Fortune and BusinessWeek are piling on the story of Harbinger Capital Partners, a $19 billion hedge fund, seeking to take over the New York Times (NYSE: NYT). Harbinger now owns 19% of its Class A shares. Of course, Harbinger is not the only threat to management of the Times -- News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) Rupert Murdoch is doing his part as well. Will Steve Rattner, a long-time friend of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Managing Principal of Quadrangle Group, come to the rescue and take the Times private?

In play here are Phillip Falcone, a Harbinger partner who made $1.7 billion last year, and the quaint idea of protecting a media company's founding family by maintaining two classes of stock: Class A for the public to make insiders liquid and Class B for the insiders. Murdoch and Sulzberger enjoy protection for their family dynasties thanks to that two-tiered structure.

Falcone thinks that the Times is leaving huge amounts of money on the table by not "monetizing" all the comments on its stories. What sparked this idea was a January opinion piece by Caroline Kennedy comparing Barack Obama with her father, President John F. Kennedy. There were only a few comments about the article on the newspaper's Web site, nytimes.com, but there were hundreds on Huffington Post and Digg.com. BusinessWeek quotes Scott Galloway, founder of hedge fund Firebrand Partners and Falcone friend who said: "We came to the collective conclusion that there was so much upside in terms of billions of pages the paper wasn't monetizing. He [Falcone] never looked back."

Back in the 1980s, private equity maestro Ted Forstmann railed against the use of Mike Milken's junk bonds. He thought they were too risky and that the markets would eventually implode. He even wrote op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) about this. And, yes, he was eventually proved right.

Interesting enough, there's a piece in this week's WSJ that provides some warning bells for the current state of private equity. The author is Steven Rattner, who is the managing principal of Quadrangle Group LLC.

Like Forstmann, Rattner is very concerned about the high degree of leverage in Wall Street's dealmaking.

He points to the small yield spreads on junk bonds, the subprime meltdown, and easy terms (known as "covenant light" loans).

What's more, keep in mind that it's fairly common for private equity firms to pay out huge dividends so as to magnify returns. Of course, this means more and more debt.

Basically, the credit markets are not pricing risk properly. So, when things start to go sidewise, it could be a big shock to the financial system.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.