Andrew Ferguson devotes his latest “Press Man” column (not yet posted online) in Commentary magazine to the fear among some liberal media types linked to the prospect that Charles and David Koch are considering a purchase of the Los Angeles Times.
The progressive case against the Kochs isn’t any more coherent than the rhetoric. It’s odd to go all weepy about the encroaching corruptions of money at the Times, a newspaper operated for more than a century by rapacious capitalists who have ruthlessly knee-capped any competitor threatening their de facto monopoly on one of the world’s juiciest markets. The progressives praise the efforts of [Eli] Broad and his comrades for their ambition to place the newspaper on a nonprofit footing, because profit-seeking cripples the fearless gathering of news. Then they condemn the Kochs because the brothers might not care if the paper turns a profit. The anti-Koch forces extol the benefits of local owners, who in the progressive view are somehow purer than faraway owners like the Kochs, without ties to the city. Yet history shows — really, you could look it up — that local owners are much more likely to yield to compromising pressures from a community’s rich and powerful.
At bottom, of course, the case against the Kochs has nothing to do with profit or even newsgathering. It’s about the preservation of a special kind of monopoly — a uniformity in the assumptions and prejudices that guide the city’s ruling class, especially its scribblers. Much of the hostility is based on a simplification of the Kochs’ views. As Reason’s Matt Welch and Jack Shafer, of Reuters, both pointed out, the Kochs are more accurately described as libertarians than conservatives. They show no interest in the social issues that preoccupy large parts of the conservative coalition — David, for example, has cheerfully proclaimed his support for gay marriage. They are deregulators and free marketers all the way down. They’ve aligned themselves with the Republican Party for a reason that no progressive can acknowledge: Of the two parties, Republicans are far more ideologically diverse. The GOP tolerates libertarian views of the social issues much more easily than the Democrats abide libertarian views of economic life.
