SHAREHOLDERS GAG AT U.S.-HATING RAG By PAUL THARP
Cries of outrage arose yesterday after a London newspaper's July 4 front-page attack on America called President Bush a "criminal" at the helm of "the world's leading rogue state."
Under a front-page headline reading "Mourn on the Fourth of July," The Daily Mirror article said "Bush's policy of bomb first and find out later has killed double the number of civilians who died on Sept. 11 [and] the USA is now the world's leading rogue state."
The tirade against America's war or terror triggered an angry backlash from the newspaper's major American shareholders, who demanded the ouster of the Mirror's editor, Piers Morgan.
Morgan remained defiant yesterday despite the protests, saying he would continue to bash Bush in articles by the paper's leftist columnist John Pilger - and that "they shouldn't be misconstrued as anti-American."
That response infuriated some of the already steaming shareholders.
"That is totally outrageous," said Tom Shrager, a managing director of New York-based fund Tweedy Browne & Co., which owns 4 percent of the Mirror's parent company.
"The article compares America to Nazi Germany - that's totally inaccurate," Shrager said.
The three biggest shareholders of the Mirror's parent, Trinity-Mirror, are all American-based companies. In addition to Tweedy, they are mutual-fund giant Fidelity, which owns 14 percent, and The Capital Group, which owns 12.62 percent.
The top brass of the three big funds spent the day protesting to the Mirror parent CEO, Phillip Graaf.
Graaf and his senior management told the executives that they, too, were offended by the article, according to Shrager.
"The senior management told me they're opposed to the article's point of view, and that it was an editorial decision."
"They said they are talking about 'doing something' about him. They know that Piers Morgan has been controversial in the past.
"They agreed with me that the article was totally outrageous and that this cannot go on."
Shrager said that when he asked Graaf if the Mirror's advertisers from the United States are angry about the article, Graaf told him, "Well, not yet."
Among its seven largest advertisers are U.S. giants Toys "R" Us, Ford Motor Co., AOL, Dell Computer, Wal-Mart's Asda Stores, General Motors' Vauxhall Motors and 20th Century Fox.
None of the advertisers had any immediate comment on the controversy.
Shrager, who became a top Wall Street investor after arriving here 20 years ago as a Romanian refugee, said he and the other investors aren't trying to muzzle the press.
"I know what censorship is like because I came from behind the Iron Curtain," he said.
"I believe strongly in freedom of the press - but that right comes with a certain level of responsibility to be fair. The Mirror wasn't fair, and it wasn't accurate."