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Why Do the Koch Brothers Want a Chunk of Time Inc.?

Nov 27, 2017  •  Post A Comment

“Why do the Koch brothers want to own a piece of Time Inc.?” asks Recode’s Peter Kafka.

The brothers, billionaires Charles and David Koch, have invested $650 million in the Meredith deal to acquire Time Inc. for $1.84 billion in cash (plus the billion or so Time Inc. has in debt), according to The New York Times.

Kafka speculates, “Do [the brothers] think it’s a good financial bet? Or do the brothers, a powerful force in conservative politics, like the idea of influencing one of the world’s largest publishers, even if it’s nothing like the powerhouse it used to be?”

Or perhaps it is simply a passive investment, Kafka notes.

He then says we should, “See if Meredith, which publishes titles focused on women and the advertisers who want to reach them, ends up hanging on to the titles it has traditionally been uninterested in — particularly Time and Fortune.

“If Meredith — the publisher behind Family Circle and Better Homes and Garden — now decides it is interested in the news business it wanted no part of for years, it doesn’t automatically mean the Kochs plan on having an active hand in the news business. But it would be an obvious answer.”

 

 

4 Comments

  1. The obvious answer is not always the correct one. dL

  2. Watch TIME start gaining a right wing bias when the deal closes.

  3. Even if Time did start to lean right… so what?

  4. The left wing owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, bought the Washington Post. The Post used to be a bastion of unbiased political reporting. It used to be a “down the middle of the political spectrum” newspaper. Now, it’s become a hatchet tool to attack conservatives in general and the President in particular. If the NY Times becomes as far right wing as the Washington Post is far left wing, that would make for an interesting situation.

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