When I was a kid, we often took votes at the dinner table. More often than not, the count was four to one, with my Dad being the one. After the count, he’d invariably announce, “Well, I won again.”
When we’d protest, he’d explain, “My vote is the only one that counts.” (My brother soon devised another vote to counter dad, though. The question was, “Who thinks Dad’s a dork?” The vote was still four to one, but on that one, his vote was the only one that didn’t count.)
Of course, Dad’s vote counted because, well, he was the boss of the house. (Mom voted with us just to be nice. She really agreed with Dad.) Aside from being the boss, he had more sense than his three sons have ever been able to muster, and his decisions were usually right. I particularly remember once when he refused to let me drive to my girl friend’s house during an ice storm–a decision that has been recalled to me three times when my own children have wrecked cars on icy days.
So, I had to laugh this morning when reading the story of the New York Times’ annual meeting at which one class of shareholders voted to oppose the current board of directors’ way of running the paper. The Times is a patriarchy if there ever was one. There are two classes of stock, one owned by the public, and one controlled by the founding Ochs-Sulzberger family. The family stock is the vote that counts.
And that’s why we have a newspaper like The Times, which spends all sorts of money to hire people like reporters–2,000 of them–and spreads them all over the world so those of us who appreciate breadth and nuance in reporting have somewhere to get it.
Along with The Washington Post and a few other papers who still are under family control, they’re significant contributors to the fabric of democracy, and are so evaluated by their families, who are indeed wealthy, but measure their wealth in more than mere stock prices.
That’s a lot like our family, I’m proud to say.
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