NOTES ON A SCANDAL Part Two.

Transcription

1 NOTES ON A SCANDAL Part Two. Several persons have asked my opinions about the recent National Labor Relations Board hearings into the allegations that the Santa Barbara News-Press illegally fired employees for union activity. Because of a book deadline, I missed several days of the hearings but was in attendance when News-Press owner Wendy McCaw testified. On the days I wasn t there I followed the hearings on as well as in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound and the Independent. (See my note on news coverage below.) Did the government prove its case against the ownership of the News- Press? On legal analysis I defer to Craig Smith. My purpose in writing these comments to examine what the hearings have told us about the practice of journalism in Santa Barbara. For that purpose it may be instructive also to examine what the News-Press has said on its editorial pages. I m no longer a subscriber, but various folks have sent me relevant columns and editorials. The most absurd of these columns was written by McCaw s lap dog Travis Armstrong, who dutifully echoes every bias of his boss. He opined that publication of the Pentagon Papers case and the expose of the Watergate scandal occurred because the owners of The New York Times and The Washington Post believed they had an absolute right to print anything they wanted. So, in Armstrong s lights, Ms. McCaw has been following in the footsteps of the legendary Katherine Graham, the late publisher of The Post. It is to laugh. The Times and The Post took a stand for publication against suppression. In the Pentagon Papers case the Nixon administration was foolishly trying to suppress documents that shed light on the war; most of what was in the papers occurred before Nixon took office. In Watergate the same administration sought to cover up a crime. Mrs. Graham stood up to power. She showed courage in doing so; the attorney general of the United States even made a crude physical threat against her. Ms. McCaw, unlike Mrs. Graham, puts the preference of celebrity friends above the news, as she did notably in suppressing what was essentially harmless information, i.e., the address of Rob Lowe s vacant lot, an address vailable to viewers of the local public website. 1

2 Mrs. Graham, for whom I worked for 26 years, would have explicitly repudiated that notion put forth by Ms. McCaw s lawyer Barry Cappello at the NLRB hearings and echoed faithfully by Armstrong that a newspaper owner can do anything she wants with her newspaper. Don t take my word for it. Read Personal History, the acclaimed memoirs of Katharine Graham. For starters, she quotes approvingly (page 63) the seven maxims of her father, the publisher Eugene Meyer. The fifth maxim, contrary to the declared views of Ms. McCaw and Mr. Cappello is: That the newspaper s duty is to its readers and the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owner. That s what Katherine Graham preached and practiced. She also followed the first of her father s maxims: That the first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained. Mrs. Graham would have been appalled by the suppression of the address of Lowe s lot news, an act that Ms. McCaw proclaimed as common sense on the witness stand at the hearings. But since Kay Graham had a better sense of humor than I do, she might have been amused by lap dog Armstrong s claim that the News-Press suppression of news somehow resembles publication of the Watergate stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that marked the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency. Mrs. Graham believed that no one neither a newspaper owner nor a president of the United States was above the law. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senator of New York and Renaissance man, often said that everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts. At the NLRB hearings--and to my consternation with only token opposition from the government attorneys-- Barry Cappello repeatedly used his own facts when eliciting testimony on the issue of whether reporters should cite the editorial opinion of their newspaper in a news story. His view and the lockstep views of Armstrong and editor Scott Steepleton is that reporters should have cited these opinions in their stories. It is not a close question. The government could have put on the stand an expert witness picked at random from the ranks of journalism schools or newspapers, necessarily in this case a professor or journalist outside of Santa Barbara, and the testimony would have been the same. The expert would have testified that quoting from an editorial in a news story isn t done, and for an obvious reason. Doing this blurs the line between opinion and news. Publishers in the early 20 th century at a time the press was inflammatory 2

3 and partisan began the practice of separating news and opinion not because they were Wonderful People but because they found that readers trusted newspapers more when opinion and news were kept apart. Interestingly, that s still true. People, by and large, are skeptical of the press. They are even more distrustful when news and opinion are intermingled. This is one reason that I can say confidently, whatever happens in the NLRB cases, that circulation of the News-Press will continue to decline in each and every report of the bureau that audits such things. Related to the weird view that new stories and editorial should be intermingled is Mr. Cappello s assertion that the notion of a wall between the editorial and the news departments is a fiction existing only in the minds of the former employees of the paper. Again, an expert a real expert would have testified otherwise if only the government attorneys had bothered to call one. The wall which I prefer to call a barrier is often less than absolute. But there was a distinction between editorial and news at all the six newspapers for which I worked during a 50-plus year journalistic career. It would have been a scandal at any one of them if the owner had begun firing off memos reprimanding reporters for publishing addresses. The most striking aspect of Ms. McCaw s testimony was her passion about wildlife. During questioning by Judge William Kocol she exploded as she described how coyotes were being annihilated. Later, she expressed similar concerns about the killing of pigs and rats. This concern for wildlife contrasted with her contempt for the human beings who worked for her. In her memos and her written comments she described reporter Anna Davison as a shill and a handmaiden and a mouthpiece for the National Park Service. This was character assassination. Ms. Davison s stories were balanced by any normal test I remember being upset by the killing of the pigs when I read one of these stories as I m sure were many other readers. That was not enough for Ms. McCaw. She wanted the news stories to replicate her editorials. That is the greatest contrast of all with Mrs. Graham who wanted reporters to report the news not her opinions and who treated reporters with great respect. She might have been amused by the Armstrong columns, but she would certainly have been angry at the smear of Davison. So, as is often the case with propaganda, the stated objective of the News-Press owner turns out to be the opposite of her real objective. Ms. McCaw said repeatedly and her mouthpieces echo her that she wants to remove bias from the paper. The facts show that what she really wants is 3

4 to insert opinion into the news stories. (Mr. Cappello is too good a lawyer not to have noticed this that s why he insisted that a newspaper owner can do whatever she wants whether or not it s good or ethical journalism.) Such claims in defiance of the facts are not unique to Wendy McCaw. Fox News boldly proclaims that its goal is fair and balanced news. Does anyone, Fox included, really believe that? It would be defensible if Fox said: Look, we think much of the media has a liberal bias, and we re seeking to balance that with a conservative slant. Similarly, Ms. McCaw could say, I don t accept the conventional wisdom of the National Park Service and other experts and want stories that reflect my point of view on wildlife. I also want to defer to my friends and celebrities and never write anything unfavorable about them. We might not like that, but it would be refreshingly honest. Finally, a word on the news coverage. I propose a Hannah Guzik Award, in honor of the young reporter, a recent Westmont graduate, who was assigned to cover the NLRB hearings by the News-Press. She lasted only a few days because she couldn t take the twisting of her reporting on the NLRB hearings. (She decided it was too much for her about the same time the paper decided it didn t want a fair-minded reporter doing the coverage.) For the News-Press the truth is radioactive. But thanks to some excellent coverage of the hearings, I think truth again will out. Based on what the hearings showed, the Santa Barbara News-Press had a first-rate reporting staff most of the reporters were women, by the way before Ms. McCaw came along. Most of the stories to which she objected were fair and balanced not in the Fox meaning of the term but in the dictionary definitions of these words. As to the coverage of the hearings, Craig Smith would have earned less as a journalist than he did as a lawyer, but his trial coverage is first rate. Dare I suggest he missed his calling? I ve also been impressed with the reporting of Eric Lindberg or the Sound. Mr. Lindberg is a recent graduate of USC, which has a journalism school nearly as good as its football team. (Disclosure: I taught an Honors Journalism class at USC in the mid-1990s as a Freedom Forum fellow.) Mr. Lindberg writes as if he were a veteran trial reporter. Trials, including this hearing, offer a few islands of drama amidst rivers of boredom. So my hat is off to Smith and Lindberg for their good and patient work and also the reporters at the Independent, the Ventura Star and the Los Angeles Times, the latter two of which covered the hearings on only an occasional basis. 4

5 Finally, a word about what went on outside the courtroom. Near the end of the hearings, Mr. Cappello whose courtroom performance certainly earned the hundreds of thousands of dollars Ms. McCaw is paying him was surprisingly insulting to Tracy Lehr of KEYT when she attempted to question him and Ms. McCaw as they went to lunch. Mr. Cappello had behaved in a gentlemanly manner inside and outside the courtroom during the hearings; perhaps his contemptuous treatment of Ms. Lehr was meant to impress Ms. McCaw. Whatever the reason, Ms. Lehr is universally respected by those who know her as an honest reporter, doting mother, and fine human being. Why shouldn t Ms. McCaw answer a question or two about her views of the newspaper? Put another way, why shouldn t she be accessible to the public she claims to serve? But Ms. McCaw s contempt for others is not limited to the honest reporters who worked for her. She testified in court and seemed proud of it that she does not have an open door policy in her office at the newspaper. She has refused to meet with the city s mayor. She refuses to publish letters that criticize her. Until now, she has declined to bargain with the union that won an overwhelming (33-6) vote to organize the News- Press. Tracy Lehr deserved something better than an insult for doing her job. She deserved an answer to her questions. The people of Santa Barbara deserve answers, too. They deserve a newspaper owner who realizes, to paraphrase Katharine Graham, that a newspaper is not the plaything of its owner but a public trust. --Lou Cannon, October 1,