Arianna has her usual brilliantly insightful blog today on the continually imploding New York Times and it's internal mad bomber, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger. To summarize: Judy Miller is the symptom, Pinch is the disease. Read the whole thing, as you should do every day with Arianna.
But she makes a salient point about the only thing that might put the breaks on Little King Arthur and his decimation of Camelot: MONEY. Because, remember, the NYT is a publically owned company. Here's the money paragraph:
The company's market cap, which was $6 billion in November 2004, dropped below $4 billion last week, its earnings fell by more than half in the last quarter, and there have been widespread layoffs (200 staff positions eliminated in the first half of this year, with an additional 500 cuts announced in September). And now Sulzberger's ham-fisted meddling in the newsroom has put the paper's greatest asset -- its reputation -- at grave risk. (It led to, among other things, Times reporters not being able to freely report on Plamegate until Miller was out of legal jeopardy, which deprived its readers of the kind of headline-grabbing reporting in this morning's paper.)
I used to work for the NYT in their ill-fated TV division, another Pinch-driven venture that eventually went south. I shook the hand of Sulzberger the lesser at a couple of gatherings on the 14th floor of the Gray Lady and he was as unimpressive as one might expect. To be fair, the Times is full of talented people who care about doing good jobs, much like the civil servants in Washington who endure various administrations. But like the D.C. toilers, the Times staff is at the mercy of their overlords.