Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Liberal New York Times taking a beating so it "unexpectedly" fired liberal female chief editor.

Those running the New York Times will either take on a more conservative bent or the paper will go under within a few years.  Jill Abramson is a known liberal who had, for the past 3 years until today, been chief editor at the New York Times.  How can I call her a known liberal?  Well, they say that the best proof is the official denial as occurred just late last month.  Whether or not she thinks she is a flaming liberal, everyone else obviously does because otherwise that question would not have been asked in an interview.  By the way, you only have to listen to 10 seconds of her elitist, hyper-liberal speech affectation to know where her head is.  Her little passive-aggressive "bureaucratsi" tone and speech cadence ground on my nerves while listening to her speak to such a degree that I could hardly make it all the way through that short video. 

The strongly rumored back story about her dismissal was that Jill had the audacity to complain about the fact that her pay was not as high as the person she replaced, who was a man.  Well folks, it is a liberal idea that women should be paid as much as men for the same work.  While this, in fact, sounds like just being fair, fair doesn't matter to the herd.  Is the lion pride run by a lioness??  I think not.  It is always the male cat that takes the top spot in the pecking order. Look at history.  Where is the female equivalent to George Washington, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?  Face it, men are more aggressive by nature and that is how real progress gets made.  Society lets them get away with it whereas a she-wolf would receive rapid condemnation.  Fair has nothing to do with it.  It's part and parcel of the species.

Don't mistake this as a value judgement by me one way or another.  I don't care what women get paid, I only care what I get paid.  But just for the sake of argument, let's examine both sides.  On the liberal side, same pay for same work is the mantra.  But let's not mistake same job title for same work and let's certainly not mistake same company performance for same work.  In other words, Jill thinks that job title=work and that is a broadly liberal view.  They think that academic degrees=lifetime pay advantage as well.  But paper titles and degrees do not equate to results. 

I had a personal situation once as a manager at AMD that really set this idea home for me.  I was a non-degreed engineer who was managing a group of engineers, all of whom had bachelor's degrees.  I didn't try to hide the fact that I had achieved my level with only a high school education and a LOT of long hours in the lab learning tech.  I had (and have) no chip on my shoulder for not having the sheepskin.  I did my time at the college of hard knocks known as Screw U.  In any case, I had received a new employee from another team and after working for me for a year it was time to give him his annual appraisal.  While the guy was capable, he didn't think he had to accomplish anything.  So he would fool around on standards committees and produce nothing of value.  When I rated him mediocre and told him why he got that rating, he was appalled and he blurted out that he had graduated UC Berkley with some kind of honors.  I'm sure it was a great accomplishment but the man was nearly 50 years old and had graduated college in his early 20s.  This bozo actually thought that some academic accomplishment 30 years prior was somehow relevant to his performance report covering the past year at work.  This is delusional academic liberalism at its finest.

And in a similar way, Jill was under the impression that she deserved equal pay because she had the same title as the last guy even though ad revenue under her management had slumped.  In her mind they should have just paid her the same money as the last guy even though he had many years of experience in the job.  To her there was no need to prove anything first.  But I don't really think asking for more pay was the reason she got fired, it was just another straw, a final straw, on the camel's back.

Jill's real mistake was of maintaining the liberal bent of the NYT intact even though those paying for the ads were clearly on the decline.  She didn't know what her audience was really thinking and she lost sight of the fact that she is running a business, not a liberal propaganda outlet.  She was not in tune with the herd and it finally caught up to her.

Expect the new guy, Dean Baquet, to make changes going forward.  He has seen what happened to Jill and he would be a fool at this point not to make some directional changes.  Expect the NYT to begin a less liberal agenda going forward and in fact, within a few years, to sound even conservative more often than not.  The pendulum is swinging away from liberalism and it is now to the point where other newspapers in the country are billing themselves as "refreshingly non liberal".  What clearer of a signal should anyone need than this?

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