A Cup of Austrian Kaffee Mit Schlag

The NYT just bought, or rather hijacked, the International Herald Tribune away from joint editorial control with the Washington Post. Ken Auletta in his recent New Yorker piece on Pinch Sulzberger mentions the underhanded business ethics the NYT employed in this corporate filching of a venerated journalistic institution.

Already, the NYT's unctuous editorial content appears to be seeping into "straight" news stories in the IHT, as the characteristically oily/querulous nanny ethos of the NYT smudges a poorly put-together piece on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s refusal of clemency to Crips gang-founder and multiple murderer Tookie Williams.

Clumsily entitled Schwartzenegger Backlash in Austria, the piece gives a long and tendentious narrative on how the Good Burghers of Graz decided to change the name of their Sports Palace named after Arnold in 1997.

But it wouldn’t be a New York Times piece if it weren’t inherently dishonest, burying the fact about a dozen paragraphs into the overly long story the uncomfortable fact that about seventy percent [70%] of the Good Burghers of Graz were AGAINST the move to punish Arnold Schwartzenegger and AGAINST changing the stadium’s name!! Also, if you read far enough, the mayor was against it too!

It turns out that a leftist coalition managed to conjure up a majority on the City Council to score a political point and embarrass this city with a sort of Leftist Putsch against Arnold. But you practically have to be a cryptographer to wrench the lede of the story out of the florid orchidaceous flimflammery surrounding the gist of the entire puff-piece.

Let’s have a plebiscite and see what the city of Graz really wants!