What Shrinking Newsrooms Mean in the Age of the Koch Brothers and Billionaire Donors

[Commentary] The Star-Ledger's owner announced massive layoffs at the newspaper as part of a larger effort at consolidation. Now, entire sections of the Newark newsroom sit empty; a newsroom that has shed an astonishing 240 jobs since 2008, or two-thirds of its former staff.

Philadelphia columnist Will Bunch called the Star-Ledger pink slips for reporters the "best news" of Christie's career. Why? "With fewer of them on the beat, Christie -- and all the other corrupt politicians of the Garden State -- will be able to keep more of their secrets from the public than ever before."

But the sad news regarding the Star-Ledger isn't just about the challenges New Jersey's largest newspaper faces trying to cover the 11th most populous state with a newsroom one-third its previous size. The larger, disturbing question is what happens to newsgathering, and what happens to a democracy, when the cutbacks show no signs of abating while at the same time new, super-donor forces in American politics, led by people like the Koch brothers, exert unprecedented influence via staggering sums of money, misinformation, and faux news on the state level. "We are going to consolidate ourselves right out of a democracy," quipped one New Jersey journalist.

Charles and David Koch aren't alone among right-wing donors eager to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Democrats and to permanently alter the political landscape. Aspiring Republican presidential candidates recently traveled to Las Vegas for the so-called Sheldon Adelson Primary; to court the casino billionaire who spent $92 million in a failed attempt to defeat Obama in 2012. Unlike Adelson, however, the Koch brothers are helping to build an enormous, sprawling, and unprecedented infrastructure not only to help elect Republicans, including a Republican president, but to try to rewrite the laws across the country.

[Boehlert is Senior Fellow, Media Matters for America]