Koch Brothers Effort to Buy LA Times Protested By Hundreds

On Thursday morning, hundreds of Los Angeles-area citizens will rally together outside the house of Bruce Karsh, Chairman of the Tribune Company, which owns and operates various news publications across the nation, most notably the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

The politics that they’re looking to reject, of course, are the scary, ultra-conservative, libertarian politics of the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, who are poised to buy the rights to the Tribune Co. publications. The west coast group of activists will be following in the footsteps of the dozens of Chicago citizens who protested against the business move outside the Tribune Tower in Illinois last week.

While the protest is highly encouraged, as all peaceful protest should be, the irony behind the act that the protesters are trying desperately to conceal is severely detrimental to its cause.

Three members from the Los Angeles City Council have already proposed a motion at the political level to oppose the sale of the Times to any owner seeking to turn “LA’s metropolitan daily into an ideological mouthpiece.” This is the same supposedly ideologically objective paper that previously urged a repeal of the Second Amendment in its editorial column, mind you:

You will not feel safe, your children will not be safe, until there are almost no guns on the streets and in the homes. No guns, period, except for those held by law enforcement officers and a few others, including qualified hunters and collectors. ... We must, as a nation, move toward a very different model, one that presumptively bars private citizens from owning a firearm unless they can demonstrate a special need and ability to do so. ... We think the time has come for Americans to tell the truth about guns. They are not for us; we cannot handle them. They kill people, our children included. It's time to get rid of them. Period.

According to UCLA Professor Tom Glosecrose, 18 of the 20 major news outlets in the United States are left-wing. He also argues that this media-bias gives Democrats an 8-10 point Electoral advantage.

Politics have successfully infiltrated the media. If Glosecrose’s studies are accurate, we’ve already lost unbiased journalism in the U.S. So what these protesters really aim to do is to keep the political influence of the media in question in alignment with their political ideologies.

The protesters tomorrow have every right to be there. They have every right to take their message to Karsh’s doorstep and get him to listen. But they cannot say that they wish to keep politics out of the media, just maybe the type of politics that they want to keep out.