On Tonight’s Radioshow: Breaking Down the Tribune Bankruptcy

Over at Chicago Media Action Mitchell Szczepanczyk has written a concise “Chicago Citizen Activist’s Guide to the Tribune Bankruptcy” that makes simple work of untangling the how and why the Tribune company is in the financial dumps:

The Tribune debt didn’t just happen. It happened because Zell used the debt to buy the company.

Why did Zell buy the company? Because a Tribune shareholder revolt in the summer of 2006 demanded a change of ownership, and the following spring they got it.

Why did Tribune shareholders revolt? Because the Tribune thought that by 2006 they would be rolling in cash for having a bunch of TV-newspaper duopolies. They banked their future on it. And for good reason: The Tribune already owned four such duopolies across America, and what, you were expecting media concentration to stop or something? Are you some kind of anti-market communist freak?

Mitchell will be my guest on the radioshow tonight (9 PM WNUR 89.3 FM, Evanston-Chicago, IL) to talk more in depth about the greed, incompetence, arrogance and myopia that led to so many job losses, eroded journalism and who-knows-what-more.

I’m working on my own piece triggered by the Tribune bankruptcy, but more broadly aimed at the rotten outcome of the post-1996 consolidation era. Some observers, free-marketeers and big media apologists are now claiming that such disasters as Clear Channel going private equity and all these bankruptcies are evidence that we don’t need ownership regs, because clearly the market is acting to correct the excesses of consolidation: See, now these big consolidated behemoths will be broken back down into littler pieces.

But what they fail to account for is the real human toll — the lost jobs, the lost public service, the diminished local content, news and information.

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