The Los Angeles Times is up for sale, and there are super-wealthy conservative bidders. Get the popcorn out and watch the liberals squeal.
The hilarious kickoff came when two leftist collectives -- the Daily Kos website and the California-based Courage Campaign Institute -- set out to buy an ad in the LA Times to protest the Koch brothers pondering a bid.
I kid you not, the ad began: "WE NEED NEWS, NOT MORE SPIN." This would assume that today's Los Angeles Times -- which just endorsed Obama's re-election -- is an oasis of objectivity in a desert of media bias. They were outraged when the Times used their owner's prerogative and refused to run the ad.
The Koch brothers are unqualified to own a newspaper, according to this ad. Why? Because they're conservative: "They bankroll the Tea Party. They deny global warming. They buy politicians and bust unions."
Michael Bloomberg bankrolls the anti-gun lobby. He "buys politicians" in that cause: He just spent $2.2 million in Chicago for a barrage of ads to beat gun-rights Democrat Debbie Halvorson in the House race to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. He's even been accused of "union-busting." And he's presently the mayor of the nation's largest city. The Left hasn't run any ads against his qualifications to run Bloomberg Media, have they?
This is also funny because the Daily Kos crowd serves up a daily diet of counter-factual radical spin and nonsense, such as how the tea party is a gaggle of racist Nazis. They just argued Fox News was a "clear and present danger to America" because they weren't running enough live coverage of President Obama being applauded by supporters in Israel.
The Kos crowd has argued the liberal media are completely worthless in defending the Left's agenda. "This supposedly Liberal media was the media that allowed Republicans to almost sink the Affordable Care Act," they've complained, and "allowed birthers to have the semblance of plausibility" (?) and "provided a false equivalence to Republicans holding the entire country hostage to get their will because of the president's refusal of draconian cuts to the social safety net."
The Koch brothers aren't the only potential bidders for the LA Times that upset the Left. Rupert Murdoch is also quite interested in buying the Times and the Chicago Tribune from the troubled Tribune Co. One might think that Murdoch's sober journalistic operation of The Wall Street Journal after he bought it might calm the panic. You would be wrong.
In front of a graphic reading "Murdochopoly," Fox-hating Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" announced the government has prevented cross-ownership of TV stations and newspapers in the past. "We wouldn't want Rupert Murdoch to be disproportionately powerful," said Jon Stewart. He fake-interviewed Murdoch with old video clips and asserted, "I assume you are asking us to waive our laws as a courtesy, so you don't have to break them."
Stewart ran clips of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and associated Murdoch himself with "rampant law-breaking." Then he cracked, "and now you'd like a waiver to have another whack at a newspaper."
Stewart was also alarmed that Murdoch would boast that his media properties could swing elections or change the political agenda. "The law against media consolidation was really written with people like you in mind," Stewart lectured. "Well, actually you in particular, because of how you like to do the exact thing the law was created to prevent."
Liberal hypocrites claim to be defenders of freedom of speech -- but they can't stand it when a conservative owns a media outlet because that's not freedom. That's somehow an abuse of capitalism and of democracy. Liberal hypocrites think conservatives use their media outlets for partisan gain, but they somehow can't admit they've all been happily broadcasting from Obama's back pocket for five years. Time Warner's magazine can name him "Man of the Year" and compare him to Jesus in a manger, but that's defined as "independent" journalism.
But Stewart's hyperbolic hypocrisy may be the richest, as he pronounces his verdict from the mountain top of Viacom, which Stewart's leftist compatriots at PBS's "Frontline" have ranked as the second largest media conglomerate in the world, larger than Murdoch's News Corp.
The Los Angeles Times used to be considered a Republican rag before Otis Chandler took the reins in 1960, just as the Chicago Tribune was considered a conservative outlet under Col. Robert McCormick. At worst, the papers would only be returning to their alleged old form. But liberals want to hold on to these media properties like they're captive nations, and they're going to fight it using the same phony argument that the conservative media make propaganda, and liberals just produce "news."
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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