The Last Los Angeles Times Press Run
Plus, Biden misleads New Hampshire voters about his own income
The final non-outsourced press run of the Los Angeles Times happened March 10. The newspaper posted a video about it on YouTube.
One of my earliest jobs in journalism was at the Los Angeles Times in 1994 and 1995, and perhaps as a result, I found the video quite affecting. The fact that it was posted on YouTube, which is owned by Google, or, as it’s now called, Alphabet, encapsulates the situation. The distribution network that connected advertisers with customers in Southern California used to be the Los Angeles Times, whose Sunday edition was fat with ads for cars, apartments, and jobs. Now it is Google, Meta, and the rest of the Internet, big and small.
That change has had significant tradeoffs, both positive and negative. I wouldn’t want to romanticize the old days too much. When I went out to report the news in Ventura County, in places like Oxnard and Simi Valley, I was sometimes treated with suspicion by conservatives who, based on long experience with the press, saw me as a representative of a biased liberal media.
The capital requirements to assemble a printing and distribution network, and the winner-take-most aspect of the classified advertising market (advertisers and readers both highly value the marketplace with the most ads and the largest audience) created significant entry barriers that, at worst, bred a kind of monopoly complacency and arrogance.
At best, though, those profits paid for reporters, like me, to go out and report and write news. And they paid for editors who, at best, helped make sure that news was accurate and accessible and fair. The newspaper owners lived in the community and cared about its long-term health and prosperity.
The reporting, writing, thinking, and editing skills are independent of the printing technology and can be transferred to the Internet, too, especially with the benefit of technology like what you are experiencing right now that allows readers and writers to connect more directly without the intermediation of a large news organization such as the Los Angeles Times.
With lower entry barriers come less authority, but perhaps the authority that does still exist is more authentically earned—the product of a reputation for reason rather than investing in, or happening to inherit, a big printing and distribution network. That’s the most optimistic take on it; the less optimistic take on it is that today people are getting their information from TikTok rather than from the Chandler family that owned the Los Angeles Times. I have a lot of faith in the ability of people to sort through and get to the truth, but I sometimes wonder if that faith is misplaced.
The last word on this should probably come from the video itself: John Martin, who worked at the paper there for 42 years, says, “I thank God for my time, I thank God for everything that I got a chance to do here.” He said, “Talking about it gets me a little emotional, but it was a good run.”
I thank God, too, for having had the opportunity to start at the Los Angeles Times (and at the Harvard Crimson when it still had a six-nights-a-week operating printing press in the basement of the building. That press, too, has now been idled and replaced with an outsourced, weekly vendor). And for the opportunity to remain at it today, mostly online, here, I thank God and the paying readers.
Biden in Goffstown: President Biden was in Goffstown, New Hampshire yesterday as part of his initiative to lower inflation by personally targeting unpopular industries. From the White House transcript of “Remarks by President Biden on Lowering Healthcare Costs for American Families”: “I want to cap the cost of insulin at 35 bucks for every American — every American.”
Price controls lead to shortages. I predict that if the president imposes this “cap,” we’ll have insulin shortages.
Biden also doesn’t explain why if government price controls work for insulin, he doesn’t simply solve the whole inflation problem, economy-wide with government-assigned prices. That’s how they did it in the Soviet Union—they had whole buildings full of bureaucrats whose job it was to set prices. The result was empty supermarket shelves. The knowledge needed to set the price under which supply meets demand is distributed. No central planner can be sophisticated enough to set the prices better than the spontaneous order of a free market.
Biden’s argument for why the insulin is overpriced had to do the cost of manufacturing it. “You know how much it costs to make that? Ten dollars — T-E-N — ten. Ten dollars. … So, if you add everything, including the cost of packaging it, it’s 13 bucks,” he said. What’s next, Biden going after artists for selling paintings for more than the cost of the canvas and pigments? Or colleges for charging more in tuition than it costs them to have one additional student in the classroom? It’s one thing to try to take a “cost plus” approach with defense contractors, though even there it hasn’t been that fruitful. It’s another thing to try to apply it to the drug industry, which spreads the cost of drug research and development—even for drugs that don’t pan out—over a wider array of products.
Biden promises concrete savings: “we’re going to save taxpayers another estimated $200 billion — $200 billion taxpayers will not have to pay the drug companies for exorbitant prices that aren’t warranted.” But how much will taxpayers suffer because of drugs that don’t get developed because capital flows instead to other industries in which profits aren’t capped by demagoguing politicians?
Biden went on, “I ran for President and I promised nobody — nobody will, as long as I’m president, will earn — who earns less than $400,000 — that’s a lot more than I ever made — will pay an additional penny in federal taxes.” It’s not accurate that $400,000 is “a lot more” than Biden ever made. In fact Biden earned $405,368 from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, part of a total of $1,689,651 that he and Jill Biden earned from higher education institutions that year.
Perhaps Biden can chalk the misstatement up to his status as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” If he remembered it and intentionally misled voters about it, that would be troubling.
Recent work: “New York Times Opinion Piece Paved Way for Oscar Night Comparison of Israel to Nazis” (from the Algemeiner). “Harvard, in a Dramatic Development as Antisemitism Engulfs the University, Asks Bay State Taxpayers for a Bailout” (from the New York Sun).
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