A Lie: One More Reason Not to Trust Reuters Takeover

Then today I had to listen to Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, in an interview by Reuters, say this about the Thomson takeover (at about the 2:20 mark of the interview):

“The Thomson family has a long history in owning and really respecting editorial operations. So I think they were uniquely attracted to all that Reuters represents.”

(Here listen to my recording: Reuters Thomson History.mp3)

It’s exactly this kind of distortion of facts to protect corporate interests that worries me especially now that these two companies will have rule over so much of the financial news.

Here is what in 1998 the American Journalism Review reported about that long Thomson history. Compare it with the distortion above:

Thomson’s formula was so simple others soon mimicked it: Carve a lot out of a little. He scooped up small-town dailies and dished out the least costly product he could sell. One early shell-shocked publisher, sitting in on the first meeting after selling to Thomson Newspapers, watched as the new budgeteers ordered that newsroom pencils be issued one at a time. “God help us if they ever discover there are two sides to a piece of toilet paper,” he muttered.

Here is more about that Thomson respectful history:

In 1993 even Thomson’s chief executive officer, quoted in one of the chain’s few respected papers, Toronto’s Globe and Mail, conceded that the company penny-pinched its way to “cruddy” newspapers.

Read the whole AJR article and see what a pathetic distortion Glocer is putting forth. Everyone who is in the industry knows that the Thomson family killed small newspapers every where. I lived in Portsmouth, N.H., desperate for a newspaper job, but would not lower myself to its standards. So I have first hand knowledge.

Read this Tom Glocer, also from the AJR:

Quality was never a hallmark of a Thomson sheet–and employees of family-owned local papers blanched when they heard the Thomsons were coming.

And read this:

“They don’t have an emotional bone in their body,” says Bill Sternberg, Thomson’s former Washington bureau chief who now works at USA Today. Sternberg spent seven years building up the bureau, then saw it gutted in one night over dinner at the J.W. Marriott Hotel, the staff to be told in the morning. The Washington bureau is now down to two reporters, one writing for Thomson’s Arizona papers, the other for the Wisconsin group.

Here is Sternberg talking about the first paper Roy Thomson bought in 1934:

“Just look at Timmins. They sure had enough money to have kept the paper for sentimental reasons. But they didn’t. They don’t have sentiment and they don’t have ideology. The ideology is dollars.”

By 2001 they had moved out of the newspaper business entirely. But now they are back in the news business. And Tom Glocer’s distortion seems to be a continuation of that wretched Thomson news industry history.