NYT’s Recognizes a Bad Investment in News Control

I know it’s unfair to compare the New York Times' news control management to China’s. China’s is far more profitable.

Nonetheless, the NYT’s editorial of September 13, also picked up by the NYT’s owned International Herald Tribune, concludes, without self-reflection, about China’s new added media rules that all foreign news must enter via the state-run Xinhua news agency monopoly:

What they do understand is how rich they've gotten since joining the World Trade Organization. These new rules appear, at a minimum, to violate their WTO pledges to liberalize access to financial information. Trade officials and foreign business leaders need to remind Beijing's leaders of those promises. And they need to warn them that a country that keeps a stranglehold on information is not a great place to invest.

The political risks to investment in corrupt regimes is great: The relative ease with which proprietary technology is bandited and property expropriated, and the resentments built among those in such countries who yearn for greater freedom and will one day come to greater power against such Western collaborationist profiteers. But, at least in the meanwhile, the rulers are lining their bank accounts, and some of the prosperity of foreign trade is seeping down to some among the population.

By contrast, neither the NYT’s owner-management nor its shareholders are profiting from the sharp decline in its stock price, reflecting its poor profits and future business prospects. Running further to a strident Left in its editorials, its news coverage similarly slanting, vital news ignored or partisanly presented, and national security concerns be damned in this determined blindness to responsibility, is a lemming-like leap into turning off customers and continuing decline. Neither China, nor the New York Times, is a great place to invest.