5
2004
My copy of The Atlantic Monthly finally showed up Friday so I spent the weekend – what else? – reading former New York Times editor Howell Raines 20,000-word-plus finger-pointer.
The whole thing is a boring exercise in self-congratulation, bridge burning and fabulous excuses. If you’re not in the newspaper business there’s no reason to read it. But it provides a really short and really fine example of just how short-sighted New Yorkers see the world. And for all his protests to the contrary, Raines is one of them.
Here’s Raines critiquing the Times business coverage:
“A gaping hole in that strategy is that we were essentially conceding to The Wall Street Journal the hottest running story of the late-1990s boom – mergers and acquisitions.”
Mergers and acquisitions? What planet was this man on? His evidence for the “hottest running story”? AOL/Time Warner. Which, of course, involved a New York company. Forget all that dot. this and that; all those stock games played at the expense of shareholders. Nope, the late 1990s was M&A, Enron and Arthur Anderson.
Oh, nevermind. He’s gone. Unfortunately, his thinking lives on.