Lee Enterprises, Don Anderson Explains Montana Newspapers
Lee Enterprises Wasn’t Low Bidder, Sale Negotiator Says [Nor Highest]
By Paul Freeman – Associate Press Writer
Great Fall (AP) – The man who negotiated the sale of the Anaconda Co.’s Montana newspapers to Lee Enterprises said on Saturday that Anaconda rejected offers higher than the Lee’s $5.7 million.
Don Anderson, former publisher of a Lee newspaper in Madison, Wis., said Anaconda President C. J. Parkinson told him during the 1959 negotiations that Anaconda wanted to sell the newspapers to a group which would “give Montana a good press.”
The sale saw Anaconda divest itself of the daily newspapers in Billings, Butte, Helena, Missoula and Livingston. It also marked a major change in policy for Anaconda, then the most powerful single force in the state.
Anderson’s comments came before a panel discussion at the annual convention of the Montana Press Association. While the panel’s topic technically was “Montana’s Politics and Journalism Since World War II,” it was apparent that most media representatives believed the Anaconda sale was the single largest event in post-war history.
Anderson, now retired and living in the Gallatin Canyon, said the Anaconda Co.’s newspapers were guilty more of omission than commission in handling news.
“It was not so much what they would put in as what they would leave out,” Anderson said. He said the Anaconda newspapers never carried stories about mine disasters and would suppress stories favorable to politicians who were opposed by Anaconda.
Anderson said politicians on Anaconda’s blacklist would get their names before the public only in connection with their being charged with a felony or some similarly unfavorable story.
Anderson said editors and publishers of the Anaconda newspapers studiously read the morning Butte Standard to ascertain the company position and edited their newspapers accordingly.
Anderson said he believed that Anaconda had decided that the newspapers brought the company more trouble than the control was worth.
He said that, despite Anaconda’s Montana reputation as an “orge that eats babies,” he found company officials to be public-spirited and gentlemanly during the negotiations.
Former U.S. Senate candidate Leif Erickson of Helena, a politician who said he had felt the force of Anaconda’s opposition as expressed through the papers, said he was smeared as a supposed “communist” by the Anaconda-controlled press.
The above article appeared in The Sunday Missoulian on August 17, 1975.
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Don Anderson Hall, part of the University of Montana Journalism school, was built in 2007 to honor Anderson. He was born in Bozeman, Mt. in 1901, became a columnist, editor, and publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal, and eventually rose to vice president of Lee Enterprises.
For a history of Lee Enterprises see the link below: