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:
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"?
When you've sold your soul to one devil, the second comes easy.
The NYT is taking a huge loan out from a guy named Slim? Is that where we are now?
Amusingly, it would mean an Arab at the helm. Carlos Slim Helu (Carlos Salim Helou) is from the Mexican Lebanese community. That said I have no sense of his politics. As a Maronite he may well be very right-wing and even reasonably sympathetic to Zionism (not to paint Maronites with a broad brush, but there are such sentiments in that community).
Can't wait to hear all those extremists left and right-wingers screaming about Mexican or Lebanese influence in the media.
Guess I'll be waiting a long time…
Slim is a Maronite Christian and his late wife was a member of the Gemayel clan. That, I suppose, says it all.