Sam Zell is a real estate magnate and the head of The Tribune Company which owns the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Chicago Cubs as well as a number of TV stations and smaller newspapers. Slate.com on Monday had a piece titled, “Words, Words, Words” written by Michael Kinsley about the upcoming changes within the Tribune Company’s newspapers, such as the new policy shift taken by Tribune management to measure “Reporters’ Value By the Inch.” In an article written last week on Editor and Publisher’s website, Jennifer Saba says,

“One of the main strategies outlined by Tribune Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels involves measuring the productivity of journalists. “This is a new thing,” he said. “Nobody ever said, ‘How many column inches did someone produce?’”

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson makes a compelling argument today why Sam Zell is eligible for life in prison for his massacre of the LA Times. In response to Slate’s article mentioned above, Meyerson starts,

“On Oct. 1, 1910, a bomb set by James McNamara, an operative of the Iron Workers union, then embroiled in a ferocious dispute with the Los Angeles Times, blew up the Times building, killing 21 pressmen. McNamara was arrested the following April, convicted and later sentenced to life in prison. He died in San Quentin in 1941. The question for today is: Would a similar sentence be appropriate for Sam Zell?”

Meyerson ends this very fair rant by putting things in perspective for us.

“Great newspapers take decades to build. We are discovering that they can be dismantled in relatively short order. The Los Angeles Times was a hyperpartisan, parochial broadsheet until Otis Chandler became its publisher in 1960 and began the work of transforming it into the paper of both record and insight that it’s been for the past half-century. The diminution of such a paper diminishes its city, which is why L.A.’s otherwise disparate civic elites have periodically tried to restore the Times to local control since the Trib bought it at the turn of this century. Instead, in Zell, what Los Angeles has is a visiting Visigoth, whose civic influence is about as positive as that of the Crips, the Bloods and the Mexican mafia. Life in San Quentin sounds about right.”

Bill O’Relly, who can’t even claim that he is a journalist (much less an American or human being), is in the habit of sending his lackies to do his dirty work; i.e. catching people off guard and then editing the crap out of the segments to create a message of propaganda unworthy of even Hamlet. Well, this time things didn’t go so well and the attendees at the 2008 National Conference of Media Reform (and the folks at Uptake) were ready for O’Reilly producer Porter Barry (Google his name for your amusement), when he accosted respected journalist Bill Moyers. Here is the exchange in its entirety. Enjoy and please comment at will. Viewers on YouTube are alive and kicking:

“Challenge the bully and the bully runs. Why won’t BO go on Moyers? He knows he will be humiliated and outclassed. Moyers is a journalist; BO has to cut the mic of his guests so he can yell them down. Will BO have the courage to mention this without editing the video? Don’t hold yer breath.”

The Project Censored team, consisting of Bridget Thornton, Brit Walters and Lori Rouse and affiliated with Sonoma State University, has available on its website a great report detailing corporate and institutional influence and cross-industry conflicts in mainstream media. They list the 10 largest media companies, each one’s board of directors and the other industry, non-profit and academic institutions these board members are also involved with… Of course this doesn’t mean that all of your information is biased, but it would be hard to remain objective given all of these circumstances. Also, please note this list is from 2005 and there has been even more industry consolidation since that time which we have not documented here.

The 10 largest media conglomerates detailed are (not listed in order of size): Gannett, New York Times, Washington Post, Knight-Ridder, The Tribune Company, News Corp., AOL/Time Warner, General Electric, Walt Disney and Viacom. The areas of influence these companies have include: Newspapers (local and national), TV networks (local and national), TV stations, magazines, book publishers, radio (local and syndicated), movie studios, movie distribution, movie theaters, record labels and cable and Internet providers.

Companies where the media board members also hold additional board seats are involved in the following, to list a few: Defense contractors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, universities (including journalism schools), banks, retailers, auto manufacturers, technology companies, airlines, food and consumables manufacturing and distribution, law firms, foreign governments, insurance companies, non-profit institutions (including those responsible for recognizing and awarding independence in journalism), etc.

Again, we want to reiterate that just because GE owns NBC and a member of GE’s board also sits on the board of the Boston Museum of Science does not mean that the individual curators at the Museum are unduly influenced by the connection with NBC. However, it is important we maintain a certain level of transparency when it comes to media ownership in order to decide for ourselves what may or may not be biased information.

You can view the full report here.

Monday’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann featured a very interesting discussion with longtime, independent journalist Bill Moyers on the subject of bias in the media toward a particular political candidate or party. (Perhaps Keith was returning the favor after Moyers’ interview with Keith last December.) We have included Monday’s video below, but to point out a couple of specific quotes as they relate to our discussion of Media Slackers, Moyers stated that instead of bias toward a political candidate or party, the “bias in the media is toward simplification.” Moyers went on to quote Saul Bellows, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, as saying, “The day will come when no one will be heard who doesn’t speak in short bursts of truth.” Paraphrasing this journalistic icon once more, does this mean the media will start speaking with bumper stickers? Haven’t they already started this practice and what can we look forward to in the upcoming general election coverage?