`Times-Mirror-Newsday''s Historic Mass Media Monopolization Drive

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

In the late 1970s, Times-Mirror-Newsday began to accelerate its mass media buying drive. Between 1977 and 1979, Times-Mirror-Newsday spent $500 million to acquire more media properties.

In the early 1990s, California’s Times-Mirror-Newsday attempted to cement mass media power by controlling all of the following mass media institutions:

The Los Angeles Times newspaper

Times-Mirror-Newsday/New York Newsday newspaper

The Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Evening Sun newspapers

The Hartford Courant newspaper

The Greenwich Times newspaper

The Stamford Advocate newspaper

KDFW-TV-Dallas

KTBC-TV-Austin, Texas

KTVU-TV-St. Louis

WVTUM-TV-Birmingham

Rhode Island Cable Television

Chillecotte Cablevision Inc.

The Los Angeles Times Syndicate

Broadcasting magazine

Popular Science magazine

Golf magazine

Sporting News

Field & Stream magazine

Yachting magazine

Military Forum magazine

Times-Mirror-Newsday also controlled Times-Mirror Land and Timber Company (which owns 272,000 acres of timberland) in the early 1990s, to reduce the business costs for obtaining the paper required by the conglomerate for its many newspapers.

Asked by Downtown in early 1991 whether the ownership by Times-Mirror of so many media properties tended to prevent a diversity of views from being published, then-New York Newsday Managing Editor Toedtman answered: “The Times-Mirror properties that I know of do not stifle diverse views.”

Besides Rockefeller & Company Director Clayton Frye Jr., Chandis Securities Director Otis Chandler and Bruce Chandler, the board of directors of Times-Mirror-Newsday also included the following U.S. Establishment figures in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

1. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Director Robert Erburu. Erburu was chairman of the Times-Mirror-Newsday board in the early 1990s, as well as a director of the company’s Tejon Ranch and the Times-Mirror Foundation.

2. Parsons Corporation Director F. Daniel Frost. Frost also directed Tejon Ranch and Avery International. The Parsons Corporation had special business interests in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s.

3. Southern California Edison/Carter Hawley Hale Stores/Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Director Walter Gerken. Gerken also was a director of the California Economic Development Organization in the early 1990s.

4. J. Paul Getty Trust President Harold Williams. Williams also was a Pan American Airways director and a regent of the University of California in the early 1990s.

The president of Times-Mirror-Newsday in the early 1990s, David Levanthol, was an editor of Yale University’s student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, in the “silent 1950s.”

From its mass media monopolization activity, the California-based Times-Mirror-Newsday corporate board—on behalf of the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Chandler families and other U.S. Establishment families—was able to specially influence political life in New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Texas, Missouri, Alabama, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. as well as in California in the early 1990s. At the same time, it earned a gross income of $3.5 billion each year and a net income annually of $300 million.

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Discrimination At Times-Mirror-Newsday Historically

`Times-Mirror-Newsday''s Historic Corporate Connections

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

By the time Otis Chandler’s father, Norman, died in 1973, the Times-Mirror-Newsday media conglomerate had 31 divisions and a gross income of over $600 million per year. Although about 30 percent of the Times-Mirror-Newsday stock was then still owned by the Chandler family—enough to pretty much control the media conglomerate’s business and editorial direction—a cross-section of non-family representatives from other large corporations also sat on the Times-Mirror-Newsday board. The Times-Mirror-Newsday directors in 1973, for instance, were the following U.S. businessmen:

1. Bank of America/Norton Simon/Ford/Hallmark Cards Director Franklin Murphy.

2. Bank of California and Pacific Insurance Director Albert Casey.

3. Republic National Bank, American Airlines, Lone Star Steel, Neuhoff Brothers and Blue Cross-Blue Shield Director James Aston.

4. Bank of America, Bank of Hawaii, Hawaiian Western Steel and Deltec International Director Lowell Dillingham.

5. Wells Fargo Bank and U.S. Steel Director Thomas Jones.

6. Western Airlines and Pacific Lighting Director Harry Volk.

7. Rockwell International/Pacific Indemnity and Cyrus Mining Director J.I. Atwood.

As Jack Hart noted in his book, The Information Empire, the corporate makeup of the Times-Mirror-Newsday corporate board “hardly seemed conducive to independent news reporting…Times-Mirror directors, for example, indirectly tied the interests of the Times to companies like Ford, the Bank of America, American Airlines…and dozens of similar corporate giants.” In the 1970s, Times-Mirror-Newsday Director Franklin Murphy also sat on the U.S. government’s Intelligence Advisory Board which worked with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency [CIA].

Asked by Downtown in early 1991 whether the [now-defunct] New York Newsday would be reluctant to report critically on the outside companies which are also directed by Times-Mirror directors, then-Managing Editor Toedtman again insisted that “There’s no hands-on control of the newspaper by Times-Mirror” that would “compromise the integrity of the paper” in terms of how “editorial content is determined.”

As might be expected, given its unpublicized historic corporate connections, Times-Mirror-Newsday strongly supported U.S. military intervention in Vietnam editorially during the 1960s. According to The Information Empire book, the Los Angeles Times’

“support for American intervention dated back to a Defense Department junket through the region by Otis Chandler…in the spring of 1963…Throughout subsequent years the Times editorial page remained rigidly fastened to the Administration’s coattail…A 1967 editorial condemned Martin Luther King’s opposition to current Vietnam policy.”

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Times-Mirror-Newsday’s Historic Mass Media Monopolization Drive

`Times-Mirror-Newsday' Chandler Dynasty's Hidden History--Part 2

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

Los Angeles Times Publisher Harrison Gray Otis had three daughters. In 1894, a then- 30-year-old Los Angeles Times employee named Harry Chandler married one of his daughters, Marion Otis, and was soon appointed to be the Los Angeles Times’ business manager. As Harry Chandler replaced his aging father-in-law as top man at the Los Angeles Times during the early 20th Century, the newspaper became known as a Chandler family, not an Otis family, mass media operation.

After becoming the Los Angeles Times’ business manager, Harry Chandler went into the Southern California and Mexican real estate speculation and land business in a big way. He organized syndicates among Los Angeles’ bankers, railroad men, industrialists and other real estate industry figures and, by the time he replaced General Harrison Gray Otis as Los Angeles Times publisher when Otis died in 1917, Harry Chandler’s real estate syndicate network was the largest in California.

According to the Thinking Big book, “the single activity that established Harry Chandler’s power within local ruling circles” in California “was his real estate speculation.” By the 1930s, Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler “owned more than two million acres in ranches, agricultural property, cattle and cattle operations and suburban land,” including 800,000 acres of land in Mexico, 300,000 acres of Tejon Land Company land in California and investments in Hawaii’s Dillingham Company, according to Thinking Big.

In the 1920s, Harry Chandler also joined over 50 corporate boards of directors. Among the companies which Harry Chandler directed were the following: Security Bank; Los Angeles First National Trust & Savings Bank; Los Angeles Investment Company; Goodyear Tire & Rubber; TWA; Union Oil of California; Colorado River Land Co.; and Los Angeles Steamship Company.

Harry Chandler was also both a Stanford University Trustee and a Trustee of the California Institute of Technology. In addition, Los Angeles Times publisher Chandler set up “numerous dummy corporations and secret trusts,” according to Thinking Big.

As a result of combining real estate speculation, corporate boardroom seat accumulation and business stock investment/manipulation activity with anti-labor mass media journalism, Harry Chandler became almost as rich as Harry Guggenheim’s family or Laurance Rockefeller. The Thinking Big book observed that “estimates of his fortune ranged from a low of $200 million to a high of over half-a-billion dollars; the [Los Angeles] Times newsroom had it that he was the 11th-richest man in the world.” The same book also noted that, despite his huge annual earnings, Harry Chandler “paid only $2,000 a year in taxes in the early 1920s.”

Los Angeles Times publisher Chandler’s business activity included involvement in the oil industry. In the 1920s, according to Thinking Big, Chandler “developed controlling interests in several local oil companies and had worked with the Royal Dutch Shell interests in their attempt to gain stock control of Union Oil Company…”

On his deathbed in 1944, at the age of 80, Harry Chandler, according to Thinking Big, “is said to have ordered the destruction of his and General Otis’ papers” and “not wanting to let others know how he had achieved his fortune and power, he had told his children that he didn’t want any family or newspaper history published.” He did, however, leave “a detailed trust arrangement to pass on his vast fortune to the new generation of Chandlers.”

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Times-Mirror-Newsday Chandler Dynasty’s Hidden History—Part 3

`Times-Mirror-Newsday' Chandler Dynasty's Hidden History--Part 1

(The following article about Times-Mirror-Newsday’s hidden history was written before the 2000 merger between the Tribune Company and Times-Mirror-Newsday. It first appeared in the March 6, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly Downtown.)

Twenty-two percent of the Times-Mirror-Newsday media conglomerate was still owned by the family of then-Times-Mirror-Newsday directors Otis Chandler and Bruce Chandler in the early 1990s. The various Chandlers had inherited the Chandis Securities stock and Chandis Securities, in turn, then owned the Chandler family stock of Times-Mirror-Newsday in the early 1990s.

Like the families of the other dynasties connected to Times-Mirror-Newsday in the early 1990s either as stockholders or through a corporate directorship—the Guggenheims and the Rockefellers—the Chandler family helped build up its media and real estate empire by being ruthless in relation to U.S. labor and competing businesses and by always seeking to maximize profits by means of monopolization techniques.

In 1886, Harrison Gray Otis purchased 100 percent of the Los Angeles Times newspaper. By running the profit-making Los Angeles Times as a nonunion newspaper long after most other U.S. newspapers employed higher-wage union labor, Harrison Gray Otis was able to turn the Los Angeles Times into a profitable enterprise as his Los Angeles readership and advertising market expanded in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. According to the book Thinking Big by Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, “Harrison Gray Otis and the Los Angeles Times would earn the reputation as the most powerful and persistent enemy of organized labor in America, a role of which Otis was intensely proud.”

In the 1890s, Los Angeles Times publisher Otis was also a staunch supporter of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. In 1898, he even served as a volunteer U.S. General in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, in order to help the U.S. military machine turn the Philippines into a new U.S. colony by means of military violence that produced extensive “collateral damage” to many Filipino civilians.

(Downtown 3/6/91)

Next: Times-Mirror-Newsday Chandler Dynasty’s Hidden History—Part 2