The resubmitted ad with references.
The
Los Angeles Times advertising department
has reversed its earlier decision to reject an advertisement from Daily Kos and the Courage Campaign urging the Chicago-based Tribune Company not to sell the 132-year-old
Times to the billionaire Koch brothers. The ad will run in the main news section of Wednesday's edition of the
Times.
A slightly different version of the ad was rejected by the Times on Friday on the grounds that it failed to provide references for its claims that the Koch brothers have funded the tea party, denied global warming and bought politicians. Asked in a subsequent conversation if the ad would be published if it were resubmitted with the references included, a salesman said it would not regardless of any such changes. Not in the "best interests" of the newspaper to run it, he said.
Nonetheless, the Courage Campaign decided to rework the ad and resubmit it anyway, which it did on Monday. All references about the Koch brothers included in the reworked ad were taken from stories that have appeared in the Times itself. On Tuesday morning, another Times salesman called the campaign to say the reworked ad had been give the okay.
Tribune, whose merger in 2000 with Times-Mirror Corp., the Times's owner at the time, made it the second largest newspaper publisher in the nation, has been reported to be considering selling the Times, the nation's fourth most widely read newspaper, to the ultra-right-wing Kochs.
On Monday afternoon, the Courage Campaign tried to deliver more than 100,000 petition signatures to a Times representative, urging the Tribune Company not to sell to the Kochs. Nobody from the Times would accept the petitions.