Thomas Lifson, "More bad news for the New York Times... tick tock, tick tock."
Moody's Investor's Services, the bond rating agency, has notified the New York Times Company that its bond rating may decline, according to Editor & Publisher. Without changing the current Baaa3 rating (at least for the moment), NYTCo's outlook has been downgraded from "stable" to "negative."
"The change in the rating outlook to negative reflects Moody's concern that a continued deterioration in the company's advertising revenue could make it increasingly challenging for the company to bring metrics in line with the rating in 2009 as anticipated in the prior stable rating outlook," wrote senior analyst John E. Puchalla and Corporate Finance Group Managing Director Alexandra S. Parker.
A Baa3 rating qualifies as investment grade, enabling many funds to hold its unsecured debt. If the rating were to decline to below investment grade (and it is perilously close now), many funds would no long hold NYTCo's debt securities, and their prices would decline. This could make refinancing that debt, as it expires and must be rolled over, much more expensive for NYTCo.
...the ratings firm added that it is currently operating at levels more consistent with a rating lower than Baa3. The investment grade rating, it added, is predicated on better performance in 2009.
In other words, if NYTCo fails to improve its performance, the current "investment grade" rating is in peril. So far, the decline in advertising is accelerating, while cost cutting efforts have not realized their announced goals.
The clock is ticking.
http://www.americanthinker.The Marketplace of Ideas is actually a market that has some cash money involved, the real test of things. Who will invest their time in the Times? Who will invest the time it takes to make a few bucks to pay for the paper? Who will invest their time in reading a paper that tells things they don't want to know, time that could be well spent on learning better things? The Gray Lady is bleeding to death before our eyes. Does it matter at all? The Times will survive regardless of money. Some wag suggested George Soros would buy it to inflate his already sizable ego. It's not going to be buried, but it won't be a paper of any record worth spinning. Elitists can crank out as much vile propobama as they choose, but the people who count, those who count their dollars and cents and spend them freely by choice, they have made the final word count where it counts.
3 comments:
Hmm..
It's funny, we seemed to have written our pieces at the same time, independantly of each other, yet in an intriguing way they compliment each other rather well.
The New York Times is determined to preach to the choir, and the echo is killing them. Their gimmick, decades ago, was that they were to appeal to as many people of as many political stripes as possible. Not unbiased, just well-rounded.
When was the last time that could be said of them..?
Peers often points out that Man cannot be objective in the material world we live in, and that newspapers shouldn't even pretend to try to be objective, given not only that it is practically impossible but also, and more to Peers' point, that it's not a good political or social idea to try to be and hence to pretend to be "objective." The problem is, to use an anecdote, like me as a boy trying to play chess with myself, not having anyone who would bother to learn the game to beat me easily at no cost. I would play both sides of the game, and though I would often favor one side, I would then make an effort to compensate by favoring the other. But I always won. So it must be with "objective reporting."
Peers most often goes for a dialectical approach to essay writing, while I go for polemics, neither of which are attempts at "objectivity." When one obviously abandons all hope of what we might term "balance," then one is aware straight away of the position of the point. There's no attempt to trick the listener. The New York Times, as Peers might argue, pretends to be balanced. Or they did. No longer. But neither are they writing polemics these days but rather sheer propobama. It's nothing short of outrageous and insulting to the average reader. Rather than state, as Peers argues in favor of, a clear stance and open that one is a "faction" paper and everyone knows it, everyone can accept it as it is, and all can expect some fair treatment of the exposition in the marketplace of ideas even if they are presented only to bolster ones own point, party and faction papers try to pretend without hope of success that they are "objective" and fair, which the Times is so far from these black day of ours that one can only sneer at the pretense. Honest reporting is to honestly admit that one is an honest partisan. The New York Times, and mmost others in America today, do not follow through on that, which is lovely for us in that people are disgusted by the MSM and come to blogs for honest bias and partisanship written fairly against the evil Satanists and dog-kicking liberals who cheat their mothers out of their old age payments. But that's me being dialectical, against my better judgment.
We often too write about Gnosticism, politics as an elitist pursuit of Philosopher Kings acting in a state of apocalyptic vision. Peers is too good at this for me to muddy the waters with more, but the sense is there and valuable just in the mention. The New York Times and assorted Left dhimmi fascists would be insulting to us if we only held their esteem in any regard. That they despise us is beneath our contempt. Thus, as they go further into self-righteous contempt and impending bankruptcy, they hate us all the more for ignoring their mystic vision. Ta ta, losers.
Osama Barka. What madness are we in for? We'll know when we see the results of our dhimmi elites in effect in Nov.
Geez,
I go away for a few days to find more new, newish words...
How about Ospama; or B. Obulla? Break (grey) momma?
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