Can Koch Brothers Turn Major Urban Newspapers Conservative?

The rumblings that the right wing billionaire Koch Brothers will try to buy the print assets of the Tribune Company and acquire some of the biggest newspapers in the country are growing louder.

Garance Franke-Ruta of the Atlantic is confident though that the Koch Brothers can only do minimal damage to the papers that they might acquire, which include the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun. In Franke-Ruta’s opinion:

American newspapers originated as physical objects designed to be distributed in defined, geographically constrained regions. They originated as urban creations because only in urban areas was there enough commerce, enough politics — enough news — for them to grow, and enough readers to make them strong. There are newspapers based in rural areas, but it is hard for them to grow large, both because of the lack of regional news, and because of the difficulty of getting the physical object of the paper to enough people to scale it. Newspapers have historically depended on high densities of people for their existence (see Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers, for a really wonderful and fun history of the form).

Newspapers have also, at least until rather recently, demanded that their writers know a region. Not before they got hired, but once they started to work in it. Papers may have hired from diverse regional backgrounds (and newspapers draw from a more geographically and educationally diverse population of reporters than Rubin thinks they do), but what they demanded of their workers is that they become regional specialists. That’s what running people through the Metro Desk was designed to do. Until fairly recently, to report on national politics, you had to get to know the problems of the city or of dense close-in suburbs first. You had to take a crash course in the culture of the city and the region in which your newspaper was based.

Also important: Because employment at these city-based newspapers is voluntary, they tend to attract reporters who want to live in cities. The New York Times, for example, gets the Iowans who want to leave Iowa and live in Manhattan or Brooklyn. It does not get as many job applicants who want to live in traditional rural communities, because it is not a rural-community-based employer. Newspapers hire people who can deal with working in cities — big, major, complicated, diverse, progressive cities — and who will obey the socially progressive laws of those cities at work, even if they live off in the ‘burbs somewhere.

There are successful conservative newspapers in cities, but they are usually the scrappy local underdogs to the big mainstream dailies bought by the plurality of the regional paper-buying population. Think: The Boston Herald (conservative) versus The Boston Globe. The New York Post(conservative) versus the New York Times and Daily News. The Washington Times (conservative) versus the Washington Post.

Franke Ruta’s logic is a deeply flawed product of the current moment in publishing. After all, the Los Angeles Times was long a financially successful conservative paper (although, it was considered a very bad paper at that time as well) and the only Democrat that the Chicago Tribune has ever endorsed in a presidential election is Barack Obama. It’s not just that big cities don’t make “big media” liberal, it isn’t liberal at all.

There is no need for newspaper reporters to become “progressive” to know a specific beat or region. After all, it is difficult to define what the “socially progressive laws” are of doing the crime blotter.  Nor are market forces at play. While there was a time when liberal papers competed with conservative ones, now most cities in the country have only one newspaper and those publication doesn’t have a deeply ideological slants at all. Instead, their editorials are rather milquetoast statements filtered by corporate ownership on high. When papers were owned by idiosyncratic moguls, they had unique voices. Now, when owned by faceless corporations, they don’t say much.

The Kochs acquiring the Tribune Company’s papers would put them in the hands of idiosyncratic moguls, but it’s not the era of the mogul anymore nor are the Kochs the right newspaper tycoons. After all, Los Angeles, Chicago and Baltimore are cities with little in common, save for the fact that they don’t share the Koch Brothers’s far right brand of libertarian politics. If the Kochs merely change the tenor of the editorials, no one would notice—after all, a dwindling number of papers have fulltime editorial boards in the 21st century. But, if they further lowered the quality of the reporting, it would end the paper.

Cities like Detroit and New Orleans don’t have print newspapers seven days a week. In the past, the Kochs would drive readers to other papers. Now, they might simply drive them to the Internet. The Kochs have ample money to hire and fire who they want and if they acquire the Tribune newspapers without acquiring the rather few scruples needed to be a successful newspaperman (after all, Rupert Murdoch can do it), they may kill print journalism in much of the United States.

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