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What If The Kochs Bought The LA Times?

Kock Industries

Conservatives are always complaining that the liberals control the media.  If so that control is very fragile:

Charles Spies, the Republican fundraiser, who ran the pro-Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, explained to Mother Jones:  

“If I had the resources and wanted to impact the policy debate, I’d buy a newspaper or a magazine.   Not to make money. They’re not profitable. But imagine if I was, you know, a mogul that had 30, 40 million dollars to spend and cared about policy issues and elections. I’d buy the New York Times or the LA Times. Buy a major newspaper and put my people in on the editorial page and use that to frame issues the way I wanted to. And then I could claim that the news folks were separate from the editorial page but I think they know where the owner’s heart is at.”

This is not idle speculation,  A two years ago the Koch brothers considered buying one or more of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and Orlando Sentinel. The total value of all of these is only  $623 million, much les than the billion dollars the brothers are sending on this year’s presidential campaign. 

Other conservative billionaires have bought major print media.  Amazon’s own  Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.  The Washington Examiner newspaper and the Weekly Standard magazine are owned by Phil Anschutz.  ,  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns the Wall Street Journal (and of course FOX News).

 


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