March 28, 2024

Koch Brothers Making Play for Tribune’s Newspapers

The first two pieces of the strategy — educating grass-roots activists and influencing politics — were not surprising, given the money they have given to policy institutes and political action groups. But the third one was: media.

Other than financing a few fringe libertarian publications, the Kochs have mostly avoided media investments. Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

By early May, the Tribune Company is expected to send financial data to serious suitors in what will be among the largest sales of newspapers by circulation in the country. Koch Industries is among those interested, said several people with direct knowledge of the sale who spoke on the condition they not be named. Tribune emerged from bankruptcy on Dec. 31 and has hired JPMorgan Chase and Evercore Partners to sell its print properties.

The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion.

Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic.

One person who attended the Aspen seminar who spoke on the condition of anonymity described the strategy as follows: “It was never ‘How do we destroy the other side?’ ”

“It was ‘How do we make sure our voice is being heard?’ ”

Guests at the Aspen seminar included Philip F. Anschutz, the Republican oil mogul who owns the companies that publish The Washington Examiner, The Oklahoman and The Weekly Standard, and the hedge fund executive Paul E. Singer, who sits on the board of the political magazine Commentary. Attendees were asked not to discuss details about the seminar with the press.

A person who has attended other Koch Industries seminars, which have taken place since 2003, says Charles and David Koch have never said they want to take over newspapers or other large media outlets, but they often say “they see the conservative voice as not being well represented.” The Kochs plan to host another conference at the end of the month, in Palm Springs, Calif.

At this early stage, the thinking inside the Tribune Company, the people close to the deal said, is that Koch Industries could prove the most appealing buyer. Others interested, including a group of wealthy Los Angeles residents led by the billionaire Eli Broad and Ronald W. Burkle, both prominent Democratic donors, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, would prefer to buy only The Los Angeles Times.

The Tribune Company has signaled it prefers to sell all eight papers and their back-office operations as a bundle. (Tribune, a $7 billion media company that also owns 23 television stations, could also decide to keep the papers if they do not attract a high enough offer.)

Koch Industries is one of the largest sponsors of libertarian causes — including the financing of policy groups like the Cato Institute in Washington and the formation of Americans for Prosperity, the political action group that helped galvanize Tea Party organizations and their causes. The company has said it has no direct link to the Tea Party.

This month a Koch representative contacted Eddy W. Hartenstein, publisher and chief executive of The Los Angeles Times, to discuss a bid, according to a person briefed on the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversation was private. Mr. Hartenstein declined to comment.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/business/media/koch-brothers-making-play-for-tribunes-newspapers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Murrey Marder, Reporter Who Took On Joe McCarthy, Dies at 93

But by another, more important standard, Mr. Marder, who died on March 11 at 93, was an ace. In nearly 40 years at The Washington Post, he embodied the role of public watchdog, becoming an emblem of meticulous, thorough news gathering when his persistence in laying bare the lies and exaggerations of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade helped bring McCarthy to ruin.

Mr. Marder was fresh from a Nieman fellowship at Harvard — which he had earned covering the perjury trial of Alger Hiss, his first big assignment at The Post — when he took over what came to be called “the Red beat.”

Beginning in February 1950, when he declared that more than 200 Communists were working in the State Department, McCarthy, the Republican junior senator from Wisconsin, gained headlines and power in his campaign to thwart what he called the Communist infiltration of American life. Re-elected to the Senate in 1952, he conducted hearing after hearing and hurled flimsily sourced accusations at American citizens.

Mr. Marder and Phil Potter of The Baltimore Sun covered McCarthy with skepticism, insisting that he substantiate his accusations. In the fall of 1953 McCarthy held hearings at Fort Monmouth, N.J., on suspicions that a wartime spy ring, allegedly created by Julius Rosenberg, who had been executed in June, still existed within the Signal Corps. Cooperating with McCarthy, the Army suspended 33 civilian employees.

Mr. Marder did not believe any of it; his legwork turned up evidence that McCarthy had inflated minor security cases that the Army had investigated and that no espionage was involved in any of them. Attending a news conference after his articles appeared, Mr. Marder relentlessly questioned the secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, forcing him to admit that McCarthy’s spying allegations were bogus and that the Army had known it.

“There was nothing flashy about a Marder story, no one ever accused him of deft or imaginative prose, but he was above all else careful and fair,” David Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book about the news media, “The Powers That Be.” He added:

“Doggedly, he worked out a means of covering McCarthy. Hold him to the record. Not just what he said yesterday, but the day before and the week before. Explain not just this charge, but what happened to the previous charges. Give the people on the other side, the accused or the semi-accused, a chance to answer. Always explain the meaning of the charges. Try above all not to be a megaphone for McCarthy. Expose him to maximum scrutiny.”

The Fort Monmouth episode set the stage for the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, called to investigate a set of charges leveled by McCarthy against the Army and vice versa. The hearings were televised, McCarthy came across as a loudmouthed dissembler and bully, and his popularity plummeted. The next year the Senate censured him.

Murrey Marder was born on Aug. 8, 1919, in Philadelphia, where his father ran a grocery. After graduating from high school he took a job as a copy boy at The Evening Public Ledger, and he became a reporter at 21. During World War II he served in the Marines as a combat correspondent and worked on the corps’ news desk in Washington.

He joined The Post in 1946. In 1957 he opened the paper’s first foreign bureau, in London, and became the chief diplomatic correspondent. In 1964 he wrote about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which precipitated the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, and in 1971 he wrote articles based on the Pentagon Papers.

He retired from The Post in 1985. He died of a hemorrhagic stroke in Washington, leaving no survivors from his immediate family, his nephew Steve Marder said.

After his wife, the former Frances Sokoloski, died in 1996, Mr. Marder used his retirement savings — $1.3 million in Washington Post stock — to help start the Nieman Foundation’s Watchdog Project, which is devoted to examining and supporting public-interest journalism.

Bill Kovach, a former Nieman curator who was a Washington bureau chief for The New York Times and editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said Mr. Marder had been an unsung hero of journalism.

“The pop historians have filled pages of praise for Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, his fellow creator of ‘See It Now,’ as the ones who exposed Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy as the malicious liar that he was,” Mr. Kovach wrote after Mr. Marder’s death. “But the pop historians were and are wrong — dead wrong. Murrey Marder was the pathfinder.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/us/murrey-marder-reporter-who-took-on-joe-mccarthy-dies-at-93.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

DealBook: Tribune Hires Investment Banks to Weigh a Sale of Its Top Newspapers

The presses at The Los Angeles Times in 2009.Ric Francis/Associated PressThe presses at The Los Angeles Times in 2009.

8:18 p.m. | Updated

The Tribune Company has hired investment banks to weigh a sale of its top newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, the media conglomerate said on Tuesday.

The company, which emerged from bankruptcy late last year, has retained JPMorgan Chase and Evercore Partners as advisers, said Gary Weitman, a spokesman for Tribune.

Mr. Weitman said the move was prompted by unsolicited expressions of interest in the newspapers from various suitors.

“Hiring outside financial advisers will help us determine whether that interest is credible, allow us to consider all of our options and fulfill our fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders and employees,” he said in a statement.

Tribune’s move came as little surprise. Speculation had been swirling around the media industry for some time that a number of potential suitors had emerged for the company’s holdings. That group may include News Corporation, which is in the process of spinning off its newspaper holdings from its far bigger Fox Entertainment operations. The new company may consider acquisitions as a way to gain more clout and reduce costs.

Another potential buyer is Aaron Kushner, who owns a group of newspapers that includes The Orange County Register in California and has been vocal about his interest in the Tribune properties.

Peter Liguori, Tribune’s recently appointed chief executive, told The Los Angeles Times last month that he had not ruled out a sale of the company’s newspaper brands, but that he was not “going into this job with a fire-sale sign.”

Tribune is expected to hold on to its newspapers, which also include The Baltimore Sun and The Hartford Courant, if the price offered is not high enough.

A sale would help Tribune focus more on its bigger broadcasting operation, which includes WGN America and about two dozen stations across the country. Mr. Liguori himself is a television veteran, having worked in News Corporation’s television division and at Discovery Communications.

Tribune filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008, just one year after it was taken over by the real estate developer Samuel Zell in a deal that relied heavily on borrowed money.

The company emerged from Chapter 11 protection on Dec. 31, under the control of the investment firms Oaktree Capital and Angelo, Gordon Company, as well as JPMorgan.

It left bankruptcy in relatively healthy financial condition, reporting about $9.8 billion in assets and $1.3 billion in liabilities as of Dec. 30.

Evercore was hired this month to advise The New York Times Company as it considers a sale of its New England media assets, principally The Boston Globe.

Shares in Tribune, which trade over the counter, were up 1.3 percent on Tuesday, at $53.50. That values the media conglomerate at about $3 billion.

News of the hiring of the banks was reported earlier by CNBC.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/27/2013, on page B5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Tribune Company Hires Investment Banks to Weigh a Sale of Its Top Newspapers.

Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/tribune-said-to-hire-bankers-to-sell-newspapers/?partner=rss&emc=rss