In 1995, Jeffrey Chandler decided to break with tradition and expose a family schism. A member of the large, extended and very private family that owned the Los Angeles Times, he had come to believe that the newspaper had become far too liberal under the control of his cousin, Otis Chandler.
It was time for The Times to return to its conservative roots, Chandler and his sister, Corinne Werdel, told Forbes magazine. "We have the inmates running the asylum," Werdel said. "They're so far out in left field."
The siblings were especially upset with the paper's coverage of gay rights and AIDS. "This is a mainstream paper, and the homosexual population is 1% to 1.5%," Jeffrey Chandler said. "When you start featuring these kinds of stories the way The Times does ... my God, you've got a campaign going on here."
Not much came of the complaints, or of a study the two reportedly commissioned around the same time. Never made public, the study, by a consulting firm, is said to have argued that the paper should adopt a more conservative stance, modeling itself after publications such as the National Review, the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal. Werdel and her brother had limited power then to influence the paper or its parent company, Times Mirror Co.
Today, Jeffrey Chandler, 64, is at the center of power within the Chandler family, which sold Times Mirror six years ago to Tribune Co. of Chicago. As one of three family representatives on the Tribune board, he is a key player in the Chandlers' fight to force the sale or breakup of the giant media company and could ultimately help determine the future of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, KTLA-TV and other Tribune properties.
Like most Chandlers, he keeps a low profile -- the Forbes interview was a rare exception -- and declined to be interviewed for this article. But his ascent says a great deal about how much has changed -- and, in a sense, stayed the same -- within a family that was once considered the most powerful in Southern California and even today is capable of shaking up the newspaper and financial world.
The second-largest shareholders of Tribune, the Chandlers have challenged a management plan to buy back 25% of the company's shares and cut $200 million in expenses. In regulatory filings, they have declared the Tribune-Times Mirror deal a failure and accused management of "strategic missteps" that have been "disastrous to investors."
The descendants of pioneering Times publishers Harry Chandler and Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, his father-in-law, have earned a reputation for single-minded dedication to financial success, with a willingness to act boldly, even ruthlessly, to achieve it -- sometimes without regard for the welfare of the newspapers that created their family fortunes.
Tribune Chairman and Chief Executive Dennis J. FitzSimons remarked Tuesday that the Chandlers were acting out of self-interest, "at the expense of other stockholders," a comment that echoed a statement by independent members of the Tribune board.
It was not the first time the Chandlers had been accused of brazen self-interest, a recurring theme throughout the family's long history as business titans and power brokers in Southern California. Author David Halberstam once wrote that The Times, the family's flagship, "was ancillary to the essential cause of the Chandlers, which was commercial profit and commercial expansion."
David Laventhol doesn't mince words about the Chandlers, the lead characters in a book he is writing about Times Mirror.
"I tell people, 'It has such a simple story line,' " said the former publisher of The Times and president of Times Mirror. " 'They're interested in their money, and that's it.' "
The same could be said of many business owners and investors, of course. Businesses are supposed to make money. And some who know the Chandlers say it is unfair to generalize.
"You can't paint them with one brush, because some of them are very philanthropic, and very generous and communityinvolved," said Steve Meier, a former Times Mirror executive who heads the Pfaffinger Foundation, which was established in 1936 to help Times employees in need.
But neither that nor the fact that the concerns Jeffrey Chandler expressed in Forbes were essentially journalistic have doused a widespread perception that the Chandlers are more interested in money than in the fate or quality of the publications that have made them rich.
"The thing is," said Alex Jones, author of books about the families that built the New York Times and the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., "if you're going to have a family-owned newspaper that's going to last multi generations, it's got to be something that the family draws psychic income from, not just monetary income. That's what the Sulzbergers have at the New York Times. That's what the Grahams have at the Washington Post."
