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Robert Scheer continues his exit tour, tossing rhetorical bomblets at the Times for dropping his syndicated column. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, posts some of Scheer's comments to a weekend gathering of readers. Parenthetical comments in the quoted text below are hers. [He also was on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now program this morning; transcript here.] Scheer does drop a nugget of news in Nation talk: the San Francisco Chronicle (where his wife Narda Zacchino is a top editor) picked up his column. Scheer also predicts that the Times will lay off more than seventy editorial staffers this week; all I can add to that is that there are strong rumblings of imminent and deep budget cuts, including buyouts and possibly layoffs.
According to vanden Heuvel, Scheer had this to say:
This was a stupid management decision, a bad marketing decision...Let's go bland and safe.The publisher is a wise guy accountant, a bean counter from Chicago. These guys come in from Chicago. They don't know the community, and buying the LA Times may be illegal. The Chicago Tribune already owns a TV station in same market and they're going to need a waiver request which comes up next year. The publisher/bean counter's Pasadena golf buddies probably warned him about me--that flaming leftie. Now, (Times founder) Otis Chandler was no liberal but he understood his community. The paper is in decline. They have 300,000 fewer readers now than when I went to work there nearly thirty years ago....The Times needed me more than I need it...I always have two or three balls in the air at same time...That's why I teach full-time at USC's Journalism school, do my radio show, write books. It's the only way to live. I've been preparing for this moment for 30 years. I wrote this column for 13 years and never missed a deadline.
More after the jump.
Probably the main reason they got rid of me was O'Reilly and Limbaugh made a living out of attacking me, pounding, pounding away and doing mass mailing campaigns against me and using me as a punching bag. But I'm still standing; the paper may collapse....Would never go back to LA Times, and I start at the San Francisco Chronicle next week. They called Wednesday to offer me a column. And my syndicate stood behind me, and the syndicate's editor, a conservative, was quoted in Editor & Publisher saying he was 100 percent behind me. And it's the same syndicate which runs O'Reilly's column.[snip]
They may own the paper but they don't own the readers. And LA is the greatest city in the world, and it deserves a great newspaper. Send e-mails and make them aware that if they want to keep readers, they got to be smarter. Let them know readers don't like being treated with contempt. I know there's shock in the Times building; every switchboard jammed, e-mails streaming in. (One estimate is that close to 10,000 e-mails have come in; on Saturday, the paper ran a series of articulate, intelligent, reasoned and serious letters protesting Scheer's ouster.) I hear the publisher is walking around in a daze. Didn't anticipate these protest, the level of outrage. Every complaint you send will give space to others who want to do bold, brave reporting.