The Poor LA Times Has Fallen on Hard Times
I love the way Susan Estrich can dance all around a subject without getting into the heart of the matter. In an opinion article for Fox News the liberal activist laments the tragic fall of the Los Angeles Times. It seems the LA Times has fallen on hard times lately forcing the company to make hard decisions. To survive the company has to either cut jobs or the owners have to invest more money in the paper.
What makes the situation particularly interesting is that, waiting in the wings, are some of Los Angeles’ richest men, eager to own the local newspaper in the same way tycoons buy up baseball teams, for the prestige and the play, if not the profit. Would they invest more? Be less bottom line conscious? Would the city be better off? And does that give civic leaders a right to meddle in corporate business? The answer is that they don’t need permission. As for the editor and publisher, theirs is a high stakes game.
Newspapers are businesses, but they are also players in a political environment; citizens of the cities in which they publish. A newspaper that loses the support of its community will not thrive. A newspaper company that does its politics poorly will ultimately pay in the bottom line. (snip)
The day may well be coming when newspapers are like sports teams; the toys of the rich, bought by billionaires to be players, instead of owned by publicly held companies.
The poor Times, I feel like crying now. The article skips all around the issue of what put the paper into the financial situation it now faces, the public no longer trusts the paper to tell the truth in an unbiased manor. Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger was first running for governor and the paper interjected itself by running a false story of a woman who claimed she was groped by the future governor. And now the Times is running another story when Schwarzenegger was kidding around in his office and made what some claim to be inappropriate comments. The entire discussion was recorded and stored on the governor’s computer in a password protected file. Then someone, most likely from the Democratic contender’s camp, hacked into the computer and found the audio files. The files were then leaked to the LA Times who promptly printed Schwarzenegger’s gaffes. Once again the LA Times has to interject itself into California’s politics and becomes the story instead of just telling the story.
Is it any wonder subscriptions to the LA Times has been in a freefall for the last several years? Readers want the news, not biased reporting. If the Times were really interested in making money, they would start trying to recover the confidence of the people of California. That will only come by reporting the news and not trying to influence the news.
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