AP Photo/Reed Saxon
Like most American newspapers, The Los Angeles Times has had a rough go of it. Over the past 20 years, as readers abandoned the print edition either outright or for digital versions, ad revenues decreased. Those revenues shriveled even more as the share of English-speaking residents in the L.A. metro area declined, and were altogether tanked by a steady stream of idiotic business decisions from the paper's owners once the Otis Chandler wing of the Chandler family lost control of the paper to its benighted cousins in 1990. Since then, the paper's owners-successively, the Let's-Cash-Out wing of the Chandler family; the Chicago-based Tribune Corporation to whom the Chandlers sold the paper; real estate wheeler-dealer Sam Zell, who bought Tribune with other people's (including its employees') money and plunged it into bankruptcy (and who holds the distinction of being the only newspaper owner in recorded history who viscerally hated newspapers, reporters, and editors); and the hedge fund guys who inherited Tribune when it came out of bankruptcy-have had but one solution to the Times's dwindling revenues: Cut.
Over the past 15 years, the paper's editorial staff has been reduced from 1,200 to 500, and the Chicago-based management is now trying to shed an additional 80 reporters, editors, photographers, and artists-reportedly, the more senior ones with correspondingly higher salaries-by offering them now-or-never buy-outs. Once a paper whose page count and Pulitzers rivaled The New York Times's, today's Times is an anemic version of its former self, and with each successive cut, both the paper and the number of its readers have grown steadily smaller. Great editors-John Carroll, Dean Baquet-have quit the paper rather than acquiesce in Chicago's incessant demands for cuts, but the cuts have continued unabated.
Since Tribune emerged from bankruptcy a couple of years ago, a movement of Los Angeles civic leaders has formed to try to persuade the paper's Chicago-based board to sell the Times to an Angeleno committed to rebuilding what had once been a source of civic pride. This is remarkable in itself: L.A. is a city with few institutional leaders or 1 percenters who bestir themselves in the cause of civic betterment, much less come together to formulate a common position. It is a mark of how painful the deterioration of the Times has become that such a group could even form.
Over the past several years, a succession of possible Times purchasers have come forth as well-media mogul David Geffen, supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle, and, most persistently, homebuilding-and-insurance gazillionaire Eli Broad. At times, Broad has functioned as the city's one-man civic elite-raising the funds to build Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, supplying the funds to save the city's Museum of Contemporary Art, and recently opening his own museum next door to the Disney and across the street from MOCA. Broad has also endowed all manner of medical research, management schools, and education reform efforts both in L.A. and throughout the country.
To date, the Tribune board has spurned Broad's offers to buy the paper, though he reportedly continues to try to come up with a deal it won't refuse. Until recently, he had an inside ally-Austin Beutner, the investment banker turned mayoral aide turned, in 2014, Times publisher. This September, however, after just one year on the job, Tribune abruptly fired Beutner, for such presumed heresies as encouraging Broad's offers and affirming the value of a large and talented editorial staff.
Undaunted, Broad, backed by the civic leaders, is apparently still endeavoring to buy the paper and, just possibly, return Beutner to his perch.
Would that be a happy ending for the Times and its city? Not necessarily.
Problem is, though Broad has not succeeded in buying the paper and Beutner has left the building, they have nonetheless managed to plunge the Times into serious ethical dilemma, compromising its well-earned reputation for unconflicted reporting of the news.
When Beutner was publisher, he established a new reporting initiative that hired more staff to increase the paper's already substantial coverage of local education. The initiative, as Paul Farhi reported Friday in The Washington Post, was funded by $800,000 from a group of foundations focused on education, including the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the K&F Baxter Family Foundation.
Both foundations are major supporters of supplanting L.A.'s public schools with charter schools-indeed, the Broad Foundation has recently developed a proposal to create an additional 260 charter schools across the L.A. school district, which would essentially place half the students currently in public schools into charters. It is, to put it mildly, a controversial proposal. As well, Frank Baxter, of the Baxter Family Foundation, is a board member of Alliance charter schools, a growing L.A. chain whose efforts to thwart its teachers from unionizing were enjoined last week by a court order, after the state's public employees labor board ruled that the chain's practices towards its pro-union teachers appeared flagrantly abusive. (You can follow Rachel M. Cohen's ongoing account of the Alliance battle here and here.)
Whatever possessed Beutner to accept funding from partisans in an ongoing battle that the Times was already covering in its news pages and editorializing about in its opinion pages-and not just funding, but funding specifically targeted at covering that very battle? Would he have accepted funding from either Catholic Charities or Planned Parenthood to bolster the Times's coverage of the battles over abortion and reproductive rights? Would he have accepted funding from the local teachers union, or a pro-union foundation, to cover the same beat that the Broad and Baxter money are now funding? I suspect he would not-and that what made the Broad/Baxter money different in Beutner's eyes was that he felt comfortable with their positions, and probably believed that their commitment to charter schools was widely shared throughout the city's power elites-of which Beutner was a member in very good standing.
While still at the paper, Beutner did something that his publisher predecessors hadn't done for several decades: He took an active role in editorial board meetings that determined the paper's position on several issues. As publisher, that was his right. But accepting funds to cover the very beat in which his funders were inevitably going to be the subject of the paper's coverage was not his right, and is profoundly damaging to the Times. It inflicts the appearance of a conflict of interest on every local education story or opinion piece the Times runs.
As a longtime Los Angeles journalist before I moved to D.C., I know a number of the Times's reporters and editors who cover this topic on the news and opinion pages. They are among the most principled journalists I've ever known. Howard Blume, my onetime colleague at the L.A. Weekly, included an acknowledgment of the Broad Foundation's funding of Times education coverage in the story in which he broke the news about the Foundation's plan to increase the number of charter schools. Howard's work aside, it's not clear that the paper's management felt such disclaimers were even necessary until the Post story ran last Friday. Presumably, such disclaimers will now have to accompany the scores of stories about the future of L.A. schools that Howard and his peers will be turning out over the next several years, to the point where the disclaimers will become something of a standing joke. Howard and his paper need this like a hole in the head.
None of this augurs well for the Times should Broad succeed in purchasing it, whether or not he returns Beutner to the publisher's suite. Compromising the Times's reputation by creating the appearance of a conflict of interest in its reporting isn't what champions of restoring the Times to pre-eminence are looking for in a post-Trib owner. But the longer the Times remains in the Trib's control, the smaller and more inadequate this once-world-class paper will become, and Broad remains the most likely suspect to buy the Times and rebuild it.
The question, then, is how he'd rebuild it. Would it be in the spirit of its great publisher, Otis Chandler, who assembled a superb news staff that covered the city and the world free from the pressures of outside interests? (Or inside interests: Chandler's right-wing cousins objected mightily to many stories, but he absorbed their complaints himself and never let it affect the paper's coverage.) Or would it be in the spirit of Otis's predecessors, who created a paper that was travesty of journalism, that routinely slanted its stories to promote its owners' commercial interests and political beliefs?
Let's hope it isn't necessary to destroy The L.A. Times in order to save it.
