News of L.A. Times Sale Stirs a City’s Emotions

The impending end of Times Mirror Co. as a Los Angeles institution signals the passing of a consequential and controversial California epoch, and may mark the final major chapter in the abandonment of downtown Los Angeles by major corporations.

On Monday, the city’s political and cultural leaders reacted with wariness and concern to news that Times Mirror Co., parent company of The Times, was being acquired by Chicago-based Tribune Co. Some worried about the impact on Los Angeles’ cultural institutions, where Times Mirror has long been a leading contributor. Some wondered at the political implications of the nation’s second-largest city suddenly being without any locally owned media institutions. Some fumed about what they saw as corporate greed trumping civic involvement.

And still others saw the sale as a historic passage, emblematic of a city that has long nurtured creativity but not stewardship and that now is shrugging off the last vestiges of the oligarchy that transformed Los Angeles from a scrappy frontier town into one of the world’s most booming and diverse metropolises.

“This is the recolonization of Los Angeles and California,” said Kevin Starr, a leading historian of the city and state. “The Times is one of the three, four or five elements that kept Los Angeles together, that gave it a sense of a center.”

John Gregory Dunne, one of the city’s most celebrated novelists and intellectuals, was more blunt: “I feel as if I was gut shot.”

Although he now lives in New York, Dunne said he and his wife, the equally acclaimed novelist and essayist Joan Didion, still consider the Los Angeles Times their hometown paper. Dunne said he signs on to The Times’ Web site every morning and has, for instance, saved every piece of the newspaper’s ongoing police corruption coverage.

Didion was just as forceful, directing her anger at the Chandler family, which built the newspaper and engineered its sale.

“Some of the Chandlers built Los Angeles,” she said. “The rest of them just sold it out. It was their birthright to trade, it’s their mess of pottage they’re left with, but they may be surprised how little the name Chandler will mean without the paper behind it.”

Some Anger Aimed at Newspaper’s CEO

Dunne was one of several people interviewed Monday who also expressed anger toward Times Mirror Chairman and CEO Mark Willes. Willes’ attempts to transform The Times often ran afoul of journalistic traditionalists. But, paradoxically, the CEO only recently learned of the company’s pending sale to Tribune--a deal negotiated directly between Chandler family representatives and the Chicago company.

“For the Chandler Trust to sell its birthright is like the Sulzbergers selling the New York Times to Rupert Murdoch,” Dunne said.

The Times’ history is inextricable from that of the city itself. Acting with stealth shortly after the turn of the century, the paper’s owners were part of a large group of civic leaders who helped secure water from the Owens Valley. The newspaper, meanwhile, helped build public support for a bond issue to bring that water to Los Angeles. The maneuvering triggered a war with some residents of the Owens Valley and left resentments that linger even today.

And yet, as much as any single act, that move laid the foundation for the city’s growth and security--and in the process made the Chandler family enormously rich.

Longtime Champions of Conservative Causes

The Chandlers and their paper for decades were staunch opponents of organized labor and determined advocates for conservative causes--interestingly, a world view shared by the Chicago Tribune’s arch-conservative leader, Robert C. McCormick. But the Chandlers’ views, solidified by the 1910 bombing of The Times’ building by labor activists, dominated not just the newspaper but the city in which the paper grew and thrived.

“It’s hard to imagine any place in the country where one family and its newspaper have been so directly responsible for the making of a great place,” said Donald Waldie, public information officer for the city of Lakewood and a distinguished historian of suburbia. “That’s been true for good and for ill.”

So dominant were The Times and its owners that they once towered over the government itself. Now-retired Police Chief Ed Davis recalled Monday how he used to lobby for more police and bigger LAPD budgets. First stop, he said, was at The Times. Once he’d talked the publisher into his proposal, Davis would then head across the street to meet with the mayor.

“I’d walk into the mayor’s office, and your reporter would give me a wink,” Davis said. “He’d say: ‘We put the fix in for you.’ I’d get what I came for.”

As the paper’s politics drifted leftward to the center under the leadership of Otis Chandler, Chief Davis waged his share of titanic battles with The Times. He once famously canceled his subscription and vowed not to read The Times until it started publishing a newspaper, and he was regularly pilloried by editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad.

Today, Davis is again a subscriber. The stairway of his Morro Bay home is lined with the Conrad cartoons making sport of him. Davis and Conrad, in fact, used to lunch together in The Times’ executive dining room.

Rare is the Southern California leader who lacks a relationship with The Times--or an opinion about the paper and its pending sale.

Take Waldie, for instance. He first began reading the paper as a boy growing up in Southern California. “I’ve read it every day of my reading life,” said Waldie, who is 51 and whose parents first subscribed to The Times in 1946. Over those decades, Waldie said he has sometimes been frustrated by The Times’ influence.

“But I’ve never felt it was unconcerned about the life of Los Angeles,” he said. “The Times’ aspirations for itself were the aspirations of the city. I don’t know that the aspirations of a leadership in Chicago will share that.”

Ownership Change Is Blow to Downtown

While the end of local ownership over Los Angeles’ dominant media outlet will leave a hole in the city’s history, the transfer of ownership to the Tribune also will have a more tangible effect: It will remove one of the last two Fortune 500 companies still based downtown. The other, Atlantic Richfield, also may depart soon, as it is negotiating its sale to British Petroleum.

Oddly, those final departures appear likely to occur in the administration of Mayor Richard Riordan, who is generally well-liked in the business community, and at a time of relative economic health and prosperity.

Riordan was out of town Monday but released a short statement.

“The Chandler family--Angelenos who have contributed so much to our city over the years--has created a world-class newspaper,” the mayor said. “They have laid a strong foundation for the L.A. Times to continue as one of the best newspapers in the country. I am confident that under its new ownership the L.A. Times will continue to play a leading role in our city.”

Others were less sure, more concerned about the ramifications of out-of-town ownership.

Joel Kotkin, a frequent contributor to the paper’s Opinion section, said the move reflected a continuing diminution of Los Angeles. “We have become a banana republic, a second-tier city,” he warned in an interview with KCRW’s Warren Olney.

Barry Munitz, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, was more reflective but no less troubled.

“Sure, the paper keeps going,” Munitz said. “But where’s the driver?”

Cultural Impact Is Another Concern

Historically, The Times and Times Mirror have been major players in the city’s philanthropic community. The Music Center with its Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is a signature monument to the family’s cultural commitment, and more recent projects such as the Disney Concert Hall have benefited from the company’s largess. Now, with the owners based in Chicago, some worry that The Times will recede into the cultural woodwork.

“It’s a voice lost in nonprofit support,” Munitz said.

Robin Kramer, a respected political and community figure who served as Riordan’s chief of staff, worked at The Times briefly in 1976, when a fellowship placed her in the paper’s Orange County newsroom for a time. She was out of town when the announcement came Monday, but when told of it, she was stunned.

“My jaw just dropped,” she said.

The effects of outside ownership, she said, may turn out to be subtle or profound. Cultural institutions may suffer, as may the city’s sense of itself. But the most immediate consequence, Kramer said, was to a way of life.

“It really means that the last bit of old-fashioned Los Angeles is gone,” she said. “Maybe it already was. Now you know it is.”

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Times staff writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this report.