Activist hedge fund Harbinger Capital disclosed in an SEC filing yesterday that it has sold 2.5 million shares of The New York Times Co. (NYT), reducing the company's largest outside shareholder's stake from to 14.6%. It also sold shares in September, when it reduced its position in the company from a 20% stake.

Harbinger declined a request for comment from The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), but it's possible that Harbinger is finally realizing that the shares' dual-class voting structure will make it impossible to affect change on the company's operations or corporate governance -- and as long as the Sulzberger family controls the company's fate, it will continue to be a value destruction machine trading at approximately the same share price it was at in 1984.

Harbinger Capital Management -- a hedge fund with the inane specialty of taking activist stakes in companies with entrenched managements and dual-class voting structures -- has raised its stake in Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) to 8.1%, according to a 13-D filed with the SEC.

When Harbinger first reported its 4.9% stake, I wrote that "the company's dual-class voting structure means that the Dolan family controls 75% of the voting rights, giving it full control over the board of directors and the company's future. Philip Falcone, the guy who runs Harbinger, can make all the noise and demands he wants, and he might even get a couple seats on a family-controlled board. But any ideas that Falcone has are the equivalent of going up to the CEO in a bar and telling him how he should run the business. Maybe he'll do what you suggest, and maybe he won't. He'll do whatever he wants, and Falcone's stake isn't going to accomplish anything."

Guess what? Owning 8.1% changes absolutely nothing. Collins Stewart analyst Thomas Eagan tells (subscription required) The Wall Street Journal that "They are sending a message that they want to play a role in the direction the company takes."

Great. But that doesn't mean the Dolans will listen. If they wanted to listen to shareholders, they wouldn't have the dual-class voting structure.

The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) has agreed to give activist hedge funds Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners control of seats on its board of directors. The funds own a 19% stake in the company, but that really doesn't matter. The New York Times Co. has a dual-class voting structure, so the Sulzberger family controls 10 directors while the outside shareholders elect 5. So Harbinger and Firebrand control 2 out of 15 directors and the maximum any shareholder could ever dream of electing is 5 out of 15 directors.

In a display of journalistic integrity, the New York Times itself admitted that this move is pretty much irrelevant, saying that "The new arrangement could make for some uncomfortable internal politics, but it is not clear that it will have any effect on the company's direction."

The company says, of course, that it looks forward to working with the new directors, who have pushed for asset sales and more aggressive investment in the internet.

But the problem is that having 2 seats on a 15-member board won't provide any additional leverage, as far as I can tell.

This quixotic activist campaign, however noble, is likely to result in a big fat nothing.

The newspaper industry has been struggling of late, battling online classified sites, job listings, and free blogs. While readership of offline paper has been steadily decreasing, readers have been drawn more and more to the online versions of newspapers.

Last Thursday, Reuters published the results of a recent study from the Newspaper Association of America reporting the number of unique visitors to newspaper websites last year rose more than 6% to a monthly average of 60 million.

So, it's not surprising to see that one hedge fund in particular is reported to be readying itself for a proxy battle to make a move for the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT). Marketwatch reports that the New York Times has said that Harbinger Capital Partners Master Fund has recently informed them of plans to seek seats on their board.

Last night, Openwave Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: OPWV) did the right thing by rejecting a Harbinger "control offer" that was essentially a "takeunder" rather than a takeover. The offer was worth a whopping $8.30 per share. Unfortunately, the Street had hoped that the old $8.30 was grossly undervaluing the company as the shares yesterday reached $10.37.

The company also announced it was cutting 20% of its workforce and paying out a $100 million dividend; the company only has $334.4 million in cash and equivalents as of March 31, 2007. That sounds like a "we're going at it alone" strategy if there ever was one, and the company is even referring to this as a "stand-alone plan." Back in early May, shares of Openwave were nestled under $8.00.

This rejection of the Harbinger buyout was indeed the right move, but the company should have known better than to wait almost a few weeks. It doesn't take that long to use an abacus to realize that a takeunder is just not going to work. Management is a serious void here, or so it seems. Shares are back all the way down to $8.38 in pre-market trading (9:16 a.m.) or a 19.2% drop.

There are a few companies that could use Openwave as a portfolio company. Once the quarter-to-quarter performance expectations are removed, this company actually offers a substantial platform for almost every aspect of mobile communications and it already has agreements in place with most of the cell and wireless carriers out there.

Jon Ogg can be reached at jonogg@247wallst.com; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.