Koch Brothers Becoming Newspaper Moguls?

Think Progress

Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have become villains on the left for pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into right wing causes. The brothers, who run Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the United States, received a great deal of public scrutiny in 2012 for pumping tens of millions of dollars into superPACs to promote Republican candidates. But the Kochs may soon be entering the news business.

There are reports that the brothers are looking into buying the Chicago Tribune company, which includes the Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun as well as five other newspapers, 23 television stations and WGN. Although it’s unclear whether the Kochs are interested in the entire company or simply the eight newspapers, this potentially represents a major shift in the national media landscape.

Even if the Kochs acquire the Tribune company’s newspapers, they will instantly become among the powerful media tycoons in the United States. The question is what they might do with that power.

For all their criticism leveled against the Kochs, they are public spirited and have no qualms spending money subsiding what they find to be important causes. Hopefully, they find that the cause to be journalism. The papers owned by the Tribune Company have battered by decades of mismanagement and neglect. With a deep pocketed owner, papers like the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times could return to their past glory and the Chicago Tribune might even become good for the first time in its long history. There is one fear; that the Kochs’ ideological leanings will affect the reporting in the paper.

This is different than the editorial stance. The New York Times’ editorial page is left of center and the Wall Street Journal is far right of center but the reporting in each of those publications is nearly universally respected. That’s the model that Kochs should follow. After all, when papers have biased reporting, they become punchlines. No one respected the Los Angeles Times of the first half of the twentieth century when it was an organ of the California Republican Party and the few papers that still operate on that hyper-partisan model today, like the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, are treated with the same general disregard.

The Koch brothers could actually revive print journalism in cities across the country if they choose. But first, they have to actually buy the Tribune papers and then they have to resist the temptation to start meddling in the newsroom. Both are big ifs.

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