New York Times Up for Grabs?

There was the Jason Blair scandal, the Judith Miller WMD fiasco, the John McCain (yawn) brouhaha and the appointment of neocon “never-get-it-right” William Kristol as an Op-Ed columnist, to mention a few New York Times blunders. All that and a shareholders’ assault make the Sulzbergers’ lock on ownership of The New York Times seem not entirely impregnable, explains Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff.

Vanity Fair:

Happy newspaper families are alike, and, it seems, unhappy newspaper families are alike, too: in the end they all lose their papers.

The Sulzbergers of The New York Times, along with the Grahams of The Washington Post and, until recently, the Bancrofts of The Wall Street Journal, have been among the most peaceable, stalwart, and worthy newspaper families of the ages, marrying the salubriousness of wealth and prestige with the virtues of enlightened ownership. What’s more, the Sulzbergers pioneered a historic family-and-corporate-ownership structure which was, in theory, next to impossible for an unwelcome outsider to mess with.

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