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Comment by stuffedBelly | Hacker News Reader

This piece reads more like it's trying to rekindle hatred towards Wall Street than educating people what private equity is and how it works. If it's supposed to be investigative journalism then it certainly failed. Maybe try starting with improving accuracy of the terms by not using "private equity" and "Wall Street" interchangeably?

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This is the 2nd time I see a NYT article bashing on private equity. The first time it was about ambulances and it was factually incorrect (to put it mildly).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11977710

Do not get tripped by the top comment.

Two of the authors are the same. Danielle Ivory & Ben Protess.

> If it's supposed to be investigative journalism.

It is not. It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity.

It doesn't claim to be an extensive or comprehensive report on the influence of PE in the US market and everyday life.

Just a reductionist overview of the topic, nothing more nothing less.

I agree the piece doesn't represent itself as investigative journalism. However, this is below the quality level of journalism that I typically receive from the NYT, which typically makes some effort at covering multiple perspectives on an issue. This feels like it was made by BuzzFeed or something.

Info graphics marry numerical data to imagery.

For example: it's an info graphic if you show some number of cars unevenly distributed across two lanes on a road and explain that each car in lane A represents 10,000 rental cars and each car in lane B represent 10,000 driver-owned cars, and the sum of the infographic cars * 10,000 happens to equal the number of cars on USAmerican roads, assuming that the infographic specifies that its subject is rental-vs-ownership of cars on USAmerican roadways.

See? An info graphic is a fancy chart or graph. Every rule from your highschool science textbook about charts and graphs applies to infographics.

Pictures that don't adhere to those rules are just pictures.

>It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity.

No, it's just a graphic. There's no info, and it's inflammatory.

It tells you what X is by listing all the bad things X has done. That's like telling someone what the US is by saying "The US tried to purge the North American natives in the 19th century."

It doesn't tell me what "the US" actually refers to, and it poisons the well against it. You are no better at implementing a classifier to distinguish "US" for "not US", and now you're armed with entirely negative things about the US.

(I was originally going to do Germany there, but Godwin's Law and all.)

> > It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity.

> No, it's just a graphic. There's no info, and it's inflammatory.

IME, "infographic" is a term in which the "info" portion relates to "information" in much the same way that "factoid" relates to "fact" (or "truthy" relates to "truthful".)

Yeah but it made for a clever pun there, don't you think? Esp with the "graphic" double meaning!

> more like it's trying to rekindle hatred towards Wall Street than educating people

They did that on purpose. That's because NYT is left-wing newspaper just like The Guardian. Note that, socialist Paul Krugman is columnist for NYT.

The only job of Guardian, NYT, Huff Post and many others is to say negative about capitalism, private enterprise and free-markets. And to say positive about big government, wealth distribution and other left-wing agenda.

The same about Hollywood and entertainment industry (e.g. MTV), they are mostly left-wing.

I think left-wing ideas and left-wing propaganda completely monopolise western world (almost entire Europe, AU, CA etc).

It's sad but true.

Or..hear me out here..

There are people who view the world, politics and the economy differently than you do, and they're writing about what they know. No secret propaganda agenda.

> Note that, socialist Paul Krugman is columnist for NYT.

Socialist Paul Krugman is a columnist for the NYT? They must have two Paul Krugmans, then, as the better-known one [0] is not even close to a socialist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#Economic_views

That's interesting considering the US and UK are most certainly conservative, right-of-centre countries.

As soon as I read the article too I wanted to check if the NYT is owned by private equity. According to wikipedia, it's both part publicly traded on the NYSE and privately owned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Company. I wouldn't know where to find out how much of the company is privately owned and publicly traded, though. But spot on, it's a publicity piece (and you've played your part by clicking). But I think most would see that by the presentation. Was still entertaining though.

Why is it relevant that the NYT is private or whatever? Is the NYT a basic service formerly provided by government?

because of the irony.

What irony? There is no connection. What is so "ironic" about a private business being private? Or is there anyone - apart from former Eastern Bloc countries - who thinks newspapers should be state-owned? The topic is privatization of government functions. Private media should not write about it? I don't understand. So in order to write about this topic we need non-private media, i.e. only individual bloggers, state-owned media (China?) and maybe NPR can write about it?

It is visually appealing and I like its attempt to bringing exposure to something general public has little understanding of. This topic definitely deserves more than just a publicity piece, especially for something as complicated as financial industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Slim

Being privately owned isn't the same thing as being owned by private equity. And looking at the NYT it has Class A and Class B shares, where only the Class B shares are privately owned. The usual reason for dividing the shares into different classes is to give the owners of one class rights that the other class doesn't have. I'm not sure what, if any, differences there are between the NYT's Class A and Class B shares.

I'll admit, I don't know what the specific legal definition of private equity is. According to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity "In finance, private equity is an asset class consisting of equity securities and debt in operating companies that are not publicly traded on a stock exchange." There are probably more legal specifics that would further divide private equity from just anything that's not publicly traded. But, you're on the right track, if in fact the private Class B shares override the rights of Class A shares (significantly), then the NYT's could be seen as just another shady entity in our lives that's controlled by private equity, as the link tries to illuminate.

The article is using the term "private equity" to refer to private equity firms, so the more relevant wiki article is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_firm

The article links to another titled "What is private equity." Privately owned != private equity.

Private equity means leveraged buy out.

Yea, the implication is that private equity is bad because some firms have caused prices to increase.

And they're poisoning the water with lead! Oh wait..

That's how NYT is doing business for a long time now, where's the surprise really?

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