Monday, October 12, 2009
Newspaper war stories
Posted by Max Brantley on Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:20 AM
Comments (8)
Showing 1-8 of 8
I could never understand how the Gazette lost the law suit about the unfair competition and the way funds were diverted from cable tv, etc., by Hussman to keep the Democrat afloat as he gave away free advertisement in the Democrat.
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One of the hardest lessons I ever learned was not to expect justice from the American justice system. When it happens, it is cause for celebration.
Hey! The Bidness Party does a fine job running the Banana Republic. You just can't be on the outside, there's justice and just us.
Hussman will always be portrayed as the villain in this tragic tale, but it is ironic that a newspaper that was so progressive in its news and editorial stance was in many ways so provincial and reactionary. Hugh B. Patterson himself perpetuated this paradox every day right up until the sellout.
“I could never understand how the Gazette lost the law suit about the unfair competition . . .” Here, in brief form, is Carrick Patterson’s take on it, Cato, pulled from Roy Reed’s book, “Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette,” a helluva interesting book, by the way: “Our opinion was that selling below the cost of producing was illegal. And we tried to get various enforcement agencies, such as the attorney general’s office and the antitrust division of the Justice Department, and so forth, interested in taking action on that. And we were never successful. So, finally, it became obvious it couldn’t go on that way, that we would be driven out of business. So we filed a lawsuit in federal court asking that they be enjoined from selling things below their cost of producing and so forth. And after a lengthy trial, we lost the suit. They did a much better job of presenting their case than we did of ours. We simply didn’t do a good-enough job. And after that, there was no question of our being able to survive economically.”
And then there's Hussman’s take on the lawsuit: “Of course, the Gazette sued us, saying we were trying to drive them out of business using predatory pricing, et cetera. And, of course, it was a jury trial, and the jury verdict was that, no, we had not violated any antitrust laws, and we won resoundingly . . . Hugh Patterson and the Gazette found some really high-profile attorneys for the case. Our attorneys were Williams and Anderson. Well, it was Phil Anderson. He was at Wright, Lindsey and Jennings at the time. And Phil is a great attorney, but Phil also had a great passion for what we were doing. He had been our attorney since 1974, for twelve years by the time the trial came. And Phil --- not only was it a case --- he absolutely was convinced that we were right, that what we were doing was precompetitive, not anticompetitive, that it had increased competition between the newspapers in Little Rock. It hadn’t diminished competition among the newspapers. So I think the fact that he felt so passionately about it helped.”
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