Dropping mortar round after mortar round of insubordination on their bosses at the Chicago-based Tribune Co., Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet and Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson have fought them to a stalemate. The daring duo refused—in the news pages of their own paper—to make the staff cuts ordered by the barbarians from the Midwest. The staff naturally applauded this public act of resistance, which succeeded in enlisting members of the city’s ruling elite in the insurrection: The city fathers and mothers wrote an angry letter to Tribune’s brass expressing their view that the Times isn’t just a newspaper but a “public trust” with a “responsibility to serve the community.”
Instead of firing Baquet and Johnson, which everybody expected, the Tribune bosses have changed the subject, according to today’s New York Times. They’ve set the issue aside for a meeting of the Tribune board to deal with the equally insubordinate Chandler family. In 2000, the Chandlers sold the Times and the media empire to which it belonged to Tribune, making themselves Tribune’s largest stockholder. The family isn’t livid about budget cuts but rather Tribune’s depressed stock price, and the remedy they seek is the company’s breakup.
The least likely resolution to the stalemate would be the sale of the Times to one of the three local billionaires who have petitioned Tribune’s board for the right to buy it: media mogul David Geffen (net worth, $4.5 billion); supermarket buyout guy Ron Burkle ($2.3 billion); and builder-investor Eli Broad ($5.5 billion). I write “least likely,” but what do I know? I thought it inconceivable that Tribune would allow two executives to mutiny and live.
On the very, very, very long shot that Tribune sells its way out of its Los Angeles Times nightmare, what sort of owner would each of these aspiring newspaper saviors be? The track record of the filthy rich who acquire newspapers as playthings or as business propositions is not good. Mortimer Zuckerman, whose hunger for New York status motivated him to buy New York’s Daily News, doesn’t really have the heart or temperament for the tabloid war he’s in with the New York Post. Wendy McCaw has made herself a national joke with her management of the Santa Barbara News-Press. And if you understand what Philip Anschutz’s master plan is for the free dailies he runs in San Francisco, Washington, and Baltimore—beyond creating new forms of litter—please tell me.
Our most eager Los Angeles Times suitor is David Geffen. A 1993 New York Times profile attests to his generosity, a quality that Baquet and Johnson would surely appreciate. Geffen gave his longtime secretary 1 percent of the sale of his record company upon her retirement, which worked out to $5 million. But he’s also so parsimonious that he came to believe that owning a beachfront house in Malibu gave him title to the entire Pacific Ocean. Geffen pledged to provide public access to the beach in front of his property in exchange for California Coastal Commission permits to remodel and expand his residence but took 22 years to make good on the promise.
He possesses a Tribune-esque personality, with a vindictive streak so broad that even his friends talk openly about it. “David will do anything for you if you’re his friend,” movie producer Howard Rosenman told the New York Times. “But if you’re his enemy, well, you might as well kill yourself.”
Enemies who don’t kill themselves and who were once Geffen’s friends have a shot at becoming a Geffen friend again, according to Tom King, who wrote a biography of the mogul in 2000. This sort of inconsistent consistency is common to many newspaper owners. King captured Geffen’s dualistic nature in a 2000 comment to the Los Angeles Times: “On one hand, David repels people, and on the other hand, he draws them in.” Zuckerman and McCaw, on the other hand, seem only to repel people.
As the McCaw catastrophe illustrates, journalists expect owners to pay the bills and keep their paws off the newsroom. Of course owners almost always fiddle around with their papers—why else own one?—but the smarter ones do it subtly. How would the vengeful Geffen react to negative Times coverage of his buddies in the Democratic Party, the art world, financial circles, and Hollywood? According to today’s New York Times story, Geffen has told friends he’d be satisfied with a 5 percent return on his investment at the Los Angeles Times compared with the 20 percent margin it’s alleged to earn Tribune now. How long would Geffen feel that way? How about when inflation rises to 4 percent? It would be wiser to give Geffen his own column than the keys to the Los Angeles Times.
Ron Burkle likes to party. So do journalists. He likes to trap his tormenters with gotcha traps, as he did with Jared Paul Stern. So do journalists. He allegedly hired a private investigator to spy on his ex-wife, according to a report in the Los Angeles Business Journal. (He denies it.) Hewlett-Packard hired private investigators to spy on journalists. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
Unlike David Geffen, who mostly wants to run his mouth, Burkle has actually taken a flyer at the vanity press-mogul thing before, attempting to purchase the dregs of the Knight Ridder breakup this year. He tried to bring an NFL franchise to Los Angeles and owns part of the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, which is totally silly but makes him no sillier than Tribune (owners of the Chicago Cubs) and the New York Times Co. (part owners of the Boston Red Sox).
Southern California is the most pro-labor market in the nation, and not only has Burkle marched with the farm workers, but he’s adored by the union president he negotiated against when he owned local supermarkets. “He’s probably the best employer we ever dealt with,” Ricardo Icaza told the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe if he wins the Times, he’ll bring unions to that famously nonunion shop.
On the downside, many, if not most, of Burkle’s nonsupermarket ventures tank. The Chronicle notes that besides the failed NFL bid, Burkle blew dough on three dot-bombs. Burkle identifies heavily with Democrats, chumming with Willie Brown and John Burton, donating to the campaigns of Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Antonio Villaraigosa, and throwing a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton. He’s also best buddies with Bill Clinton. Compared with Burkle, David Geffen is bipartisan. Could he resist imposing his politics on the paper?
Ultimately Burkle only wants to date the Los Angeles Times, not marry it, because he doesn’t have the scratch to purchase it outright (estimated valuation of the Times, $2 billion and northward). His fortune stands at a mere $2.3 billion, according to Forbes, so he’d need partners, and as the Chandler family is teaching Tribune, partners can be trouble.
Eli Broad ranks as the screwiest of the three Los Angeles Times suitors. Eli, you’re 73! You don’t need the heartache of owning a newspaper! Drive out to Malibu and trade a few of your Lichtensteins to Geffen for one of his de Koonings.
Broad’s problem is that he’s a philanthropist who operates like a businessman. He gives money to museums and schools and then insists on tinkering with the operations. The nerve! In 2001, the Los Angeles Times counted the many Broad tentacles snaking their way through the Los Angeles arts establishment and asked, “how much Broad is too much Broad? Does the city’s wealthiest and most outspoken patron support arts institutions, or control them, just by being Broad?”
Broad and Burkle, who are friends, might partner to buy the paper. How about David? When the Los Angeles Times handicapped the three potential owners in the middle of the summer, it reported that “Broad, 73, and Geffen are said to have a chilly relationship,” which means the three would never unite like the DreamWorks SKG troika.
What would Broad’s L.A. broadsheet look like? The New York Times interviewed him in June and reported:
If the real estate billionaire Eli Broad had his way, the Los Angeles Times would run more photographs of donors at charity events. There would be fewer stories on movies and more about the city’s museums and classical arts. And it would champion civic projects, becoming, in his view, the glue to unite a diverse and fractured city.
Ewwwww!!!
Broad doesn’t really want to buy the Los Angeles Times, he wants his foundation to hold hands with other foundations to join together to run it as a daily philanthropy. This arrangement would have limited appeal to journalists who already think that their low pay makes them donors to their bosses’ causes.
The idea of nonprofit ownership isn’t completely ridiculous. A foundation owns and runs the respected St. Petersburg Times, but it was set up by its last owner and is guided by journalistic principles, as opposed to the promote-the-arts-and-do-good-for-the-community ones advocated by Broad. Alicia C. Shepard cites the Anniston Star as another good example of a foundation-run newspaper in a recent piece about nonprofit for, of all places, the Chicago Tribune. Over in England, an endowment finances the Guardian. But Broad’s proposal 1) promises a dull newspaper that not even his circle would want to read and 2) includes way too many cooks who want to be the top chef. A boardroom battle pitting Los Angeles philanthropist against Los Angeles philanthropist would be Armageddon compared with the current Chandler family rumble with Tribune.
The least bad candidate for Los Angeles Times owner turns out to be Tribune. I know they’re perfect Satans, but they’re the Satans journalists understand. At least they know something about running newspapers. Here’s hoping that Tribune cancels the contracts they’ve put out on the lives of Baquet and Johnson, a reasonable budget is advanced, and everybody out in L.A. just learns to get along.
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Research assistance by Christopher Beam. Jeans by Levi. Shoes by Alden (Chukka Boot Shell Cordovan #7). Hair by Daniel’s of McLean. Send e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
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