The investors controlling the Los Angeles Times finally found an editor who they can be assured will make the paper cheap enough to run to pay off the ridiculous pile of debt the parade of fuckwit owners has piled up trading this proud national newspaper like a crack whore at a biker’s bachelor party.

After Editor James E. O’Shea refused to throw any more writers or editors off the roof of the Times’ offices, the publishers tossed O’Shea and appointed the guy who ran the Times’ Website, Russ Stanton, certain that a guy who’d worked Web media would know how to run a sweatshop correctly.

“Golly,” said Stanton earlier this week, “This is a great opportunity to prove newspapers can be as cheaply run as Websites and get rid of those stupid notions that a newspaper story isn’t an opportunity to suck off an advertiser.” To demonstrate his dedication, Stanton said he was meeting with an advertiser later to wash his car with his tongue.

Stanton’s rise exemplifies the fall of America’s civic culture and the regression of non-fiction media into disposable investments for whichever gangland traders think they can make a quick score transforming a newspaper into an empty building that publishes press releases and ads on a periodical basis.

The LA Times is owned by the Tribune Company, which bought another big media chain, Times Mirror in 2000, and which was bought out by a real estate tycoon, Sam Zell last December. The $8.2 billion dollar transaction has left the media conglomerate of TV stations and newspapers fully $13 billion in debt; still a profitable company but not to the extent that it can neutralize the grasping stupidity of gangland investors who believe their own bullshit.

That is why the word conglomerate has the word glom in the middle of it. Because they’re filled with gloms who have no fucking clue that you can’t keep piling debt on top of a company until it collapses and call it enterprise. You nuke your margins that far out into the future and, hey, asshole, this isn’t engaging a manageable investment risk; it’s baiting apocalypse like a Rapture junkie.

Predictably, Zell and his cronies are going to make the employees pay for their witless investment decisions by recruiting a malleable glom, Stanton, to get rid of all the employees. It seems like he has no qualms about throwing reporters off of the roof. It’s basically all editors at the LA Times do since the 2000 Tribune/Times Mirror roll-up. They may as well advertise for guys with really big enduring biceps.

Tribune’s initial pick for editor after the Times Mirror buyout, John Carroll quit after he refused to throw any more reporters off the roof. The company sent a new publisher and editor who threw as many as they could before they grew weary of the carnage. O’Shea arrived from Chicago to find a demoralized and enraged staff and could only extinguish a handful of reporters and editors until devil remorse got hold of him.

Stanton did some reporting back in the day at mostly dogshit papers except for the Riverside Press-Enterprise before drifting to the Times where his last real editorial job was editing the lame business section before becoming the Website guy, perfect credentials for reducing an editorial staff into a hodgepodge crew of all-but-unpaid freelancers, housewife columnists and work-for-free bloggers, the heart and soul of Web media.

Zell said at a press conference, “Fucking reporters, they just cause trouble accusing me, ah, innocent people of shit they didn’t do. Assholes. Stanton’s a good one. He’ll get rid of them all and I can make me some real money on this shithouse operation.”