Posted on 04/03/2013 11:13:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Los Angeles Times is up for sale, and there are super-wealthy conservative bidders. Get the popcorn out and watch the liberals squeal. The hilarious kickoff came when two leftist collectives -- the Daily Kos website and the California-based Courage Campaign Institute -- set out to buy an ad in the LA Times to protest the Koch brothers pondering a bid.
I kid you not, the ad began: "WE NEED NEWS, NOT MORE SPIN." This would assume that today's Los Angeles Times -- which just endorsed Obama's re-election -- is an oasis of objectivity in a desert of media bias. They were outraged when the Times used their owner's prerogative and refused to run the ad.
The Koch brothers are unqualified to own a newspaper, according to this ad. Why? Because they're conservative: "They bankroll the Tea Party. They deny global warming. They buy politicians and bust unions."
Michael Bloomberg bankrolls the anti-gun lobby. He "buys politicians" in that cause: He just spent $2.2 million in Chicago for a barrage of ads to beat gun-rights Democrat Debbie Halvorson in the House race to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. He's even been accused of "union-busting." And he's presently the mayor of the nation's largest city. The Left hasn't run any ads against his qualifications to run Bloomberg Media, have they?
This is also funny because the Daily Kos crowd serves up a daily diet of counter-factual radical spin and nonsense, such as how the tea party is a gaggle of racist Nazis. They just argued Fox News was a "clear and present danger to America" because they weren't running enough live coverage of President Obama being applauded by supporters in Israel.
The Kos crowd has argued the liberal media are completely worthless in defending the Left's agenda. "This supposedly Liberal media was the media that allowed Republicans to almost sink the Affordable Care Act," they've complained, and "allowed birthers to have the semblance of plausibility" (?) and "provided a false equivalence to Republicans holding the entire country hostage to get their will because of the President's refusal of draconian cuts to the social safety net."
The Koch brothers aren't the only potential bidders for the LA Times that upset the Left. Rupert Murdoch is also quite interested in buying the Times and the Chicago Tribune from the troubled Tribune Company. One might think that Murdoch's sober journalistic operation of The Wall Street Journal after he bought it might calm the panic. You would be wrong.
In front of a graphic reading "Murdochopoly," Fox-hating Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" announced the government has prevented cross-ownership of TV stations and newspapers in the past. "We wouldn't want Rupert Murdoch to be disproportionately powerful," said Jon Stewart. He fake-interviewed Murdoch with old video clips and asserted, "I assume you are asking us to waive our laws as a courtesy, so you don't have to break them."
Stewart ran clips of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and associated Murdoch himself with "rampant law-breaking." Then he cracked, "and now you'd like a waiver to have another whack at a newspaper."
Stewart was also alarmed that Murdoch would boast that his media properties could swing elections or change the political agenda. "The law against media consolidation was really written with people like you in mind," Stewart lectured. "Well, actually you in particular, because of how you like to do the exact thing the law was created to prevent."
Liberal hypocrites claim to be defenders of freedom of speech -- but they can't stand it when a conservative owns a media outlet because that's not freedom. That's somehow an abuse of capitalism and of democracy. Liberal hypocrites think conservatives use their media outlets for partisan gain, but they somehow can't admit they've all been happily broadcasting from Obama's back pocket for five years. Time Warner's magazine can name him "Man of the Year" and compare him to Jesus in a manger, but that's defined as "independent" journalism.
But Stewart's hyperbolic hypocrisy may be the richest, as he pronounces his verdict from the mountain top of Viacom, which Stewart's leftist compatriots at PBS's "Frontline" have ranked as the second largest media conglomerate in the world, larger than Murdoch's News Corporation.
The Los Angeles Times used to be considered a Republican rag before Otis Chandler took the reins in 1960, just as the Chicago Tribune was considered a conservative outlet under Colonel Robert McCormick. At worst, the papers would only be returning to the their alleged old form. But liberals want to hold on to these media properties like they're captive nations, and they're going to fight it using the same phony argument that the conservative media make propaganda, and liberals just produce "news."
“WE NEED NEWS, NOT MORE SPIN.”
Well I agree with ‘em on that point.
“This would assume that today’s Los Angeles Times — which just endorsed Obama’s re-election — is an oasis of objectivity in a desert of media bias.”
Very well said.
No conservative here reads nor buys that sorry-excuse for toilet paper. There aren’t any non-MSM newspapers here in Socal except for some located in the OC.
This paper so slants and distorts its “news” as to be unreadable. Hope new owners can clean it up (keep editorial opinions or slants on the Opinion page where they belong)
I use my local rag to light my charcoal grill with, the wife clips the cupons, other than that it’s usless.
Union bustin’ makes me feel good...
... This type of censorship is very popular in the socialist/communist utopias. I have no idea why the leadership would desire it here in free America. < /sarcasm >
I thought they were arguing AGAINST conservative ownership??
it doesn't take courage to be a liberal. it doesn't even take brains. if they changed Institute to Program it would be more appropriately abbreviated CCCP.
If the Times would just hold on a few more months, why the value of the paper would drop low enough for a web blog to actually buy it!
Free Republic Times!
I used to take the Daily News when I was there (available in the Valley and east Ventura County, I think) and it seemed pretty reasonable. Is that no longer the case?
They’re OK and I like reading it. As long as you are far away from L.A., the newspapers get better by the distance.
But maybe that's exactly what needs to happen. Conservatives like the Koch brothers, Trump, etc, need to start buying papers, cable systems, movie studios, record labels, and so on. Those of us who don't have the means to make those big purchases need to pool our money into a fund that does the same. Certainly if there aren't already conservative media funds out there, they could be created, right? Once that fund (or those funds) owned controlling interest in, say, Time Warner, we conservatives, as a group, could exercise control over what programming goes out. If we bought Dreamworks SKG, we could determine which movies get produced and which don't, which stars get hired and which don't (read: Jim Carrey. In that way, we could all put our money where our mouths are. Surely there's some enterprising investment person or team out there that could make that happen.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Good to hear. I escaped almost 20 years ago.
As long as you are far away from L.A., the newspapers get better by the distance.
I don't know. I live with all the bitter racist clingers here in Phoenix, so you'd think there'd be a decent paper, but I wouldn't piss on the "Republic" building if it were on fire.
If the Koch brothers do buy these newspapers, probably the best thing they could do would be to set up their own journalism, objective reporting, and editing school.
All “journalists” would have to spend two years not just writing objective news based on events they are shown, but they would have to take corrupted, subjective news, produced by others, and correct it so that it *is* objective. If they just cannot control themselves to *not* insert bias in their reports, they fail.
Right now, with a ridiculously tight job market, recruits to become journalists would be people with degrees in other subjects, be they history, engineering, computer science, law and criminal justice, you name it. Their degree would give them specialties in vetting news that involved their expertise.
That is, if a reporter was writing a story on a historical event, they would have to have it vetted by someone credentialed in that subject.
Finally, being an editor, if done properly, is a very hard line of work. They do not just catch grammatical errors, but logical errors, journalistic errors, and errors that could provoke a legal attack, such as libel. So to become an editor, you likely need another year or two of schooling.
I was paying the bills one night and l looked at the three month bill for the Hartford Courant I tried to remember the last time I had read an editorial I agreed with. I called and cancelled the next day and never looked back.
Great historical point by Brent Bozell! In the first half of the twentieth century and even beyond that in some instances, major big city American newspapers were, more often than not, owned by conservatives who were by and large not afraid to publicize their views on the editorial pages. In an age where newspapers served as the number one source of news for Americans, these papers played at least somewhat of a role in mitigating the leftist politics in Washington during the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal era and later.
Believe it or not, even the Washington Post was owned by staunchly Republican close friends of Calvin Coolidge during his administration. Other major newspapers once considered to have a conservative editorial slant included the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Daily News.
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