News Release

Knight Ridder Deal

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AP is reporting that “the McClatchy Co. has reached a deal to buy Knight Ridder Inc., the second-largest U.S. newspaper publisher, for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock.”

The following analysts are available for interviews:

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN
Author of the groundbreaking book The Media Monopoly and professor emeritus and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Bagdikian has worked as an editor at major metropolitan dailies. He said today: “In the long view, this can be seen as probably the highest-quality news group being sold because of Wall Street. Big banks, which are major stockholders in Knight Ridder, don’t care about public information, but about making as much money as possible. Because of these pressures, we have more commercially-oriented information and less public information, civic information. This forces the average citizen to be sophisticated in the Internet and other sources to find the crucial information that is needed to create an informed electorate in a democracy.”
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STEVE RENDALL
Senior analyst at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, Rendall said today: “The loss of a media outlet is bad for journalism and for democracy because it decreases the number of voices in the debate. This is especially clear in the case of Knight Ridder, whose Washington bureau was one of the only mainstream journalism outfits to consistently challenge the government in the run-up to war in Iraq.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167