In the middle of the past century, Los Angeles was both America's fastest-growing big city and a tight little town. Every year, miles of farmland were transformed into housing tracts for the immigrants who'd come west to work in the aerospace and auto plants and studios. And the immigrants weren't coming predominantly from the Midwest anymore; the new Angelenos included Jews from New York, African Americans from the South and Democrats from all over.
The people who ran the town were anything but thrilled by their new neighbors. A self-appointed committee of Republican businessmen vetted elected officials and fretted about the liberals in their midst. The police department treated blacks, Latinos and the occasional Democrat as enemy aliens. And the city's main newspaper, at first glance, seemed the adjunct of the right wing of the Republican Party. On closer inspection, it was the other way around: California conservatism, and its Republican standard-bearers, were the creation of the Los Angeles Times.
In election season, the Times anointed Republicans and didn't even cover Democrats. In the 1940s and '50s its political editor, Kyle Palmer, was the most influential GOP power broker in the state, widely credited with engineering the rise of Richard Nixon. In such things Palmer was the faithful servant of the Chandler family, which owned the Times and much of the city. Harry Chandler, the Times publisher from World War I through World War II, was the guy who'd bought up the arid, undeveloped San Fernando Valley, secretly engineered the deal to bring the Owens Valley's water hundreds of miles south to irrigate L.A., and pocketed hundreds of millions in the process. The role of his paper, as he saw it, was to bolster property values and Republican prospects.
In 1960, his 32-year-old grandson, Otis Chandler, was named publisher, and things began to change. Otis was something of a loner jock in loner sports (he was a shot-putter, weightlifter, surfer and auto racer), but he'd been around enough to know that the Times was a joke, and he was determined to make it one of America's best papers. In his first year as publisher, he increased the news budget by 45 percent; in his 20 years as publisher, he increased it tenfold. The Times had two news bureaus when he took over; when he left, it had 34. The paper began running longer, more analytic, more writerly stories. It began winning a slew of journalism awards.
The politics changed, too. In 1962, when Nixon ran for governor, the Times gave an equal number of column inches to Democratic incumbent Pat Brown, while its reporters peppered Nixon with questions so tough that he ended the campaign vowing to quit politics. One year before, with just a year on the job, Otis backed a five-part exposé of the lunatic-right John Birch Society and signed a front-page editorial excoriating the group, though his aunt and uncle had hosted a fundraiser for lead Bircher Robert Welch. To a rising chorus of extended Chandler family discontent, the Times began covering farm labor and inner-city poverty.
In short, the Times became a paper for a cosmopolitan metropolis, helping transform Los Angeles, in the incremental and indirect ways that a newspaper can shape a city, politically, culturally and intellectually. Many of Chandler's cousins were appalled, and after Otis stepped down as publisher in 1980, they sought to chip away at his legacy with a succession of management teams that tried to tone down the editorial pages and cut back on news coverage. It was in response to reporter complaints about such cutbacks in the early 1990s that one exasperated editor declared, "Otis has gone surfing, and he's not coming back."
He did come back, once, in 1999, to excoriate an outrageous deal that the paper's managers -- novices to journalism -- had cut with the new Staples Center, sharing revenue with the arena from a magazine supplement that the Times was devoting to its opening. Chandler called the city editor and dictated a statement terming the deal "unbelievably stupid and unprofessional." Soon, pictures of Otis sprang up all over the building. Shortly thereafter his cousins unloaded the paper to Chicago's Tribune Co., during whose tenure the Times, like virtually every other daily, has experienced declining readership, diminished reporting budgets and sinking morale in its newsroom. By the time he died on Monday morning at age 78, Chandler had achieved an almost iconic, Edward Murrow-like status, not just because he'd invested his resources and reputation in good, courageous journalism, but because his values seemed increasingly alien to much of today's news media. For all that, he leaves a newspaper, and a city, that he made less parochial, more sophisticated and by any measure, greater.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.