Are you telling me you don't know who I am? That's a sentence that always goes over well. Filled with humility, sympathy for your fellow human, eschewing vanity, beaming with a deep awareness of your small place in the universe. That's everything that sentence captures.
Earlier this month, James Dolan's Madison Square Garden Company drew fire when we revealed it was demanding all its New York City-area employees, many of whom were still suffering the damages of Hurricane Sandy, to either report to work or use their vacation time. Today, Dolan's other company, Cablevision, is taking a similar tack when it comes to having sympathy for Sandy's victims.
Madison Square Garden is a name so synonymous with New York City greatness and success that artists and athletes who perform there have a tendency to call it "the main stage of the world" and "a mecca." So how does Madison Square Garden treat its New York City employees, who have helped sustain its grandness, when they're down and out? By demanding they get back to work, of course.
Did you know that when the stock market goes down, media bosses get poorer like magic? It's true — and the fact that it's a totally obvious point doesn't make it any less fun!
Rupert Murdoch's secret, sneaky plan to destroy Long Island tabloid Newsday: let a dysfunctional company buy it for more money. Cablevision purchased the paper for $650 million and Murdoch withdrew his bid this weekend. Now, everyone is a bit confused. Because Cablevision owns many odd things, but none of them have been newspapers up til now. "The Newsday bid had the backing of both Charles Dolan, who founded the company, and his son James L. Dolan, the chief executive," the Times reports, even though generally the Dolans hate each other and disagree about everything. And according to witnesses of the meetings between the Dolans and former Newsday owner Sam Zell, the "tension between the two has been obvious." As have the tensions between Cablevision and its shareholders. Because Cablevision is a company that does one thing quite well and everything else quite poorly.
James Dolan
