Bookraft

A recurring problem since its invention is that Money does indeed talk. The Supreme Court of the United States just accorded to Money the full Rights of Free Speech. Yet Congressional leaders are constantly saying they are mute to the "talk" of lobbyist's Money and other enticements. Even Niall Ferguson in his Ascent of Money put coin behind property in his assessment of the relative fall of British aristocracy in the nineteenth century. In general, there is an insistence among the highly Moneyed, that Money does not talk ... or at least not nearly effectively as they would expect and/or like.

All the NYTimes All-the-News-Fit-To-Print motto has recently had a test of how loudly Money talks. Here is what Slate has to say about the Issue:

A little more than a year ago, when the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim increased his stake in the New York Times Company (NYT), I wrote "I pity the Times Mexico bureau chief who has to tiptoe through who is and isn't out of favor with the paper's new sugar daddy." Now we have a very clear example of how the Times treats Slim within its pages; it's not pretty, and the journalistic compromise can be seen well beyond Mexico.

For the last several days, bloggers and many business news outlets have been revealing truly astounding details from a court case involving J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) and two large Mexican telecom companies, one of which is Slim's. Blogger Felix Salmon at Reuters was one of the earliest to cover this at length; his summary of the case gets right to the heart of it.

Now a just concluded search of the NYTimes website only produced the series of links/mentions of the story in the NYTimes seen in the screenshot to the left taken from Feb 25, 2010 TimeTopics section of the NYTimes online edition. It was found in the Time Topics section detailing the background of Carlos Slim Helu, his enormous wealth and his investments in the NYTimes - 6.9% of the common stock and $250 million in debt.

However search of the Internet found a number of blogs covering the story - including Slate which is used above for the quote and Clusterstock among others. The commentary about the susceptibility of the NYTimes caving to the influence of the Money behind it is only matched by the yet another scandalous proof that Wall Street considers Fiduciary Trust for Clients unenforceable contractual nonsense to be safely ignored. Meanwhile, and in contrast, Money talks and in no uncertain terms.

Finally, on a broader scale - given the fiancial plight of many newsmedia, and the frightful state of TV news coverage [think anything but "Fair and balanced" Fox News for starters]; one has to consider that if the NYTimes is vulnerable to Money Talk - what about the even less endowed Press in general. Yes, the Web Blogs do provide an outlet- but say Slate or Huffington Post do not have the familiarity and or prestige of outlets like the Christian Scince Monitor, Newsweek, LATimes, or Business Week - all of which have various readership stresses and therefore funding problems. In an era demanding good decisions to be made, are all options going to be explored or is the Money going to shape all the conversations?