The worst of Times

Chris Ayres:

...

I’m talking about the Los Angeles Times. I should mention that America’s fourth-largest newspaper has perhaps the most fantastically corrupt history of any publication on the planet. In 1905 the publisher Harry Otis ran a number of stories warning of an imminent and catastrophic drought — the aim being to terrify his readers into voting for a bond issue that would finance the construction of a 223-mile aqueduct. The aqueduct also happened to irrigate a part of the San Fernando Valley that Otis had bought for virtually nothing a few months earlier.

This stroke of, er, luck resulted in Otis’s land being turned into farmland, and the publisher being turned into a very rich man.

In a separate incident, trade unionists bombed Otis’s house and office, killing 21 people. Otis survived, eventually seeing his daughter marry Harry Chandler — whose family went on to control the LA Times until 2000, when it was bought for $8 billion by the Tribune Company of Chicago. This seemed like a good move at the time, but like so many LA marriages, the union soon turned bitter — and was perhaps destined to end in divorce.

More importantly, it also resulted in the LA Times divorcing a good deal of its readers, along with a number of valuable advertisers.

Circulation fell 8 per cent to 776,000 at the last count, compared with 1.2 million in 1990. Meanwhile, editors at the LA Times now complain of being pressured into running stories from their sister newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, instead of the stories filed by their own correspondents. In business, this is called “synergy”. In reality, it’s called redundancy — in all senses of the word.

The Editor of the LA Times, Dean Baquet, tried to fight the cuts, then resigned on the day of the midterm elections, which I suppose at least showed an impressive talent for news management. Naturally, Baquet’s replacement was flown in straight from Chicago.

But the plot is thickening. There is talk now that David Geffen, famous for releasing John Lennon’s final album and co-founding the DreamWorks animation studio, is interesting in buying the newspaper. Geffen appears to be amassing a war chest by selling off his art collection. He recently offloaded Jackson Pollock’s No 5, 1948 for a jaw-slackening $140 million.

But Geffen faces competition from two other wealthy bidders: Eli Broad, an insurance magnate, and Ron Burkle, a supermarket tycoon. The two billionaires have already made an undisclosed offer for all of Tribune’s shares.

...

They are all liberals so there is little hope that the paper will improve or give conservatives a fair shake. If they were interested in increasing their circulation they might try being more conservative. It has certainly worked for the NY Post which was one of the few major metro dailies to increase circulation in the last reports. It would also make Los Angelos a more conservative place, which is desperately needed.