February
2012
Saturday, February 20, 2010
James Ledbetter, The Big Money, 

The Story the New York Times Won’t Touch

A little more than a year ago, when the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim increased his stake in the New York Times Company (NYT), I wrote "I pity the Times Mexico bureau chief who has to tiptoe through who is and isn't out of favor with the paper's new sugar daddy." Now we have a very clear example of how the Times treats Slim within its pages; it's not pretty, and the journalistic compromise can be seen well beyond Mexico.

 

For the last several days, bloggers and many business news outlets have been revealing truly astounding details from a court case involving J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) and two large Mexican telecom companies, one of which is Slim's. Blogger Felix Salmon at Reuters was one of the earliest to cover this at length; his summary of the case gets right to the heart of it:

JP Morgan took one of its longest-standing clients in Mexico — Grupo Televisa — and tried to hand all of its secrets over to its biggest rival, Carlos Slim. And the way it tried to do that was by selling Slim a loan larded up with covenants which would essentially force Televisa to reveal any and all information to the holder of the debt.

Posted by Tracey on 02/20/10 at 09:12 PM •  (0) Comments

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