And, the likelihood now is that the Right will consolidate its dominance of the U.S. news media in the years ahead. In the very near future, some of the country's most prominent regional newspapers may fall under the control of right-wing ideologues like Rupert Murdoch or the Koch Brothers.
Koch Industries, a privately owned oil and gas giant which has provided the means for Charles and David Koch to lavishly fund libertarian think tanks and Tea Party organizations, is now exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company's eight regional newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and the Chicago Tribune, according to a report in the New York Times last Sunday.
By buying the Tribune newspapers, the Koch Brothers would give themselves another strong platform for delivering volleys of right-wing propaganda and wreaking havoc on political adversaries. I remember in my days covering Capitol Hill being told that what a congressman fears most is the determined opposition of the hometown newspaper.
Another expected bidder, at least for the Los Angeles Times, is media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who already owns Fox News and powerful newspapers in the United Kingdom and the United States, including the Wall Street Journal.
On the other side of the bidding are some liberal-oriented businessmen eyeing the Los Angeles Times, but it is not clear if they can compete with the fat wallets of the Koch Brothers and Murdoch. The New York Times reported that Koch Industries might have an edge in the competition because it would take over all eight newspapers at once.
Some on the Left mock the idea of investing in the "dinosaur" industry of newspaper publishing and question the value of owning even some of these prestigious names in American journalism. It is certainly true that those newspapers have declined in recent years due to poor management and shifts in advertising dollars.
But they still influence how people in those metropolitan areas learn about the world. The newspapers also help set the news agenda for local TV stations and bloggers. The Baltimore Sun, for instance, produced some of the most important reporting on the Reagan administration's human rights crimes in Central America, as well as publishing groundbreaking stories about domestic spying under George W. Bush.
Yes, some of these newspapers have disgraced themselves in recent decades, such as the Los Angeles Times' shameful attacks on journalist Gary Webb after he revived the Reagan administration's Contra-cocaine scandal in the late 1990s. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]
But Internet sites -- even ones like Consortiumnews.com with a strong interest in doing investigative journalism -- lack the financial resources and the editorial support to carry out those kinds of costly investigative projects, at least with any regularity.
Without major investments by honest Americans in honest journalism -- whether the Old Media of print or the New Media of electronics -- the United States will continue to drift into a made-up world of right-wing paranoia and pretend facts. And that is a danger for the entire planet.
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