No doubt that former owner of the Los Angeles Times Otis Chandler, who passed away this morning, did many great things to help that paper rise to national prominence. But in its coverage of the story today, the LA Times chooses to emphasize that changing the paper’s “pro-business, pro-Republican” tone was essential to gaining national respectability:

Chandler was the last dominant figure in a newspaper dynasty that had run The Times since 1882. It was in that year that Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, his great-grandfather, bought part ownership in a struggling, year-old paper and turned it into a dynamic, highly profitable platform for his pro-business, pro-Republican views.
The paper remained profitable, but provincial and highly partisan, until Otis Chandler took it over and began one of the most dramatic makeovers in the history of American journalism.

Can you imagine any reporter writing that a newspaper had to shed its “provincial, highly liberal” views in order to attain national respect? It’s as though this reporter is saying that conservative views and national respectability are just incompatible. (Has he ever heard of the Wall Street Journal?) Also, the LA Times never lost its “highly partisan” tone — as readers of Patterico can tell you. It just went the other way.