by Peter Wong on September 29, 2025 (BeyondChron.org)
Local filmmaker Rick Goldsmith’s powerful documentary “Stripped For Parts: American Journalism On The Brink” may have been around since 2023. But that fact doesn’t make the film’s information dated or irrelevant. In fact, given the ongoing American right-wing oligarchy’s program to keep the American public ignorant of its looting and corruption, addressing the challenge described in the film is more urgent than ever. For the viewer who’s passionate about the future of democracy in America, Goldsmith’s documentary will bring out the viewer’s inner French revolutionary.
Newspapers, as Goldsmith shows, aren’t dying out in the way it’s publicly understood. To the public, the slow death of newspapers supposedly comes from their being overshadowed by such new technologies as online newsletters and television.
But unlike buggy whips, the need served by newspapers still exists. Goldsmith reminds viewers that to perform their roles as informed citizens, ordinary people still need to know about the activities of the powerful, whether they are elected to government or own a lot of businesses.. A stunning array of television clips demonstrate these shows would be just glorified opinion page pieces without the foundation of a newspaper as a trusted source of reference.
The problem, as the director illustrates, is that newspapers haven’t found a way yet to successfully transition away from James Gordon Bennett’s once-profitable 1835 business model for newspapers. Bennett’s New York Herald demonstrated a newspaper could be a roaring financial success when it focused on connecting the paper’s readers to the wares of the paper’s advertisers. Whether the inducement was news of current affairs, adventure comic strips, or even fashion news, the aim was the same: get the readers to pick up the newspaper and see the ads. When Internet search engines gobbled up advertising dollars that would have gone to newspapers, effective alternative sources of revenue did not leap into the breach to help newspapers fill those resulting financial holes completely .
The newspapers’ financial doldrums provided a blood in the water signal to such hedge funds as Chatham Asset Management and Versa Capital Management. They proceeded to buy financially floundering newspapers on the cheap. The hedge funds’ subsequent effect on those acquired papers can be likened to what happens after coordinated cannon broadsides are inflicted on wooden warships in the Age of Sail. This economic result shouldn’t be a surprise as hedge funds are not in the altruism business. The ultra-wealthy investors who put up with these funds’ exorbitant fees and lack of SEC oversight happily do so for the chance to get really rich. Such social costs of the tactics the funds employ to reach this end (e.g. journalists forced to triage which important stories the paper can cover) is not the investors’ concern.
The worst of these private equity firms (and the film’s chief villain) is Alden Global Holdings. Under the secretive leadership of Randall D. Smith (a vulture-like man whose daily blessing seems to be “Greed Is Good”) and Heath Freeman (a man whose apparent affability conceals his mania for finding employees to dump to improve the bottom line), Alden’s actions with the Denver Post would demonstrate the vulture hedge fund had zero interest in supporting quality journalism. In one of the film’s particularly damning anecdotes, when the Post’s staff was in all hands on deck coverage mode for the Aurora, Colorado theater mass shooting, the Alden representative who called the paper’s editor was more concerned about the editor’s drawing up a list of newspaper personnel to be fired. Another Alden acquisition, the Oakland Tribune, won a Pulitzer for their coverage of the Ghost Ship Fire. Their staff didn’t merit even a polite congratulation from Alden higher-ups.
Those who mourn the losses of such Bay Area Alden victims as the deceased Contra Costa Times can guess what the hedge fund’s endgame was. This firm of two-legged vultures in power suits were more interested in finding ways to cash out the assets of whatever unfortunate newspaper they acquired as quickly as possible. Whether the method of legalized theft was raiding journalists’ pension funds or selling a newspaper’s offices to make a real estate killing, the proceeds unsurprisingly never went to such pedantic concerns as giving the journalists they employed long overdue raises.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume Alden Global is an unstoppable financial Wehrmacht. Goldsmith’s account of the successful fight against the hedge fund’s attempt to buy the Gannett newspaper chain (which includes USA Today) demonstrates how much Alden Global depends on concealment and lack of public attention to perform its journalistic homicides. A Washington Post reporter, for example, noticed something odd about the properties Alden Global subsidiary Twenty Lake Holdings, LLC listed for sale on its website. The listings all happened to be headquarters for now deceased newspapers. A call by the reporter to Twenty Lake Holdings asking for an explanation was never returned. The Twenty Lakes Holdings website, though, suddenly disappeared.
But if Goldsmith’s recounting of the Gannett fight proves rousing, the recounting of the fight to prevent Alden getting its unclean hands on the Chicago Tribune winds up being bled of suspense. Friendly hint: having an interviewee talk way too long about their dreams for the Tribune once Alden is defeated usually creates the overwhelming sense in the viewer that the bad guys will win. This viewer got a better sense of the journalistic tragedy Alden Global inflicted by learning the professional birthplaces of film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (the Tribune and the Sun-Times) no longer employ film critics.
That creative stumble can be forgiven as Goldsmith and the journalists he interviews capture the greater truth embodied by newspapers. If having an informed electorate is key to having a working democracy, what happens to such a political system when its citizens have only opinion as their basis of information? The highly misinformed Faux News voter is just one appalling result.
So what’s the answer? One exciting solution captured in Goldsmith’s film is the existence of nonprofit online newsrooms. But there are some caveats. The circulation figures for these outlets are only a fraction of what even struggling newspapers have in readership. Foundation funding helps online journalists start up, but strategies for keeping things going long-term is still up in the air. Wealthier cities and more urban areas can potentially support these online journalistic efforts, but no answer is yet forthcoming regarding journalism serving poorer and more rural communities.
Paying to support independent journalists such as Hamilton Nolan and Marisa Kabas does ensure excellent reporting. But the money conscious among us will wonder how many publications and reporters they can afford to support in their budgets. Should it be Mission Local thanks to their coverage of local issues ignored by our local infotainment outlets? Does 404 Media get the nod because of their stellar coverage of the intersection of tech and politics, among other issues? It’s not an easy question to answer.
Goldsmith’s magic bullet is to treat journalism as a public good, similar to clean water or public education. This means having our federal tax dollars used to fund journalistic endeavors keeping an eye on the misdeeds of the powerful. The BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Company certainly show that there’s precedent for having taxpayer-paid news. Hamilton Nolan also supports this idea, but he offers the reality check that health care may also be thought of as a public good yet the U.S. government hasn’t exactly moved heaven and earth to treat it as such.
The bigger problem to deal with in a government-funded news organization is the degree of editorial independence an American version of this idea will have from the government’s desire to be treated in as flattering a way as possible. One need only look at how the Orange Cuck has turned much of the federal government into his personal fiefdom to see the dangers of unchecked government-controlled news media.
Yet the current status quo of letting the Alden Globals of the world have their way isn’t sustainable either. Freeman may talk a good public game about being the savior of journalism. But in practice, Alden Global Capital acts like the capitalist version of the medieval medical practitioners who claimed deliberately bleeding an ill person would improve their health.
Alden Global’s heads have no plans to slow down or even reconsider their profitable program of acquiring (and deliberately killing) newspapers. Nowadays, the hedge fund performs its dirty deeds through a front corporation with the anodyne name of MNG Enterprises. Yet this writer considers it a subconscious tell that the enterprise’s acronym could reasonably stand for Murdering Newspapers for Greed.
(“Stripped For Parts: American Journalism On The Brink” will be available for streaming from October 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025. Just go to the www.pbs.org website or the PBS app on your smart TV.
(KQED World will broadcast the film on October 20, 21, and 26. Check listings for broadcast times.
(KQED will broadcast “Stripped For Parts” in November, but the specific day and time is still TBA as of this writing.)
