Then the Times' corporate parent, the Chicago-based Tribune Publishing, hired an LAPD-connected billionaire and wannabe politician, Austin Beutner, as publisher for the Times. Beutner appears to have midwifed a deal in which the LAPD patrolmen's $16.4 billion union retirement fund moved to a firm that invested eight figures into a fund containing Tribune stock. (Given that newspaper stocks in general and Tribune specifically had been losing value, it's a fair assumption that the buy was more about influence than taking care of retired LAPD officers.) Within weeks -- and explicitly against Times rules -- the same union issued an award to Beutner for his "support [of] the LAPD in all that they do."
Beck asked his friend Beutner to use ginned-up "evidence" to fire and smear me; Beutner, the cop-award winner, complied, and even stayed the course after the truth came out and I was vindicated. My defamation case against Beutner and the Times is in court.
The Times never disclosed to its readers about Tribune's business relationship with the LAPD union.
It's a level of corruption that would make Al Capone blush. Yet it's perfectly legal in the United States for a police union to buy a newspaper. Indeed, the same union bought part of the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2009 -- and leveraged its ownership to ask that the U-T fire critics of the police.
Come to think of it, isn't it weird that a company with more than half a billion dollars in business with the CIA is allowed to own a major news organization like the Post?
Given the Trump Administration's attacks against "fake news" and the news media, it may seem paradoxical to suggest government action as a solution to the corruption of the news media as we're seeing at outlets like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. But the evidence is clear. Outrageous deals such as those between the Post's owner and the CIA and between the Times' owner and the LAPD amount to government censorship of the news media -- a violation of the First Amendment's fundamental principle.
Congress should prohibit such arrangements.
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