The Times and Reality

the WSJ's Holman Jenkins provides us with a look at the journalistic standards of the NY Times, and includes these thoughts:

The real question is why do Times editors allow such stuff into the paper? Do they wave it through because it might prove personally inconvenient to try to stop it? Do they believe they have more pressing things to worry about than what appears in the newspaper?

For this reason, it's hard to resist the urge to cheer on Hassan Elmasry. He's the mutual fund manager who last spring organized 28% of the shares to withhold their votes from Times directors at the company's annual meeting and last week proposed to put before the next annual meeting the question of whether to end the special voting rights that allow the Sulzberger family to control the company while owning less than 5% of the shares.

Mr. Elmasry is a fund manager associated with Morgan Stanley's Van Kampen outfit, but he's based in London and began his campaign long before the Mack allegations emerged (so forget the idea that his motive is anything but to rescue his fund's long investment in the New York Times Co.). The selling point of his fund is its disciplined focus on buying a handful of companies (no more than 40) with unique franchises, holding them for the long term and watching them carefully. The New York Times Co. has been in his portfolio for a decade.

This hasn't stopped the usual kibitzers from suggesting that his Times campaign is just a "typical" Wall Street effort to squeeze out short-term profits at the expense of journalism. But Mr. Elmasry actually has a record of taking a dim view of companies that don't protect and burnish the long-term franchises that attracted him to invest in the first place. Thus when he writes to Times shareholders that the company's voting-rights rules are "eroding the foundations of the enterprise which they were created to protect," it's worth considering, in light of all the accidents the Times has inflicted on itself lately, whether he might be right.