Is The New York Times so busy hatchet-jobbing the parent of Fox News that it doesn't notice a huge story in the making? Are Timesmen Tim Arango and Richard Perez-Pen so determined to stick it to Murdoch & Co. that they don't even see the real news? What exactly does the Times do with itself, anyway?
Yup, there was plenty of big news for Cable Gamers this week--and it's only Tuesday! But perhaps the biggest news was the pending departure of Peter Chernin, as COO of the News Corp, the company that runs Fox News--albeit FNC is pretty much an independent operation within NWS.
But of course, since Rupert Murdoch is the visionary who put Fox in motion, anything that affects News Corp is of interest to Cable Gamers. And so we note that The New York Times, always eager to stir the pot, produced a giant article, negative to the point of hatchet-y,on Murdoch and NWS on Monday.
OK, fair enough--or unfair enough. But what's amusing to insiders, as a great new blog, Nytpicker (get it?) points out, is that the Times missed the big news hiding not so far below the surface. That is, the Times was so busy hatcheting Murdoch and NWS that it missed the news of Chernin's departure, which was announced just hours after the Times story appeared. As Nytpicker puts it:
The NYT's media reporters litter their story today with references to top sources within the company, but they somehow failed to ferret out the scoop that appeared first at 1:30 p.m. New York time on Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, and was confirmed at 3:06 p.m. by the Los Angeles Times on its website.
And then Nytpicker continues:
Remarkably, the NYT didn't post the news of Chernin's exit from News Corp. until some three hours later, and that post -- by Arango -- attributed the news to "a person briefed on the matter who declined to speak publicly because the company had not made a formal announcement."
Wonder how Arango and Perez-Pena explained their failure to get the Chernin scoop to their editors, given that they'd spent much of the previous week interviewing sources with supposed knowledge of the workings of Murdoch's company.
What's all the more interesting is that Arango is a former New York Post reporter, up until just a few years ago. So one can only wonder: What he was doing, as he "sleuthed" out his story? What "sources" were he and Perez-Pena talking to? You would think that two reporters, working away on such a big story, would manage to uncover the really big story. But if you thought that, you would be wrong.
