“Kochify the News” is part of a campaign by a group called Forecast the Facts to discourage Tribune Co. from selling its newspapers to the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, who are reportedly considering their purchase.
The site mimics the look of the Los Angeles Times’ homepage, and if you click a story, its headline and deck change to what the activists say news would look like under the Kochs’ leadership.
A story titled “Part-Timers To Lose Pay Amid Health Act’s New Math,” for instance, becomes “Win-Win: Employees To Get Free Vacay While Being Saved From Obamacare.” “Lakers’ Pau Gasol Undergoes Knee Procedure” becomes “Sports: Current Health Care System Already Working Perfectly (for Millionaire Athletes)”
Charles Koch told The Wall Street Journal’s James R. Hagerty and William Launder any Koch-owned newspapers “would be a marketplace of ideas.”
In other anti-Koch news, Free Press will send cakes to Tribune newspapers Tuesday to mark the company’s 166th birthday, it said in a press release. (The Chicago Tribune published its first edition on June 10, 1847, according to the company’s website.)
“The Tribune Company’s birthday reminds us of the historic role Tribune newspapers have played in their communities,” Free Press Journalism and Public Media Campaign Director Josh Stearns says in the release. “Selling these papers to the Koch brothers, who attack journalists they don’t agree with and want to use these outlets to push their political agenda, would jeopardize these relationships.”
