By L.P. LUPO 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The venerable Ford Motor Co. is losing market share and going broke.

The venerable New York Times is losing market share and going broke.

Ford recently announced plans to turn itself around by laying off 30,000 employees.

The Times editorialized against Ford’s plan, urging Ford to be more like the Times instead. This is a case of the blind leading the partially sighted off a cliff.

The Times is losing circulation because it is ever more the house organ of the left-wing fringe. Having lost its near monopoly on spinning the news to the left, it has earned more ardent but fewer readers.

Yet the Times editors want Ford to abandon its restructuring in favor of appealing to the Times’ shrinking model.

Here’s what the Times wants Ford to do instead of closing aging factories and eliminating the jobs of workers it no longer can afford: “design more appealing cars and trucks.”

Huh? And which cars and trucks are appealing to the Times? Cars that appeal to its miniscule readership, of course: the glove-compartment-sized European SmartCar, cars that run on fuels other than gasoline and hybrid vehicles that plug into the electrical grid.

Normal American reaction: Try driving a family four to Mount Rushmore in a glove box. Try finding a place to fill up with subsidized ethanol anywhere but the corporate headquarters of Archer Daniels in Decatur, Ill.

And what happens when the NIMBY crowd opposes the local electric utility proposal to meet the increased power demand? Answer: They will chain their Prius autos across from the work site.

These mobiles are favored by the morally superior subscribers of the Utne Reader, which has an even smaller share of the market than the Times. In any event, the 15 subscribers to the Utne Reader spend their weekends composting rather than driving.

What the Times wants is for Ford to be the official car of Blue State urban progressives. Only the Times readers can afford what the Wall Street Journal recently reported as the $10,000 per vehicle premium on that life style choice.

That is the marketing choice of the Times leading to oblivion. Does the Times have any credibility in trying to push Ford into the same suicidal market niche? I don’t think so.

But I am not much worried about Ford following the foolish advice of the increasingly irrelevant Times.