NYT's Tom Friedman: Spendthrift, Idiot, Globe-Killer?

Middlebrow and profligate, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has never been described as "subtle" or "tactful." Now, his big mouth has inadvertently given the Boston Newspaper Guild a reason to vote against the contracts that the Times is shoving down the throats of its employees at the Globe.

Friedman's analysis of macroeconomics has always been long on catchphrases and short on insight, but what could he have possibly done to shake his employers' unassailable bargaining position?

He bragged about how he can travel wherever he wants to, whenever he wants to, for any purpose or none, on the Times's dime. In a New Yorker profile of Mexican billionaire and Times investor Carlos Slim Helu, Friedman went on to claim that the future of news is "going to be [the Times] and the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and not a lot more."

Adam Reilly has the fallout:

DQM was just forwarded an email sent by Globe staffer Brian Mooney, who's been a particularly vocal critic of the Times Co., to his colleagues. The email includes the text of Roston's column, and offers this gloss:

Colleagues: The New York Times Co. wants you to slit your own throats and take money out of your pockets so Tom Friedman (and others in New York) can travel in style and at great expense -- and then brag about it.

While Bostonians dither about whether the Globe is worth saving (maybe?), a larger question comes to light: Is the New York Times worth saving? It's a company that is nearly $1 billion in the hole that nonetheless pays for a man with a reported net worth of $25 million to basically do whatever he wants to, regardless of the impact on its revenue.

Which dinosaur will extinction claim first? The Times? Or the career of Friedman, a free-market cheerleader in a collapsing world economy? Can we root for a simultaneous collapse?