Following up on an initial LA Weekly report a month ago, The New York Times reported that the politically influential conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch are considering buying the eight newspapers of the recently bankrupt Tribune Co., including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Baltimore Sun. The move would be an explicitly political one, the Times reported, aimed at supplementing the Kochs’ political organizing by giving conservative causes a more prominent mainstream voice.
The Kochs don’t currently own any traditional media properties, though as the Columbia Journalism Review reported, they’re the top donors to the nonprofit group that funds the state government-focused Watchdog.org sites, which CJR profiled. In a strong analysis of the possible deal, the Lab’s Ken Doctor also looked at U-T San Diego as a cautionary tale of ideological ownership. The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson said a straw poll of L.A. Times journalists revealed many of them planned to leave if the Kochs took over. (The Post’s Steve Pearlstein urged them to do just that.) Meyerson cautioned the Tribune Co.’s board not to see a sale to the Kochs as a purely financial move, but as a political move with potentially disastrous implications.
Forbes’ Tim Worstall argued that the potential political influence of Koch-owned newspapers was being overstated, however, because newspapers’ political views are inevitably determined by those of their audience. “Proprietors do not mould the views of the readers. They chase them instead,” he wrote. The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta made a similar point, saying that big cities make their papers liberal, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Slate’s Matthew Yglesias (a liberal himself) saw Koch-owned major papers as a possible boon for the country, as a way to improve the anemic state of conservative journalism.