At least that's the major takeaway I got reading this latest dispatch on the Tribune Media Company's bankruptcy saga.
What the agreement makes clear is what's been assumed all along. The banks and hedge funds that own the debt used to finance Tribune Co.'s leveraged buyout will end up owning nearly all of the company: <underline>91.2 percent</underline>. They include J.P. Morgan and Angelo, Gordon & Co.
So banks... and hedge funds... will own 91 percent out of the flagship papers of the second and third largest cities in America along with the WGN cable network...
And papers in Baltimore and Hartford and Orlando and South Florida and Allentown, Pa. and Newport News, Va...
And TV stations in Dallas, Denver, LA, Philadelphia, D.C., New Orleans (2), Houston, Miami, St. Louis, Sacramento, Seattle, San Diego, Indianapolis, Hartford, York, Pa.; Tacoma, Wash.; Kokomo, Ind.; Bloomington, Ind.; Portland, Ore.; Salem, Ore.; Grand Rapids, Mich. and Waterbury, Conn.
Is anyone else a little disturbed by this? (Or A LOT!)
The banksters already own most of Congress. And right under our noses it appears they're taking bigger and bigger pieces of the pie out of the "news" business.
How did we get to this point?
Well, just as the corporate cannibalism of mergers and acquisitions has created too big to fail travesties in the banking sector, the same phenomenon has taken place over the last few decades in the media... except unlike the banksters... Big Media didn't get a bailout.
And these media behemoths, recklessly managed by CEOs and publishers who took on more and more debt to become even bigger and bigger market share monsters to pump up short-term stock price to the detriment of long-term company soundness, are currently in or just emerging from bankruptcy.
And I don't think the Tribune is alone in coming out the other side with the banksters having taken a major pound of flesh during the bankruptcy meatgrinder.
As a former journalist, a lover of newspapers, and just as a patriotic citizen, it scares me how much the Fourth Estate may further deteriorate with this arrangement.
Obviously all the laid off and bought out journalists who lost their livelihoods and were pushed out of the professional citizenship business over the last several years will not be brought back, but no matter what happened post-bankruptcy I was never expecting that. And certainly I don't mean to claim that things were all that great under the previous and current owners (Sam Zell - blech!) that JP Morgan is honestly that much of a step down in all likelihood.
And I don't even really mean to express my concern about journalism from a political standpoint despite me posting this on a political blog. I mean the Chicago Tribune has always been a pro-business, right-leaning publication from the very beginning only endorsing one Democrat (Barack Obama) for president in its history.
But having a corporate agenda is one thing. Being a subsidiary of JP Morgan is another!
Is it not enough that the banksters exert so much more control than us as citizens over the Fed's printing press?
Now it appears they're taking over the people's printing press as well?