Kochtopus plans to start sucking up major U.S. media outlets

[ProfessionalLeftist]

This could get very ugly, very fast. The Koch brothers are reportedly considering a bid for the Tribune Company newspapers — focusing on the crown jewels of the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune, or at least what jewels of power are left in the flailing newspaper industry — but they may face stiff competition in the form of a debt-free, full pocketed media power player named Rupert Murdoch.

L.A. Weekly's Hillel Aron reports "multiple sources" claiming Charles and David Koch will offer to buy the Tribune Co. slate of papers — including the Times, the Trib, the Baltimore Sun, and five other papers — or maybe just offer to buy all of Tribune Co. outright. If the notoriously free-spending political heavyweights and brothers in industry choose to go for the whole company — and, importantly, if their offer is taken seriously and ends up bailing out the papers — their purchase would also include 20 television stations along with the eight papers. The Tribune Co. emerged from bankruptcy at the end of 2012 and has been looking to unload their newspaper holdings, apparently as part of a single-package deal, according to Bloomberg's Edmund Lee. Any buyer interested in Tribune's Co.'s newspapers will have to cough up a cool $600 million to acquire the whole lot — not exactly a lot to the Koch brothers, who spent untold hundreds of millions on the 2012 election... and weren't too pleased with their return on investment.

MORE...

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2013/03/koch-brothers-tribune/63013/

[KharmaTrain]

1. Throwing Away More Money...

...maybe the Kochroaches should ask Sam Zell how well it went with his purchase of the Tribune company. The newspapers are on life support and the broadcast properties face a lot of competition from bigger corporates. The Chicago Tribune isn't the same paper it was when Colonel McCormick ran local politics...and the ability to influence is minimal. The shame is another bidder for the Tribune properties is Murdoch...

[leveymg]

2. Koch or Murdoch. Death by gas or beheading?

Take your pick.

[upi402]

5. ^ + 1,000

wait wut?

[Auntie Bush]

6. I'll take beheading for the three of them!

[leveymg]

7. There's an extra axe is in the shed. Be my guest. Beers on me when the job's done.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

8. With a dull hatchet. n/t

[Auntie Bush]

10. Yikes...then the job my only get half done.

[Ikonoklast]

3. I heard they're buying up all the local trolley systems, too! Dastards!

Inheriting money doesn't make one smarter.


And neither of the Kochs must have ever heard of a guy named Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás.

[Trillo]

4. Priced "for the few", not the many. A glimpse of a different world....

Consumers get "nickle and dimed", and the sum of many smaller sales is typically greater than one bulk sale.

[NewJeffCT]

9. So, they're going to be buying them from other Republicans?

Most of the media is controlled by Republics, no?