NEWHOUSE IS PEOPLE TOO
[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0.3077em 0.3077em 0em 0em; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]NEWHOUSE IS PEOPLE TOO[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0em 0em 0.3077em 0.3077em; background-color: #f4f4f4; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]...
Over and over you hear the baffled observation that the paper made draconian cuts in staff despite the fact that it was making money and had one of the most desirable saturation rates of any American newspaper. I have not heard anyone relate this to the war on the middle class being waged around the country by right-wing radicals using the Republican Party, the political wing of corporate America. The attack on public workers by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is just another phase of this all-out war by the rich elite against average American workers. Americans are supposed to recoil at the notion of class warfare, but when it’s oligarchs attacking the support system for the poor and fast-disappearing middle class, what else are you going to call it?
The Times-Picayune wasn’t a union shop, so there was little the employees there could do when faced with firing. Unfortunately, the lack of a union prevents workers from standing together, and we’re already seeing some of the employees who’ve been retained pushing back against a boycott of Newhouse editorial product. Of course, a union at the T-P probably wouldn’t have helped much anyway. I was in the Newspaper Guild and on staff at the New York Post when Rupert Murdoch assumed control of the paper for the second time in 1994. His first move was to fire everyone on staff, eliminating the union by fiat.
Just as Walker eliminated collective bargaining with a wave of his Koch Brothers-made magic wand, outspending his opponent 7-1, Newhouse doused an effective investigative voice in American journalism by hobbling the T-P. Management went after the newsroom and the paper’s best reporters like a predator going for a kill shot. Triumphs in journalism like the Times-Picayune‘s coverage of the federal flood; its ability to uncover vast misallocations of recovery resources; its pieces on the Danziger Bridge and the prison system; and its coverage of the misdeeds that led up to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico will almost certainly disappear under the flashing pixels of nola.com with its emphasis on celebrity journalism and feel-good social networking. The fact that Katy Reckdahl, one of the paper’s best reporters, was among the first to be cut tells you all you need to know.
Whoever controls the information people are exposed to controls the national political dialogue and by extension the democratic process itself, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizen’s United case that allows unlimited campaign contributions from anonymous donors, all of whom stand to benefit financially from getting their chosen political frontmen elected. Murdoch’s Fox news is a blatant Republican propaganda machine. The radio giant Clear Channel, which controls the biggest radio talk shows in the country, is owned by Bain Capital, the company started by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Bain Capital acquired Clear Channel and 850 radio stations in partnership with the Boston-based investment firm Thomas H. Lee partners (THL). Though Romney is no longer “with” Bain, his ongoing financial relationship with the firm resembles the cozy deal Dick Cheney had with Haliburton. Clear Channel syndicates the far-right talk-radio shows hosted by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage.
...
http://www.offbeat.com/2012/06/20/newhouse-is-people-too/#.T-SxOTwu3wQ.facebook
A Good Read about the demise of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. 
