Won’t Someone Please Sponsor The Met?

Richard Cohen is a lifelong listener to weekly radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. But the broadcast’s sponsor dropped the program after 63 years. “All the accounts of why ChevronTexaco decided to drop the Met mentioned that the company has come upon hard times. Its CEO, David J. O’Reilly, has taken a 45 percent pay cut, and the stock price has dropped. Still, the company made $1.132 billion last year; $7 million represents less than 1 percent of its profits. Put that way, its decision to drop the broadcasts is a bit harder to understand.”