A news article in today's New York Times reports, "The Times announced on Wednesday that its board had approved a new $250 million Class A share repurchase program. The board approved a separate $150 million in stock buybacks last February. So far, the company has repurchased $112 million in shares."
This is pretty comical, or at least hypocritical, because a June 2020 New York Times Sunday staff editorial took a position on stock buybacks, calling for them to be made illegal: "This unapologetic pursuit of profit reached new heights with the deregulation of financial markets.... Investors bought companies and squeezed them like lemons, while surviving firms scrambled to keep shareholders happy. In 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission — led by a Wall Street banker for the first time since the Great Depression — provided a new way for corporations to shovel money to shareholders by voting to let companies buy back shares of their own stock." The Times demanded a change: "Policymakers can encourage that new direction, for example by reversing the legalization of share buybacks."
The idea that a business should apologize for pursuing profit is the sort of thing that only a New York Times editorialist or a member of Congress from New England or New York would believe. And the Ochs-Sulzberger family-controlled New York Times board approving a stock buyback while publishing a newspaper that editorializes in favor of making them illegal is the sort of thing that makes people cynical about the New York Times, and about journalism in general. The Times ownership takes one approach to running its own business, while asking government to impose a different rule on the non-Sulzberger rich.