Hot Air passes on a Huffington Post (or is it Puffington Host, Mr. Taranto?) report that half of the staff of the Los Angeles Times has threatened to quit if the Koch brothers — who by the way employ more than 2,000 Wisconsinites, most at Georgia–Pacific — purchase the Times.

At a Los Angeles Times in-house awards ceremony a week ago, columnist Steve Lopez addressed the elephant in the room.

Speaking to the entire staff, he said, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Austin Beutner’s group.” No one raised their hands.

“Raise you hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Rupert Murdoch.” A few people raised their hands.

Facing the elephant trunk-on, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by the Koch brothers.” About half the staff raised their hands. …

As Tribune Co. emerges from a four-year bankruptcy, the predominantly Democratic city is quivering at the rumor that libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch may be interested in buying the LA Times. The brothers are believed to be the only group prepared to buy all eight Tribune papers, including the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant, as a package — how Tribune would like to sell them.

The ownership that most Angelenos seem to favor is a coalition of LA billionaires who have expressed interest, led by former Democratic mayoral candidate Austin Beutner and including prominent Democratic donor Eli Broad.

Many say local ownership is preferable because there’s more accountability and involvement. Local owners know and care about the city. Because they live here, they’re concerned and accessible. They won’t tarnish the paper, because they have local reputations to uphold. It would restore the family feel that the paper had for more than 60 years under the founding leadership of the Chandler family.

However, local ownership can have a dark side. Until the 1960s, the Chandlers used the Times to promote real estate development and Republican ideals. Similarly, when local real estate investor Doug Manchester bought the San Diego Union Tribune in 2011, he turned it into a platform for local business interests. To the dread of most Angelenos, Manchester has expressed interest in buying the LA Times, though he’s not considered a frontrunner.

The rest of the Puffington Host piece is a slurry tank full of speculation about how the Kochs might turn the Times into their own libertarian mouthpiece, vs. how other potential owners might turn the Times into their own fill-in-your-favorite-pejorative mouthpiece. (Including support of, horror of horrors, business and development. The irony of “a coalition of LA billionaires” being considered more acceptable is lost on the Puffington Host.)

Big Journalism asks a self-explanatory question:

Brent Bozell, president of Media Research Center, appeared on The Kudlow Report, Wednesday on CNBC to point out the double standard in the media when outrage is expressed over the politically conservative duo owning the newspaper.

“If you’re going to say that a known conservative entity like the Koch brothers should not be getting into the business of dictating what a news operation should do, what does that tell you about Warren Buffett?” alluding to the multi-millionaire, Democratic Party supporter and activist who owns many newspaper companies. 

The useful part of the Puffington Host piece is the history of the Times as what was considered a conservative newspaper under the Chandlers. (The Los Angeles PBS station did an excellent documentary on the Chandler family.) The Times helped launch the political careers of, among others, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The Times was not taken seriously nationally, however, until, under publisher Otis Chandler, the Times stopped letting ideology determine its news coverage. (The same applies to the Tribune when its publisher was the isolationist Robert McCormick.)

I can’t comment on the other potential owners save one, but it’s pretty obvious that the Kochs didn’t amass their wealth by letting their personal views get in the way of making the right business decisions. (Ditto another potential owner, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.) The opinion page (and the Times’ is about as liberal as it gets) is one or two pages out of a daily newspaper. (And the Southland already has a pretty conservative/libertarian opinion page at the Orange County Register.) A newspaper gets a reputation for good or ill based on how it covers the news of the area it serves, not for the ideology of its owners, or what’s said on its opinion page.

Here’s an Economics 101 lesson for liberals and the media: A business product or service is purchased when the buyer and seller agree on price for what the buyer gets. If the buyer doesn’t want it for the seller’s price, the seller doesn’t sell. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are successful because readers and advertisers like what they’re buying. The Kochs are successful because their companies’ customers like their companies’ products and services. (Particularly in the case of Fox News, which is getting higher ratings than the better-established CNN or MSNBC.)

What about the Times staffers? (None of whom are entitled to their jobs, because no one is entitled to their preferred job, or in fact any job.) Hot Air answers:

Call their bluff. Wherever you stand politically, we can all agree on that, right? If you’re a liberal, you want to see the fair, balanced, impartial LA Times newsroom rise as one and walk out in protest of having to work for libertarian oligarKKKs. If you’re a conservative, you want them gone for different reasons, partly as a smoking gun of bias and partly because it’ll clear the decks to hire more neutral reporters. And if they don’t walk out, that’s okay — their cheap bravado will have been exposed in all its cheapness.

Here’s another econ lesson: The value of an employee is how much it costs (financially and otherwise) to replace that employee. If the Puffington Host’s prediction is correct that half of the Times newsroom would depart, here’s one possible (though hysterically argued) result:

Perhaps one brave Times reporter would go public with a story killed by the new owners. She would lose her job, and it would be written about in The New York Times. And, it would pressure the LA Times owners to be more objective. But many of the people working at the Times support a family or are still developing their careers and can’t afford to lose their jobs — especially in a town with few job opportunities for newspaper journalists.

If half the staff quit under Koch ownership, that would leave half as many people likely to stand up to the owners — probably the half that would be more likely to do so. Not to mention, it would be a tremendous loss of talented journalists who have built a wealth of LA knowledge and relationships over years of experience.

Care to guess how long it would take the Times to replace half their staffers? Given that journalism schools keep pumping out more graduates than journalism has jobs, not very long at all. (I might even take a job offer were it not for the fact that anymore California ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.)

There are people who work for much smaller publications than the Times who do work that as good, if not better. The Times also is likely to have more newsroom staffers than it actually needs, particularly given that it is a — surprise! — union newsroom. Losing institutional memory of Los Angeles would not be a good thing, but to claim that half of the newsroom’s choosing to leave would be “a tremendous loss of talented journalists” is an assertion without evidence.

The other obvious point is belief without evidence that the Kochs would automatically be bad newspaper owners is based on their politics. That is, as usual, a way to dismiss any viewpoint left of the Puffington Host’s as illegitimate. That opinion ignores the fact that there are millions of Californians whose political views are closer to the Kochs’ views than the views expressed on the Times editorial page.

Perhaps the Kochs should purchase the Times and watch some number of its staffers leave. (Or if the Times purchase doesn’t work out, perhaps the Kochs can look at two other media companies not doing very well these days: Journal Communications, my former employer — a place that was better to work at under employee ownership than as a publicly traded company — and the publisher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, or Lee Newspapers, publishers of the (formerly conservative) Wisconsin State Journal, La Crosse Tribune and Kenosha News.) When I was in UW journalism school, “journalist” was defined as “an out-of-work reporter.”