Untitled Document
Be careful; it’s a jungle out there —
especially if you’re the editor of the Los
Angeles Times. If you don’t eat your own
editorial staff, that newspaper’s corporate brass will eat you. In 2000, the Times was bought by the Tribune Co., the Chicago-based
conglomerate that owns the Chicago Tribune and other media properties. Tribune brought in a
well-regarded editor, John Carroll, to run the Los Angeles paper, and he
and his staff produced 13 Pulitzer Prizes in five years. But headquarters
kept forcing newsroom job cuts on Carroll and demanding more — until
he got fed up in 2005 and quit. Next came Dean Baquet, another stalwart journalist.
Again, conglomerate chieftains in Chicago kept ordering him to devour more
reporters, until he couldn’t take it any more and, in 2006, said no.
He was sacked. That put James O’Shea in the editor’s chair, but
the job ate him up, too. Just recently O’Shea was ousted for refusing
to cut $4 million more from the newsroom budget. That’s three editors chewed up and spit out in
just over three years. They were fired not because of any journalistic
shortcomings but because they wouldn’t fire the people who do the
journalism. Was the paper unprofitable? No. The nastiest part of
America’s increasingly conglomerated media is that the owners
don’t merely want to make a profit; they want to make a killing! In
2006, for example, the Los Angeles Times hauled in nearly $600 million in profit — a 10
percent return on sales. Many independent papers would be happy with that
financial result, but conglomerate investors howl for returns of 30 percent
or more. So they try to bleed newsrooms (the very reason papers exist) to
death to extract still another dime for their own pockets.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2008.
