New York Times rescued from bankruptcy by ... Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim

from "The Death of the American Newspaper," By JOHN ROSS
Counterpunch, March 18, 2009

An astonishing number of North American dailies are gasping their last. A recent survey by the New York Times, itself on its last legs, lists 75 daily newspapers of being at risk from sea to stinking sea. Some like the Rocky Mountain News and the Arizona Citizen, right-wing rags that couldn't survive in ex-two newspaper towns, have already folded. Hearst's Post-Intelligencer, the more liberal Seattle paper, will soon be accessible only on-line - ditto the daily edition of the Christian Science Monitor. . . .

The New York Times has persuaded a Mexican billionaire to bail it out of impending shipwreck.

Well, not just any Mexican billionaire. Carlos Slim is usually ranked Numero Dos on the Forbes Hit Parade with $60,000,000,000 under his mattress. Heavily invested in stocks, market plunges may have cost him a third of that boodle - Slim's corporations comprise about a third of those that trade on the Mexican Stock Exchange.

The big guns of Slim's empire are Telmex, the Mexican phone monopoly that charges higher rates than any other such enterprise in the wide world, with which he was gifted in an excess of crony capitalism by the reviled ex-president Carlos Salinas, and American Mobil - the Mexican tycoon's cell phone companies dominate 70% of the Latin American market. Also in the Slim portfolio: Inbursa banks; Carso Construction; Prodigy Internet (Mexico's top provider); the Sanborn's restaurant and department store chain; double digit chunks of Sears and Saks Fifth Avenue; the Mixup record store chain; El Globo, the nation's top pan dulce outlet; "La Cigarera", his tobacco cartel in Nayarit state; and most of the neighborhood where I live, the Historic Center of Mexico City.

(snip)

In explaining his Byzantine business strategy, Carlos Slim attributes his attempt to save the New York Times from shipwreck to nostalgia ("I'm a member of the newspaper generation") and altruism ("The New York Times is worth saving.") Indeed Slim has invested in newsprint before, iconoclastically coming to the rescue of left-wing papers in Mexico City (he is a founding investor in La Jornada) and London (The Independent.)

The Slim-New York Times connection suggests a solution for the ailing U.S. newspaper industry. Among possible Mexican investors: Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman, the capo of the Sinaloa cartel recently listed by Forbes in its up-and- coming billionaire rankings. Drug cartels in Sinaloa are said to already own several dailies in that Pacific coast state.

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross03182009.html
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Frankly I'd rather get my news from a Mexican billionaire than the CIA anyway.

Or a roue!! Or a ladies' man!!! Even without the billions, that's a name that could take the right fellow places!

I'd be smiling too if I had that kind of bankroll!

a jacket that fit, no?

Alternatively, he could be one of those guys who just doesn't give a shit about sartorial stuff.

I've seen pics of him fatter AND thinner. He's probably a perennial soldier in the Battle of the Bulge!