Coming to a Newspaper Stand Near You: Newspapers Tilt to the left even worse in Kansas!

Just this month many of our small, local, daily newspapers in Kansas were sold to "one of the largest publishers of locally based print and online media in the United States, otherwise known as Gatehouse Media of Fairport, New York. Gatehouse was until last year known as Liberty Group Publishing, based in Northbrook, Illinois; Liberty has been on a pretty steady and aggressive acquisition path for the last few years.

It turns out that Gatehouse/Liberty is controlled by a New York-based company called Fortress Investment Group. To take the exercise one step further, you can look at the boards of directors at Gatehouse and Fortress and check on their political leanings by running their names against the Opensecrets.org database. I did that for Wesley R. Edens, the chairman of both Gatehouse and Fortress, and found that in the last couple election cycle, he was a dependable contributor to Democratic congressional candidates (including Rahm Emanuel, for another Illinois connection). Opensecrets also allows you to look up donors by employer, and the people listed as from Fortress Investments looks like they lean pretty strongly Democratic.

What does this mean for the Kansas newspaper industry? At a time when known liberal biases occur within the print media, this acquisition has tilted the small Kansas newspapers even further to the left. By this spring, we should anticipate more headlines, bylines, and editorials that are negative towards conservative thought and theory and Christian principles and applaud liberal thought and theory even more. Freedom of the Press? Yes, only if Internet sources like the Kansas Federalist continue to exist, because in the print media it will mean, Freedom of the Left.