You’ll Be Happy To Know That The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc. is NOT Owned By The Trib Corp
The Koch Brothers, unsuccessful in trying to buy an election, is now trying to buy the news media.
Those handsome devils are in the newspaper buying bidness now.
Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.
That pretty much leaves us, the Mexia Herald, and New Ulm Daily News and Recipe Journal as the last remaining vestiges of news not owned by crazy rightwingers. We’re holding out, y’all. Thelma is managing the books and she says that through our strong investments in velvet Elvis paintings and push-up bras, we can maintain publication for oh, I dunno, a decade or more.
We imagine that once the Koch brothers own everything in print, Glen Beck will become the voice of moderation. This is bad news for Verdelia’s digestive problems. In a disgusting display of operant conditioning, she upchucks every time she hears his name.
Thanks to Rick for the heads up.
Gee, the K*o*ch Brothers are tired of whittling their pencils on the front porch? The newspapers they want are just the tip of the icebergs. These days newspapers are diversified investments with radio and TV stations and other popular periodicals that you might never association with the newspapers. So its not just the print and the ink that enthralls them, its them TV stations they would happily reformat ala Faux News.
1The Dallas Morning News, a Belo subsidiary, is pretty conservative, like its advertisers, but it’s read by mostly liberals. Conservatives prefer talkers like Fox or Limbaugh.
2It is appropriate that they are buying into a business that will soon go the way of the buggy whip manufacturing industry. And as NY Times and WaPo have discovered, it is not as easy selling subscriptions to the electronic editions as it was to sell subscriptions to the dead-tree editions. News PAPER is a lost cause and electronic media is a much more competitive business. I hope they lose their shirts.
3Blech. We have house guests from Canada who are morally obligated to listen to my anti-Koch rants. It’s great having housebound company.
4I don’t think they are selling the TV stations as part of this deal.
Also the Koch brothers are quite moderate compared to Col. McCormick. Remember Dewey defeats Truman?
http://allthingsd.com/20121104/tuesday-is-election-night-be-careful-what-you-tweet/dewey-defeats-truman/
5The Koch billionaires are spawn of the founder of the John Birch Society. Their father got rich by selling US oil refining technology to the Soviets Probably against the laws at the time). Although the John Birch Society was laughed off the national stage in the 70s, Charles and David still practice what their dad preached and are hell-bent on stuffing their discredited ideas down our collective throats.
6There may never be a way to make them let up, besides waiting for them to die of old age and/or disease.
But if they succeed in buying the Baltimore Sun, circulation will drop off precipitously. But the subtle Faux Nooz slant to TeeVee may be more insidious.
Look how well it worked out for the Wall Street Journal after Rupert bought it. I mean Rupert didn’t put those ads for Viagra and dating hotline numbers on the front page—like we thought he would–or did he?
7What’s a newspaper?
8Newspaper?
Oh yeah…that’s that thing I used to read a long time ago in the olden days, back before they invented the telegraph and carrier pigeon. It had pictures, too, and people used to put it on the bottom of their birdcages.
9Good grief ! I write for the Dallas Morning News (PAPER). Yeah, it’s still paper and it still fetches up as litter for my elderly cat .
10But I treasure every word that appears there from every reporter, writer, and citizen who dares to put his or her thoughts on just about every subject in print.. . . . . not the ephemeral “print” of an online blog or news source. Hard copy.
Today is Earth Day ! Celebrate our newspapers ! Enjoy the news with a cup of coffee at breakfast or lunch. Then recycle the paper !
I wonder if the Koch brothers have heard of Earth Day?
If CISPA isn’t stopped, those newspaper buys might be a different story. It’s just one more area where the Koch Brothers hope to control what we see and hear.
I laugh now when the New York Times website tells me I’ve reached my monthly maximum of articles I can read online without paying them. All I have to do is google the subject, and anything I want pops up readily.
If the web doesn’t stay free and accessible, we’ll all be looking at life according to Kochs and Friends.
11One more thing…
Fight with us against #CISPA, which threatens online privacy. Let’s stop this terrible bill.
https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9048
12I’m sure that these people will not interfere with the news portion of their new toys — but the editorial pages will be turned over to new people recruited from Sir Rupert’s well-known Wall Street Urinal.
13Speaking of newspaper owners, remember Richard Scaifi. It only takes one pissant little man with a ton of money and one pissant little newspaper to do a lot of damage.
14Ellen Childress, if I offended you with my PAPER comment, I apologize. I did not mean to imply that the people who write and report for news organizations or the work they do was losing value. Only that the marketplace is changing. It is now a self serve cafeteria, not a box lunch. I choose not to pay for an Obit section because I don’t know any of the people listed. I choose not to pay for a classified ad section because I don’t want to buy the stuff they sell.
In a world where I receive and pay my bills without paper, the mail carriers suffer. I’m sorry. They are still valuable people but the market place does not always have a place for them. That’s also true for paper delivery people, full service gas station attendants, door-to-door salesmen, and most consumer electronics repair persons. The market, like nature is merciless, red in tooth and claw. But it does not determine value, only cost.
And to Crone, if you think Richard Scaife was evil, I suggest you look at Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. It was the origin of the famous Jewish Banker Conspiracy Theory of the Federal Reserve that is still being reported by Fox, Beck, and others of the idiot persuasion a hundred years later. “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.”
15Ralph, I am told that some people will always want their newspaper. The papers are aware that I will pay whatever they need to charge. I would be totally lost without my morning paper. If it is late, DH paces the floor until it comes. We also read several online.
We still mourn the passing of the Houston Post. The Houston Chronicle was not my first pick, but as long as the ownership does not go from bad to worse, it’ll have to do.
Richard Scaifi did one good thing. Paula Jones’s new nose is better than her old one.
16If it’s still true that “…the pen is mightier than the sword…” then those paranoid conservatives are building up quite an arsenal. Trouble is, they’ll also own the online versions with which to spew their poison.
17Crone, I’m sure you are right about people wanting hard copies, but newspapers make their money from advertising, not home delivery. Advertising rates are based on circulation. When the advertisers move to more efficient electronic media, the profit margin for hard copies will diminish.
But I believe that the most important factor is that my grandchildren, and yours if you have any, are not the least bit interested in hard copies. And when they reach my age they will look back at the newspaper as we look back at telegraphs. In WWII every woman who lost a husband or son received a telegram from the Defense Department. Seventy years later the telegraph is extinct.
18I’ve wondered what people with billions and billions of dollars find to do with all that money– once you have five or six big furnished houses in various climates and countries and a couple of cars for each one and a plane for traveling between them, what ELSE can you buy? I guess this is one answer.
19Wow, if ever there was an appeal for crowd-funding, this is it! Who cares about malaria, let’s get some rich smart person to buy up all the media in this country. (JK about the malaria…but come on, Bill & Melinda!).
20