Eyewitnesses can’t be expected to produce the best dispatches from a calamity. They’re usually too bound in bandages and cross-stitched with sutures to understand anybody’s pain but their own. That’s what sort of witness James O’Shea was to the disastrous purchase of the Los Angeles Times media empire in 2000 by the larger media empire that owned the Chicago Tribune.
From vantage points first in the Tribune newsroom, where he supervised coverage of the deal, then later in the Times newsroom, where Tribune Co. executives installed him as the paper’s top editor, O’Shea files a comprehensive report about the genesis of the deal, its rapid unwinding into a novel buyout by real estate wizard Sam Zell, and the final descent into bankruptcy where the combined company languishes today. But his book “The Deal From Hell” appears to make the reportorial mistake of coming to conclusions first and not letting the evidence, no matter how strong, shake him loose from them.
‘The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers’ by James O'Shea. (PublicAffairs. 395 pp. $28.99)
In O’Shea’s view, the cause of the undoing of the newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. and Times Mirror, as well as other newspapers in the country, has not been the Internet, or declining circulation, or long stories and “skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists.” It’s been the reaction of newspaper executives to those forces. He writes: “The lack of investment, the greed, the incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy, and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public’s are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today.”
The problem with O’Shea’s analysis is that important newspapers whose executives and owners weren’t stingy, greedy, incompetent, corrupt, hypocritical or arrogant have also been forced to reduce news pages, cut whole sections, close bureaus and decimate newsrooms. Both The Washington Post and the New York Times, long controlled by families that have taken immense pride in providing the public service of great journalism, have bent before recent market forces and made the cuts that O’Shea deplores. (Candor demands that I disclose that I work for Slate.com, which is owned by The Washington Post Company.)
When the Hearst Corp. paid $660 million for the San Francisco Chronicle and paid another publisher $66 million to take its San Francisco Examiner off its hands in 2000, it had no idea that its losses would be so great by the end of the decade that it would threaten to close the newspaper if employees didn’t make big concessions. Likewise, when McClatchy Newspapers, one of the best-run quality chains in the country, bought the larger Knight Ridder chain in 2006 for $4.5 billion (spinning off four newspapers it didn’t want for $1 billion), the owners were guided not by greed and corruption when they later dramatically cut staff and features at all of its titles. They were guided by an instinct to survive.
You don’t have to like the Tribune Co. number crunchers who put the deal together with Times Mirror — or their demand that profits come before Pulitzer prizes — to see that they thought their deal was going to make the combined company a lot of money. One of the lead Tribune dealmakers, John Madigan, predicted an additional $225 million in cash flow for the new enterprise.
Loading...
Comments