This strategy worked reasonably well for the Moonies with the Washington Times. Sure, they lost $100 million a year, but that’d be chump change for these Galtian overlords:
Three years ago, Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and supporters of libertarian causes, held a seminar of like-minded, wealthy political donors at the St. Regis Resort in Aspen, Colo. They laid out a three-pronged, 10-year strategy to shift the country toward a smaller government with less regulation and taxes.
[…]Other than financing a few fringe libertarian publications, the Kochs have mostly avoided media investments. Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.
I believe that this is the future of mass media: loss leading corporate propaganda.
Alison
I love you for the title.
Comrade Jake
In related news, Glenn Beck is still batshit-cray cray.
sb
Nice title.
All of those papers, especially the LAT, have been hemorrahging subscribers for years and, at least in the case of the LAT, there have been major cuts to staff and resources. I don’t imagine the price of the papers will dent the pocketbooks of the Koch brotehrs all that much but then again, not much does.
Cassidy
The future?
somethingblue
Actually, this is the present of mass media.
aimai
I thought that was the Present of the Huffington Post?
PeakVT
I think the future is already here. Isn’t the Test Prep Daily a money-loser?
Violet
Isn’t this the way it used to be? Wealthy owners financed various papers to promote their point of view? The future is the robber baron past.
Yutsano
@Violet: I don’t think it ever really changed. New boss same as the old boss and all that.
cathyx
This will only quicken those paper’s demise.
PeakVT
Also, too, the loss-leaders will be print and online print-simulacra. Cable nooz is already profitable propaganda.
Violet
@Yutsano: I think it was less obvious for awhile and after the whole Watergate thing, people were more idealistic, but yeah, it never really changed.
Shalimar
@Comrade Jake: I don’t understand. If the Saudi recruited the Tsarnaev brothers and knew their plans in advance, why was he close enough to the blast to be injured? Couldn’t he have watched from a window nearby?
Comrade Jake
@Shalimar:
The problem with your argument here, obviously, is the attempt at LOGIC.
Boots Day
I grwe up reading the Chicago Tribune, and it would be kind of sad to see it descend into outright wingnuttia. But print journalism is a dying business, and if these clowns want to waste millions of dollars on something that connects with fewer and fewer people every single day, I’d be happy to see them do so.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Violet:
The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.
We’re headlong toward Gilded Age II, and I don’t mean a video game.
Comrade Jake
Also in related news, Donald Trump is an asshole.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Shalimar:
Trying to make sense of Beck is a losing proposition no matter how hard you try.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Comrade Jake:
What did he say (some of us can’t access twitter)?
Irish Steel
Does this mean that Nick Gillespie will get Mike Royko’s old column?
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Certified Mutant Enemy:
He wants us to waterboard the second bombing suspect prior to getting treated by doctors in order to get him to talk.
Higgs Boson's Mate
If the sale to the Kochs goes through I look forward to hearing a lot about streamlining, efficiency, and bringing them into the 21st century. IOW, “We’re going to lay off everyone, pay conservative hacks to write one generic newspaper and have it distributed locally under its old name.”
some guy
Upbeat stories about how air pollution is actually good for us.
plus, plenty of puppy pix.
I see great things ahead.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
Asshole.
Suffern ACE
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Oh. Well once he’s dead, he’ll be ready to confess to anything.
At least trump is clear what the Miranda issue is about.
Violet
@Certified Mutant Enemy: Here’s what he said:
He doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of support for it.
BGinCHI
@Boots Day: This town will reject that shit faster than you can say Studs Terkel. The Trib is already circling the bowl.
I’d hate to see WGN go to hell, but that’s probably inevitable.
Boots Day
Aside from the fact that he’s already seemed willing to talk, and that he’s in such bad shape that waterboarding might kill him, I don’t see any other problems with Trump’s idea. Oh, there’s also the fact that we shouldn’t torture American citizens.
I suspect that what Trump really wants to do is go kick that kid in the balls a few times, just for grins.
JGabriel
NYT:
Hmm. I wonder how Libertarian Fonzie and the rest of the Reasonoids feel about the Times calling them a fringe libertarian publication.
Hungry Joe
@Violet:
Yes … but way back when, most cities had more than one paper. In big cities there’d be the plutocrats’ paper, the union/labor paper, the seamy tabloid (or two), the staid/respectable/boring paper, the Catholic paper, maybe even a fascist paper and/or a commie paper. You’d read a couple or three of them and sort of triangulate on something like the truth.
PeakVT
@Boots Day: But a lot of people still rely on the LAT and other papers for their news. Having them turned into more explicit propaganda shops wouldn’t just skew their editorial pages, but also what is covered and the interpretation of what is covered. Staying informed is already hard work, and a huge number of people just don’t bother. How will people stay informed when there are no reliable front-line journalism sources? Blogs are good for interpreting and curating the news (sometimes), but they’re not a substitute for a big media organization.
Here’s just one example of how screwed up reporting can be from what is supposed to be our best newspaper.
scav
@Violet: hmmmm waterboarding as little known medical technique to repair holes in the throat and related damage? The things bad golf-playing hairpieces discover!
ranchandsyrup
The Kochtopus needs a diseased host in order to profit while helping kill the body. Journalismism is perfect for them.
JGabriel
@Violet:
The future is the robber baron present.
WereBear
I love seeing twisted billionaires waste dough on fading technology.
Does the gravitational pull of that much money kink brain arteries or something? If I had that kind of pocket change, I would open cheap cafeterias in every poor neighborhood so everybody could eat well; kids free!
There would be a shelter for every kitteh and goggie who needed them. Birds and ferrets, too! A giant Habitrail for the cats to watch, full of rescue gerbils.
A WiFi bubble over every town.
That’s just the top of my wishlist. And would that cost as much as supporting people like Michelle Malkin and Ms. Pink Himalayan Salt?
I don’t think so. But then, I haven’t costed it out, yet.
joes527
Let me be the first to welcome the rest of the nation to San Diego.
mellowjohn
@Irish Steel: @Irish Steel:
no, royko’s column has been taken over by a corporate whore named John Kass. doesn’t mean there wouldn’t also be room for gillespie, tho.
Highway Rob
Also, too, this chain used to publish reasonable newspapers with libertarian dreck on the op/ed pages. (Disclosure: I used to work for one of them.)
Bruce S
The old San Francisco Examiner – Hearst flagship back in the olden days and home to Hunter Thompson as columnist before the younger Hearst gave up the ghost – has been turned into a national freebie handout rag, with a definite right-wing agenda. The demise of newspapers has been unpleasant, but I think that it won’t matter much in another decade or so. I think we gained more than we lost with the transition to internet. Although I’m so old that frankly I miss the shared “zietgeist” of old media – pretty much everyone had seen some network TeeVee show the night before, or read Herb Cean’s column. But the truth is, “the good old days” is mostly bullshit. The Koch’s can buy up the Trib and the LATimes, but they won’t own much. Screw them and the horse-and-buggy they rode in on. They’re old farts and will be dead very soon.
Violet
@WereBear: With an attitude like that, you’d never make the money in the first place. It’s the rare billionaire who decides to give away their money to help others.
BGinCHI
@mellowjohn: I fucking hate that asshole. It was a great day the day I told the Trib to stick my subscription us its Kass.
Mnemosyne
Frankly, the LA Times has sucked for quite a while now — they were very embarrassed at having gotten caught plugging a project they had a financial interest in. They’ve had lots and lots of problems with the line between advertising and editorial getting blurred.
The sucky thing is that they bought up all of the local/regional papers, so just about every “community” paper is owned by the LA Times. It’s really that coverage I’m worried about losing — the LA Times itself can DIAF for all I care.
Michele C
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: *And* institute their weird management philosophy that even Forbes can’t review with a straight face: http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/26/science-success-management-lead-ceo-cz_df_0226kochbookreview.html
Amir Khalid
If this is an actual Koch Bros. strategy for increasing their influence, I can’t say I’m impressed. It’s one thing to buy up newspapers with growing or at least stable circulation/readership figures. That gives you some rational basis for expecting to grow your influence.
A newspaper with shrinking circulation, bleeding readers and influence as a result, would make a poor soapbox for the Koch Bros. A sensible new owner’s first priority would be to get circulation growing again. Otherwise his new media empire won’t survive long as a business, let alone help him win any hearts and minds.
scav
@BGinCHI: Collar Counties will slow a crash a bit. Trib comments sometimes indishtinguishable from Yahoo, based on the entirely few times I made that mistake.
maya
Small example of liber-repub millionaire engaging in newsprint propaganda that didn’t end well in my neck of the woods. The area is decidedly right-wing leaning too.
Good luck to the future, syndicated Koch Picayune & Pennysaver
DaddyJ
The Chicago Tribune has always been a Republican megaphone. But up to the turn of the new century it had good reporting, and you could ignore the pathologies on display in the editorial section. In the last decade or two the good reporting has withered, staff has been slashed and the propaganda’s been smeared onto the front page. The paper is shockingly degraded; it’s like meeting somebody you respected living under a bridge.
If they turn it into the New York Post I don’t think it will make much difference. Certainly won’t for me, as I killed my sub a couple of years ago.
Bruce S
The real question is how can internet publication sustain costly real-journalism things like the foreign bureaus that serious newspapers like the NYTimes (and the old LA Times) had. Most towns have always had newspapers that suck and/or are published by cranks. The San Francisco Chronicle, for one example, was always fun to read because they published lots of quirky columnists, but mostly a piece of crap as journalism even in it’s heyday. I’m concerned about how the equivalent of the handful of flagship papers like the Times fare – the rest barely matter any more, if they ever really did as much as we would like to “remember.”
roc
You’d think Galtian supermen would build up their own news apparatus, rather than overpaying for fading brands that are deeply in hock to a failed business model.
scav
This at least is at least mildly amusing — a quiz: Toddlers and MPs: can you tell the difference?
El Cid
When newspapers were big regional enterprises in the late 19th and early 20th century, there were bosses’ newspapers, labor newspapers, ethnic newspapers, not simply ‘newspapers’.
For a while, the bosses’ papers (having defeated labor and ethnic papers generally via turning to advertising versus subscriptions) were also doing somewhat of filling the general public interest.
Now that the late-1960s big business elite move to roll back worker rights & Progressive / New Deal reforms is the norm, maybe it’s time for the bosses’ newspapers to be much more visibily bosses’ newspapers again — so that there will be no more confusion about it.
Svensker
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
Knowing Trump, he probably wants to waterboard the first bombing suspect, too.
bemused
A lot of smaller state/city newspapers have been bought out by conservative/rightwing companies. Some of those newspapers used to be ok to decent. Now they have less pages with poor content, hardly worth buying or reading except for a bit of local news.
maya
@WereBear:
Wait’ll see what they have in mind for Windows XP.
Just Some Fuckhead
Not if dick pics on twitter has anything to say about it.
Sea Subb
@PeakVT: Aw, heck. I used my last free NYT article of the month clicking through to that.
handsmile
@PeakVT:
Yes, here’s the most recent information (February 2013) I can find (shallow digging):
http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/93299/washington-posts-profit-rises
The fishwrap division of the Washington Post Company continues to lose advertising revenue and circulation. Overall company profits increased in 2012 largely due to strength in its television and cable broadcast divisions (attributable in part to political advertising). The education programs of Kaplan International remain the largest revenue source for the company’s operations (thus the paper’s preferred moniker here).
This Pew Research Center report, “Newspapers: By the Numbers (2012),” ably anatomizes the critically ill patient (with lots and lots of helpful graphs and charts):
http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/newspapers-building-digital-revenues-proves-painfully-slow/newspapers-by-the-numbers/
Tonal Crow
There’s a bad Moon on the rise!
sonofsamantha
Nobody reads newspapers anymore except the same fossils who will always vote Republican and will all be dead soon. So it’s not like they are going to reach a new generation of voters with this strategy and it’s not like the current readers don’t already have a way to be told what they want to hear from WSJ, Wash Times, Fux etc.
When you have almost endless amounts of money and are a fossil yourself this purchase probably makes a lot of sense. It’s nothing to be worried about that’s for sure. Let them waste their money and unfortunately they will still have plenty more to waste. At least this helps keep people employed.
DaddyJ
@Irish Steel: Naw, they already have a guy in that spot who can write in Roykoese with a creamy Republican-party-press-release center: John Kass. He’s a very good, clever propagandist.
Zifnab
@Amir Khalid: Have you considered doing full color tabloid stories on the front page and tits on page six?
Tonal Crow
Huh? Most of the news we discuss on this site comes from…wait for it…newspapers.
Hungry Joe
@Bruce S:
Even more to the point: How can an internet publication sustain costly real-journalism things like local reporters?
Cermet
Relative to the Baltimore Sun, H.L. Mencken must be spinning in his grave – if he was alive today, he’d have some choice words about the Kock sucker brothers.
Redshirt
At least they’ll give Benghazi and Agenda 21 the attention they richly deserve.
Violet
Our society is set up so that journalists/reporters/news organizations are the ones who get more access to stories. Who’s going to replace those reporters when media organizations shut down? Does that matter?
Cacti
I’d say it’s the present.
John PM
@Boots Day: The Chicago Tribune has been heading thatway for years. I already have to wade through Jonah Goldberg, Kathleen Parker and Charles Krauthammer, and John Kass, who took over when Royko died, is full wingnut on national politics
sherparick
This will be kind of back to the Future for both papers. Until the 1960s, the Chandler’s who ran the LAT, and the McCormicks, who ran the Tribune, were the Koch brothers of their day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_R._McCormick
And McCormick definitely ran the press room to advance his agenda. And so did Harrison Gray Otis and his descendants, the Chandler Family, until Otis Chandler took over in 1960.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Gray_Otis_%28publisher%29
Somehow the truth got out anyway. Further, as Faux and the other Murdoch publications are discovering, once you are considered a “fictional” news source, the only people who read or watch you are the people who find your fictions comforting.
Elizabelle
I don’t want to see the Koch Brothers anywhere near the Tribune, and newspapers did not get First Amendment protection, via the Constitution, so they could be plutocrat propaganda.
Particularly if there is little countervailing reporting since it’s so expensive (and reviled).
Couldn’t disagree more with sonofsamantha at comment 59.
This is “Defining Deviancy Down”, newspaper edition.
jayjaybear
@Irish Steel: And Michael Medved takes over Ebert’s old office…
scav
@sonofsamantha:
not so much (and not so many) people given the way newsrooms seem to be run now. Fronts for channeling money to recipients of wingnut welfare — Faux must be getting full or unreliable.
Calouste
@Bruce S:
You just read the foreign newspapers for foreign news. The Guardian, der Spiegel, etc. Most countries have an English language version of one of their leading newspapers.
Mike in NC
I look forward to subscribing to the Koch Klown Khronicle.
Suffern ACE
@scav: Yep. It is easier to find out what is happening in New York City on the weekend than it is to find out what is happening in your own statehouse or your own park.
Calouste
@Comrade Jake:
It’s related, but it’s not news.
joes527
@Calouste:
Dude. If you read Al Jazeera the terrorists have won!
Trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
We already have the Gannett chain so I don’t know how effectively another winger chain expands “right-thinking” viewpoints across our fair land. I’ll speculate if the Kochs buy it, they won’t anticiapte turning a profit any more than the moonie tymes did. It’s another mouthpiece that they’re willing to dump some extra awhl profits into.
Too bad for all of us they’re not more interested in thoroughbred racing, Formula 1, futbol and winning the America’s Cup.
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid:
But suppose the plan is to use the thing for propaganda however long you can, and ride it into the ground?
You win coming and going, especially if you’re so rich the loss won’t hurt that bad.
You’ve destroyed some great metropolitan newspapers that could have spotlighted your business dealings or published critical reporting.
I don’t think the Founding Fathers intended George III to own all the major newspapers and get First Amendment protection for doing so.
Another Halocene Human
@Violet: Yeah, they prefer to give away money to control others.
Wouldn’t that just kill Bill Gates if feeding poor children regular, healthy meals did more for their school performance than billions in new Windows computers and high stakes testing?
aimai
If the Koch’s are like any other major player they will find a way to monetize even the newspapers–they will demand tax breaks for keeping the newspaper open, they will demand state bonds in order to build swank new offices. Hell, if they could get away with it they would try to force the state to build them a stadium in which they could make the journalists fight to the death and sell tickets with every subscription. Given the lawyers and lobbyists these guys control the sky is the limit. They can have their propaganda and profit too.
Another Halocene Human
@DaddyJ: My 74 yr old grandfather still buys it but cusses it out daily. He never agreed with the Tribune but he thinks it’s pathetic now.
Csbella
@Sea Subb:
Just throw out that box of cookies and get 10 more. It there are 10 more to get.
The Moar You Know
It is. “Papa Doc” Doug Manchester felt that the San Diego papers were failing to push his insane development ideas adequately, and the fuckers wouldn’t stop reporting on all the illegal backroom deals he was doing to get those developments approved, so he bought them all.
Fired the journalists.
The only stories we get now, by order, are human interest stories and pro-business pieces, written by college students or over-the-hill hacks.
San Diego journalism never had a lot to brag about, but now we have, quite literally, no local news sources. That’s a bit unnerving.
Bruce S
@Calouste:
I think that’s a good option for a lot of folks – pretty much what I tend to do – but I’d also like to see US journalists engaged in international coverage for various reasons. I think that the foreign press still leaves some gaps for US readers.
Another Halocene Human
@Elizabelle: The Boston Phoenix died. The model is broken.
I don’t know where we go from here but the bosses will always be able to distribute print media at a loss as propaganda. The question is where the people will get their news. I don’t know the answer to that but I’m not going to waste my energy crying over a done deal.
Bruce S
@Hungry Joe:
Yeah – although the only vestige of our local papers that are functional IMHO is the local reportage. It’s relatively low-cost – hoping that this is a niche that can survive in internet world. Often energetic amateurs have played effective watch-dog on local government and the internet gives them a platform.
danimal
@Svensker:
Fixt for accuracy.
There is no way to save the LA Times. If the Koch’s want to flush their money for virtually no increase in their power or profits, I say we support them in the endeavor.
Elizabelle
Newspaper reporting helps set the story for what cable spotlights.
Suppose it’s even less factual than it is now, and you have nowhere to go save foreign publications? Which put up a paywall, or even give you the equivalent of an “out of state tuition” subscriber package?
Meanwhile, you’re living in “Shock Doctrine” nation, but you’re assured by TV and most online news services that you are living in The Best of All Possible Worlds.
It’s like being in that Rolling Stones song, where all you can get on the radio is religious stations.
We’re all Bakersfield.
Bubblegum Tate
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
There’s a great Simpsons bit where they go to a food court, and each one of them orders from a wildly different restaurant, then we pan down to the basement, where there’s one guy standing next to a single bucket of mystery meat, which he throws on conveyer belts that go up to each restaurant.
The Kochs are going to do the newspaper publishing version of that.
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
And all you get to do is sponsor a prayer for The Girl With The Faraway Eyes.
Elizabelle
@danimal:
I hope you are wrong.
Is that what we do, lie around and say “Ah, but the Boston Phoenix!”
I am feeling really squeezed.
NPR has been dumbed down, and I heard a TV network CBS correspondent or anchor say “Democrat senators” this morning in an update. (Nora O’Donnell? Heard, not saw.)
Reporters won’t call a filibuster or threatened filibuster by its name.
It’s just that “Obama and Democrats failed again” without ever letting people know that it didn’t use to be 60 votes for any and everything, and that legislation is failing with greater than 51 Senate votes regularly.
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid:
And when you’re down on your luck ….
Origuy
@Comrade Jake: Trump just lost the fight to stop a windfarm off the coast of his Scottish golf course. From the comments in the Guardian article, I learned that some Scots call him Syrup. It’s short for “syrup of fig”, which is Cockney rhyming slang for “wig”.
Thoughtcrime
Well, these warning labels have been around ever since I can remember:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/21/37472041_dfab2ec070_m.jpg
nellcote
Interesting that the Kock bros. weren’t interested until PBO reached out to regional media instead of relying on The Village.
nellcote
and The Donald keeps loosing
joes527
@The Moar You Know:
You still take that fishwrap??!!??
It was bad enough before, but now … dude, paying Manchester for lying to you is sleeping with the enemy.
Another Halocene Human
@Origuy: FUCK yeah!
Of course, Scotland as best I can tell has a much lower GINI index score than NYC. New York actually does better on development measures and violent crime than their GINI score would indicate. Either there’s some redistributive action that’s not being captured (they were looking at income and taxes) or they genuinely are doing something right in NYS which has a secondary effect making them overperform to the first order metric (which is GINI index).
Also, too, Pb poisoning is first order, so I’m guessing NYC aggressively addressed it and has a head start on Yuropeen countries which were using leaded gasoline a decade after the USA had quit.
Bruce S
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Pretty much the story of the old SF Examiner!
zizi2
Here’s why this gluttonous purchase of neutral to liberal media outlets is dangerous. News and investigation of local and state level politics and deal making. The Kochs are not interested in federal power now, but state control now.
These Newspaper purchases will immensely help them monopolize control of opinion in blue/purple states. Think about the Wisconsinization/Walkerization of Blue/Purple states.
I’m terrified
RaflW
I was staying at a hotel over the weekend that offers the NYT to your room daily, including Sunday. I’d forgotten, in this internet era of only hearing about what Bobo, Chunky Bobo and Crazy MoDo are up to, that, indeed, the NYT is still a major source of quality journalism.
The write long stories about multiple things each and every day. That are well edited. And informative.
As much as many of us here, including me on grumpy days, bashes the Times, I think I’ll subscribe, if it can help keep the Koch’s filthy hands off one of the last bastions of actual reporting.
{I know they’re not threatening to buy the NYT, but if they fuck up the LA Times, there’s got to be a decent paper of record out there}
McClatchy still puts out some serious writing from time to time, too.