Liberals at the Los Angeles Times have long enjoyed the
legacy of an eccentric publisher, Otis Chandler, the surfing scion
who set the paper on its leftward course in the 1960s and 1970s.
But now they find themselves under an eccentric less congenial to
their sensibilities — Sam Zell, who has fired more than 300
employees since assuming ownership of the paper earlier this
year.
In late July, disgruntled staffers unfurled a banner off the
paper’s building that said, “Zell Hell: Take back the Los
Angeles Times.”
Unlike Chandler, Zell has zero regard for the pieties of
mainstream journalism and made it clear early on that he found the
paper’s New-York-Times-of-the-West pretensions ridiculous
and boring. He has said openly that he doesn’t even bother to read
the paper unless he happens to be passing through L.A.
In a New Yorker profile last year, Zell described himself as an
“economic conservative” and confessed that he likes the columns of
Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks but thought the “rest of the
New York Times’s columnists are preposterous.” He had no
use for Hillary Clinton either, according to the piece: “At a
recent dinner party, the mention of Hillary Clinton’s name prompted
him to use a four-letter obscenity to describe her.”
Otis Chandler was known for showing up in sandals; Zell has been
known to saunter into meetings with bankers in a red polyester
jumpsuit. He offered up this sartorial musing to the New
Yorker: “if you dress oddly and you’re really good at what you
do you’re seen as eccentric; but if you’re not so good you’re seen
as a schmuck.”
Apparently Zell has all the quirkiness of Chandler without the
quasi-socialism. Times staffers must have shivered when
they read in the New Yorker profile that Zell once sent a
music box as a gift to friends and colleagues that played a song
deriding the Sarbanes-Oxley Act: “Sarbanes-Oxley/ They’ve got
moxie/ But for businesses/ Their act is toxic/ It’s not rocket
science/ We’re killing profits with compliance.”
Addressing a University of Hawaii business class a few years
back, Zell said: “The idea that somehow or other the business
community is full of all these greedy characters — you should see
the greed in teachers’ unions! You should see the greed in any
political organization!”
HAROLD MEYERSON, the Washington Post’s resident socialist,
harrumphed in June that the “Los Angeles
Times was a hyperpartisan, parochial broadsheet until Otis
Chandler became its publisher in 1960 and began the work of
transforming it into the paper of both record and insight that it’s
been for the past half-century….[I]n Zell, what Los Angeles has
is a visiting Visigoth, whose civic influence is about as positive
as that of the Crips, the Bloods and the Mexican mafia.”
Anybody who provokes hysterical outbursts from the Left like
this one can’t be all bad. Chandler’s era, by the way, was just as
“hyperpartisan” and “parochial” as the one that preceded it: he
just transferred the paper’s biases and cliquish concerns to
progressive circles.
Liberals at the Times can’t blame Zell for the paper’s
forgery fiasco in March. That was a product of the old regime: In
its Chandler-esque, PBS-style investigative mode, the paper tried
to explore the twists and turns of the “hip-hop world”; the results
were farcical.
The story titled “An Attack on Tupac Shakur Launched a Hip-Hop
War” was supposedly based on “FBI reports” that strengthened the
late Shakur’s claims that friends of Combs had arranged a 1994
shooting in New York as retaliation for Shakur’s refusal to sign
with Combs’s Bad Boy Records.
The only problem with the story was that the FBI reports had
been fabricated. Bloggers at smokinggun.com detected odd
misspellings and typeface in the claimed reports, and the
Times had to admit quickly that it swallowed a hoax
whole.
AFTER ZELL SEVERAL months ago decreed that reporters produce more
stories — because he considers the output of Times
staffers feeble compared to the output of their counterparts at his
other papers — critics warned this would diminish the “quality” of
the paper and risk its reputation for national and international
news. In other words, reporters wouldn’t have months to explore the
nuances of the hip-hop world or other topics Times editors
consider essential to the commonweal, such as its week-long
investigative series a few years back on female boxers.
Chandler and his liberal successors, desperate to win the
approval of East Coast liberals, had endlessly commissioned such
articles, boring local readers senseless. The paper acquired a
reputation as the “velvet coffin,” a place where liberal reporters
could leisurely cover topics of interest to them and their elite
friends but of little interest to the paper’s consumers.
Zell, for all his eccentricities, can at least see the oddness
of that anti-consumer policy for a newspaper. The paper’s troubles
didn’t begin with Zell; they were a long time coming, gestating
under another eccentric whose dilettantish vision for it was bound
to prove unprofitable and tiresome over time.
