The salmon-colored Financial Times seemed for a while like a potential rival for The Wall Street Journal. Now it seems like Yesterday's Times.
Coverage of the AIG scandal and what the new American Administration's actions portend for world markets is an example of a business newspaper that swooned so hopelessly for candidate Obama that it cannot bear to look reality in the face. Investors of all income groups are sitting on their money, a vote of no-confidence in Obamanomics, but that is not the view that prevails in the FT's "leaders". The amateurish way Prime Minister Gordon Brown was treated at the White House recently didn't register much, either. The trade war Obama has provoked with Mexico is a setback for NAFTA, but apparently not worthy of reproach in liberal London. The near-unanimity of European leaders that the US is over-doing its stimulus programs and is over-reaching in calling on them to do the same--that, too, is not what the FT views as particularly instructive.
The paper's own core constituency surely must reside in London's "City", and those folks can read and figure things out. They, too, probably were ga-ga for Barack and the Democratic Congress a few months ago, but their revised opinions at least are beginning to be heard in news columns. And ever so slowly and mildly the editorialists are starting to come around.
Meanwhile, the slowness of the editorial columns seems to have seeped even into the circulation department. Finding the FT increasingly irrelevant this winter I tried to save time and money by canceling my subscription. Not only would the FT not accept the cancellation (twice), they started sending me two copies.
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