The Major Daily Sheds Its D.C. Eyes

Holy Crap, how did I miss this one?

Monday, Nov. 12, 2007

Marcus Stern is the author of the best article I’ve ever read in The San Diego Union-Tribune. His June 2005 article about Randy "Duke" Cunningham’s home sale was a classic example of what Bob Woodward of The Washington Post famously referred to as the "Holy Shit" story because that’s exactly what I said after reading it....

...The news service was established to serve the company’s chain of newspapers, but almost all of those papers have been sold off to pay owner David Copley’s estate taxes. The death of Copley’s mother, Helen, in 2004 left her only child with a staggering debt to the IRS. (Estate taxes are sometimes blamed for killing off family-owned newspapers in America.)

...Faced with insufficient resources to pay the bill, Copley probably had little choice but to sell off the company’s dailies in Ohio and Illinois this year with the goal of hanging on to the flagship Union-Tribune...

...No one would have missed Copley New Service had it perished in the first half of its 52-year existence. The news service that ended Cunningham’s career reportedly began life as a CIA front. James S. Copley, David’s father, offered President Eisenhower his fledgling news service to act as "the eyes and ears" of the U.S. intelligence community in Latin America, according to a 1977 expose by journalists Joe Trento and Dave Roman in Penthouse magazine. CIA operatives were placed on the payroll, the story goes, and the new service exchanged information for scoops. It was all furiously denied by the Copleys, but even the company’s own historian conceded that the news service had a "sad and thoroughly undistinguished" past.

Ummm hmmmm. You don't really wonder why I call the San Diego Uniion Tribune " the Fishwrap," do you?