 70 percent of all wireless contracts…
Whether
a weak Mexican state can develop and implement muscular antitrust
policies to rein in the likes of Slim and foster greater competition is
one of the keys to our neighbor's prosperity, which shouldn't be a
minor story for an American newspaper….
[T]the question is not so much
whether we should resent Slim's wealth. It's whether the New York Times
really wants to tie its reputation so closely to his. Was there really
no one else who had a quarter of a billion dollars to spare?
After all, Slim is someone that a Times editorial writer, Eduardo Porter, has called
a "robber baron." (His piece ran in August 2007, before Slim made his
initial investment in the Times.) Will Slim now be referred to as a
"robber patron"?
