In an interview on Newspaper Dynasties

On to Privileged Son: Otis Chandler And The Rise And Fall Of The LA Times Dynasty. Please introduce us to the Chandler family and this book about them.

The book focuses mainly on Otis Chandler, who was a fourth generation publisher of the LA Times. In 1960, he took what wasn’t a particular well-regarded newspaper and set out to make it really exemplary. And he succeeded – he made it one of the finest newspapers in the United States, one of the papers that won the largest number of Pulitzer Prizes. He hired real talent and set a higher standard than his forebears. The metamorphosis that he brought about over the course of the LA Times’s history paralleled the growth and growing prominence of the city.

So this book, by Dennis McDougal, is well researched and accurate and very readable. It’s sometimes called a business history, but it’s also a multigenerational biography of the Chandler family. It makes clear how newspaper families form an intertwined, even symbiotic relationship with the city where they’re centred. With the Chandlers you see how, over the course of the 20th century to the time when Otis was unceremoniously forced out of the management of the LA Times in the 1980s, the city became more prominent as the paper became more prestigious. It became a world-class paper as Los Angeles went from being a sleepy agricultural outpost to a major metropolitan city.

When the Chandler dynasty’s founder, Harrison Gray Otis, took charge of the newsroom in 1882 the city had fewer than 13,000 residents. It is now a city of nearly 10 million. McDougal claims the Chandler dynasty shaped and reshaped southern California. Please explain.

One thing that people often cite is the water wars. The city needed water to grow and the paper supported the acquisition of water rights from an agricultural valley. That entirely changed southern California and made it possible for more people, and consequently more readers, to live there. The Chandler family was very involved in backroom politics and forcefully editorialised in ways that result in the expansion of the city.

As the man at the helm of the [US] West’s most important paper did Chandler help to elect California’s two presidents: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan?

Uh-huh.