French Roast News

Anne is reading …

Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty (Sulzberger, Robinson); Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine (all backgrounds). Illustration by John Ritter.In an astounding new low for American journalism, Fox News top guy Roger Ailes called New York Times reporters a “lying bunch of scum” and the Times itself a “cess pool of bias” in a speech to journalism students at Ohio University last week.

Clearly, those comments hit way below the belt — a real kick in the balls if you will — coming at Ochs-Sulzberger family members who control the New York Times and chairman/publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who leads the organization.

Joe Hagan’s New York Magazine in-depth expose on the New York Times organization is more gentile but equally high-impact.

At the center of Hagan’s story is former Times CEO Janet Robinson who abruptly left the organization last December with a $24 million payout that represented half the company’s dismal profits for 2011. Writing ‘A New York Times Whodunnit’, this in-depth piece interviews more than 30 people intimately familiar with the Times business, but always off the record.

Who slew Times CEO Janet Robinson? Was it Arthur Sulzberger’s new girl friend? The advertising market? The frustrated web guru? Or the ambitious Sulzberger cousin?

It’s impossible to ignore the romantic entanglements: Robinson and Sulzberger as the platonic power couple ‘married’ to the Times empire. Yet the publisher was ‘available’ after separating from his wife in 2008.

When Sulzberger met Claudia Gonzalez, he fell hard and remains a man very much in love, writes Hagan. In the midst of Janet Robinson’s fall publicity tour to promote the Times, Capital New York picked up a story on the new romance from Mexico’s Quién calling Gonzalez “the Mexican woman who moves the New York Times.

Writing about Robinson, Hagan writes a not so pretty picture, saying that she earned a reputation for “ruthlessness” and pushing out anyone who was disloyal.

By 1999, one of Robinson’s most trusted protégés was a woman named Jyll Holzman, whom she had plucked from the magazine world and elevated to senior vice-president for advertising … During a period of tension between the newsroom and the advertising division, the Times’ then–deputy managing editor, John Geddes, represented the news and Holzman the advertising side. Robinson believed Holzman was championing their cause—until she discovered that Holzman had begun dating Geddes.

In a stunning admission of just how financially unsuccessful the Times organization has become uner the Robinson-Sulzberger union, the once wide-ranging media empire of newspapers, TV stations, websites and a baseball team worth almost $7 billion is now two newspapers and a website valued at less than $1 billion.

It almost makes one nervous that family members could vote a buyout by Ruperb Murdoch, if the price is high enough.

FRN Pope Under Pressure

Paolo Gabriele rides in the “Popemobile” with Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square in March 2011. via CNNVatican Denies Cardinal in Heist

CNN reports today that Pope Benedict XVI’s spokesman denied today that a cardinal or a woman were being investigated for potentially devasting leaks, along with the pope’s butler Paolo Gabriele, who remains “imprisoned” at the Vatican and formally charged with “aggravated theft for allegedly stealing private documents.”

Last month, the Vatican gave Cardinal Julian Herranz a “pontifical mandate” to uncover the source of hundreds of personal letters and confidential documents that have been released to Gianluigi Nuzzi, an Italian journalist and author of “Sua Santita,” a book that translates to “His Holiness” and includes the documents.

National Catholic Reporter reports that Vatican Bank president Ettore Gotti Tedeschi resigned last week. Tedeschi, along with the bank’s general director Paolo Cipriani has been under investigation for alleged money laundering.

Nuns Convene in DC

Women march in support of Catholic nuns Wednesday near St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York via CNNAmerica’s largest group of Catholic nuns will meet for three days in Washington this week to draft a response to the Vatican’s reprimand that they group embraces “radical feminist themes.’

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious “plans to move slowly, not rushing to judgment” when the group’s 21-member board meets Tuesday, writes CNN

“The board will conduct its meeting in an atmosphere of prayer, contemplation and dialogue and will develop a plan to involve LCWR membership in similar processes,” the group said in a statement. “We will engage in dialogue where possible and be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit. We ask your prayer for us and for the Church in this critical time.”

It’s expected that there will be no major announcements this week. Rather the sisters are expected to prepare a plan that will be reviewed by their entire membership in August.

CNN senior Vatican analyst and senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter John Allen says the nuns could do one of three options this week: they could go along with the Vatican’s demands; they might offer to work and negotiate with the Vatican in an effort to promote dialogue or the nuns coud say “we’re not going to play ball and we’re going to walk away.”

The last option would involve disbanding the LCWR.

Pink Smoke Over the Vatican

The documentary Pink Smoke Over the Vatican (featured above) will screen June 2, 2012 in Lexington, Ky;June 7, 2012 in Albany, NY and June 22 in Fort Worth, Texas.