Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Dennis Robert Redmond wrote:
>
> >On Wed, 1 May 2002, Dennis Perrin wrote:
> >
> >> I'll take independent capitalists over the mega-corp press any day.
I read _Brass Check_ 55 years ago, but if I remember right one of Sinclair's items was the suppression of a story by an "independent" paper involving a rape committed by the son of an "independent" dept. store owner.
There really are advantages to "mega-corp" press. Our local paper the _Pantagraph_, is still a lousy paper after being bought first by the Chronicle and then by the Post-Dispatch -- but not anywheres near as lousy as it was when a local capitalist owned it.
Bertie McCormick controlled the Associated Press, and the AP refused to service the Chicago Sun when Marshall Field founded it back in the mid-forties. The Sun had to go to court to break that power. _That_ Marshall Field was a liberal, the paper was wonderful for a couple of years. But his son was _not_ a liberal, and by the '50s it was no longer even trying to be a special paper of any sort.
Carrol
> >
> >The consistent quality of the Wall Street Journal, and other giant
> >institutions such as the BBC or the European press, says that big ain't
> >necessarily bad. Also, where would independent publishers be nowadays
> >without vast, collectivized telecom/Web networks and huge computer
> >factories?
>
> The LA Times is a much better paper now that it's "corporate" and not
> run by the Chandler family anymore.
>
> Doug