Most
people who live in New York City—including most of New York City’s over 183,000
Mexican-American residents—don’t think that the human rights of people in
Mexico should be violated or that Mexican workers and consumers should be
exploited by the Mexican government or the corporations that Mexican billionaires
or U.S. billionaires own or control.
Yet one
of the richest billionaires in the world—a Mexican billionaire named Carlos
Slim—has been one of the owners in recent years of the Big Apple’s New
York Times newspaper—which publishes “all the news that fits the
rich” each day. As Sherry Ricchiardi noted in an article, titled “A Dubious
Benefactor,” that appeared in the April/May 2009 issue of American
Journalism Review [AJR]:
“On
January 19 [2009], the Times Co. accepted a $250
million loan at 14 percent interest from a controversial billionaire who
already owned a 6.9 percent stake in the company.
“The
benefactor: Carlos Slim Helú.
“Immediately,
questions swirled about the propriety of the nation's leading newspaper getting
a bailout from a much-criticized subject of its own news coverage…The industry
was abuzz with the apparent conflict of interest…The Times Co.
declined requests for an interview about the company's connection to the
Mexican billionaire…Slim's son-in-law and spokesman, Arturo Elias Ayub, declined
a request for an interview with Slim or a family member for this story…If Slim
exercises the warrants he holds from the loan, he will be among the largest
single shareholders in the Times Co., owning up to 17
percent of the common shares outstanding...reported Times writer Eric Dash…”
And in an
article, titled “When the World’s Richest Billionaire Owns Your Paper:
The New York Times covers Carlos Slim—carefully,” that
appeared in the November 2013 issue of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
[F.A.I.R.]’s Extra! magazine, Zaid Jilani indicated how
the New York Times has been reporting in recent years
about the Mexican billionaire that owns much of its stock:
“In 2008,
the multibillionaire purchased a 6.4 percent stake in the New York
Times Company. Today, he is the second-largest shareholder in the
company, with a 13 percent stake…
“A
natural topic for coverage would be Slim’s telecommunications monopoly
that critics charge has free rein to rip off millions of consumers…The OECD
calculated that this virtual monopoly by Slim reduces the living standard of
the average Mexican family by over $600 a year...The OECD study did get a
passing reference in a 2011 Times article on Mexico’s
attempt to break up Slim’s monopoly—which mentioned Slim’s stake in the Times in
the print version, but not the online edition. The article, headlined `Mexico
Takes Aim at a Titan in Telecom,’ looked at a $1 billion fine that Mexico’s
antitrust agency imposed on one of Slim’s subsidiaries…Places where criticism
of Slim would seem obvious sometimes find him conspicuously absent, as
when Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that Mexico
has `big energy, telecom’ monopolies that are harming the country’s
economy—without naming the Mexican monopolist who owns much of the company that
pays Friedman’s salary.
“Incidents
of public pushback to Slim’s business practices have also gone unnoted, as when
hundreds demonstrated when George Washington University gave him an honorary
degree; Mexican immigrant groups threatened boycotts against his
telecommunications companies; and activists in the U.S. and Mexico formed the
group Two Countries, One Voice to rally against Slim…You’ll find the paper’s
sharpest criticism of Slim in an op-ed from 2007, a year before he became an
investor in the Times. In it, Eduardo Porter condemns
Slim as a `robber baron.’ Porter writes that `Mr. Slim’s sin, if not
technically criminal, is like that of Rockefeller, the sin of the monopolist.’…
“Perhaps
the paper was feeling like it had given its future investor a raw deal. By
December of that year, it published a reported piece calling Slim a `new breed
of billionaire’ who “has pledged billions of dollars to his two foundations
that will aid health and education.’”
(end of part 2)
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