Is NYT Biz Section Afraid to Go Out on a 'Slim'?

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When Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim pumped $250 million into The New York Times in 2009, a year after becoming a major shareholder in "The Gray Lady," the Times' business section did a front-page profile of its benefactor.

Now that Slim is embroiled in a controversy involving a chief rival and an investment banker, however, Big Money's James Ledbetter believes it's no accident that nary a word about the scandal, which has been duly covered by The Wall St. Journal and Reuters, has appeared in the Times.

According to a Reuters account, JP Morgan tried to sell a loan made to its long-term client Grupa Televisa to Slim. Provisions of the loan transaction purportedly would require Grupa Televisa to disclose any information about itself to the holder of the loan; in this case, its principal competitor.

Such intrigue involving two telecommunications giants and a major financial institution makes for a juicy story for the business press, as coverage by Reuters, The Wall St. Journal and Big Money attests, but the chances of the story seeing the light of day in the venerable New York Times appear to be none to Slim.

UPDATE: Wall St. Journal 'Copy' Boy Kouwe Quits NY Times

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Confronted by his editors with accusations of multiple instances of plagiarizing passages from articles in The Wall St. Journal and Reuters (see "TUOL" post 2/16/10), business reporter Zachery Kouwe has resigned from The New York Times.

Kouwe, a former reporter for The New York Post and Dow Jones Newswires who joined the Times in 2008, contended that he never has fabricated or knowingly plagiarized a story and was in "complete shock" when editors revealed the findings of their probe that was triggered by a letter from Wall St. Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson complaining that Kouwe had wholesale copied from Journal business writer Amir Efrati's work. 

"Inadvertently" claiming others' creative efforts as one's own on at least six separate occasions is like "accidentally" backing one's car over an annoying neighbor four times.  What the heck Kouwe?