Boston Phoenix

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 12:18pm on Friday, May 29th, 2009

The comments of Tom Friedman, self-styled "public intellectual" at the New York Times, could mean the end of the Boston Globe, according to Adam Reilly writing in the Boston Phoenix on May 27, 2009:

"Lawrence Wright's profile of Carlos Slim Helu tells us that star New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has unlimited travel expenses, and never really has to explain what he's going to write about before he hits the road. It also quotes Friedman on the future of the news business, saying that, eventually, “It’s going to be us and the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and not a lot more.” Friedman also speaks of the Times partnering with another right-thinking party--perhaps New York mayor and Bloomberg News founder Michael Bloomberg.

As Michael Roston notes, Friedman's comments are--how to put it--inelegant:

I hardly know where to begin, but this has to be one of the worst-timed statements in the history of public relations.

The flat-worlder just got dinged by his own paper’s public editor for an ethical violation - accepting a (later returned) $75,000 speaking fee from a group that was neither educational nor nonprofit in nature. While Friedman fessed up to his transgression, he doesn’t seem to care about its roader ties to his megastardom as a public intellectual who gets paid a ot of money to do and write whatever he wants while still masquerading as a ‘journalist.’

Really, while the lumpen proletariat of the Times’s staff await quarterly reports to be issued to see if they’ll still have jobs in 2010, Friedman is boasting that he can go wherever he want, write whatever occurs to him, and spend however much he wants to do those things without any attention to how his profligacy harms the paper’s ability to survive. And he’s insinuating hat his boss doesn’t really care."