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How Harper's got Philly newspaper story wrong
A story in the new Harper's about the super-rich who are controlling newspapers force-fits the story of Philly's two dailies into the role of supporting actor.
How Harper's got Philly newspaper story wrong
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In the new issue of Harper's magazine, writer David Sirota makes a broadly compelling argument: as more cities become single-newspaper towns, the super-rich owners of surviving publications are all the more able, and likely, to abuse their monopoly news power in a self-interested manner.
But Sirota force-fits the story of Philadelphia's two dailies into the role of supporting actor in the service of a larger narrative of malicious corporate control. [FYI: The online version of the article is only available to Harper's magazine subscribers, God bless their pulpy souls.]
Sirota's Philadelphia story begins in 2006: Republican PR heavyweight Brian Tierney takes over The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com, removing any “internal friction between existing business structure and larger political goals,” he writes. “The professional influence industry simply swallowed the local newspaper monopoly in a single gulp.”
Sirota cites two examples of Tierney's influence, one to highlight his management of the editorial page, the second to demonstrate his meddling in the newsroom:
Tierney quickly nudged the Inquirer’s editorial page to the extreme right, giving former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum a lucrative biweekly column at $1,750 a pop. Tierney followed up by assigning a monthly column to John Yoo, the former Bush White House lawyer who authored the notorious legal memos justifying torture. Over on the news side, meanwhile, the Inquirer was sued by a local charter school, which alleged that the paper had published a spate of negative stories as retribution against school administrators for nixing a business deal with Tierney.
It is both true and lamentable that Tierney shifted the editorial page rightward. But Sirota also strongly implies that Tierney intervened in the newsroom — and that appears to just be plain wrong.
Reporters were of course afraid that Tierney would be a disaster for newsroom independence. A PR pit bull, Tierney was “quick to call high-ranking editors to complain about coverage, at times accusing reporters of being biased, unprofessional, unethical and inept,” as the American Journalism Review reported in 2006.
Most infamous case in point: former Inky reporter Ralph Cipriano, who crossed swords with Tierney in the 1990s over coverage of client The Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was eventually fired, and sued the paper for libel.
So it was no surprise that a few months after Tierney took over, he was still “pledging for perhaps the thousandth time that he will not interfere with news stories.”
And he didn't. I reached Sirota by phone: Did he think Tierney intervened in the newsroom?
“The perception of impropriety is as important as if impropriety is happening,” he told me.
But that perception might be Sirota's alone.
Critically, he does not mention that the lawsuit alleging Tierney's malicious interference was never successful, or that it was filed by Vahan Gureghian: the wealthy, Republican, Gov. Tom Corbett-allied and extraordinarily litigious owner of Charter School Management Inc., a company that has been criticized for the tens of millions it has earned for running the Chester Community Charter School.
Gureghian is a man, after all, who once sued an 18-year-old for posting a photo of his “$13.5 million, 30,652-square-foot, 10-bedroom, French-chateau-style mansion [on] his blog, Homes of the Rich.”
Sirota chooses a rather odd candidate to play Tierney's victim.
The investigative piece that Gureghian sued over, by suburban education reporter Dan Hardy, uncovered “questions about whether the school is spending too much of its budget on administration and too little on teaching.”
It was solid and, if anything, an example of the Inquirer newsroom functioning well under Tierney's rule.
I don't believe that Sirota interviewed anyone in Philadelphia for this story. The only quote comes from Buzz Bissinger:
But journalist and author Buzz Bissinger, who writes for both papers, was openly skeptical: “I believe [the Inquirer] will effectively cease to be a real newspaper and become a house organ for these guys and their friends.”
But Bissinger, though it might appear otherwise to you, said that to the New York Times — not to Sirota.
So I asked Sirota if he did have any Philadelphia sources. He told me that he wouldn't tell me: it was a matter of protecting his sources.
“As a reporter, I'm sure you know people don't like necessarily talking about what happens in a newsroom when newsrooms were laying people off left and right.”
Sure: I'm familiar with journalists protecting the identity of their sources, but I have never heard of a reporter refusing to acknowledge whether or not he had any sources. The last time I covered the local papers' travails, I found at least three people inside the building to speak on the record.
What's most odd about Sirota's Philadelphia story is that it misses the one glaring recent example of owner interference in the newsroom, which took place earlier this year when the Inquirer and Daily News were still owned by hedge funds: management pulled a Daily News blog post by reporter David Gambacorta on developer Bart Blatstein's plan to assemble a coalition of investors to buy Philadelphia Media Network, which was being pursued by another group of investors that initially included former Gov. Ed Rendell, South Jersey political boss George Norcross and Comcast-Spectacor chairman Ed Snider (Rendell and Snider later pulled out). Meanwhile, the Inquirer killed a story about the sale, and an online version of a separate article was scrubbed of details on the company's 2011 financial performance.
The controversy blew up big-time and was covered in media outlets nationwide, including by David Carr in The New York Times.
"Personally, I never saw or heard of any instances where Brian tried to influence news reporting. The same goes for our current local owners,” Gambacorta tells me. “Both the Daily News and Inquirer are staffed with pretty damn good journalists. We've shown in the not-so-distant past that we wouldn't stand for anyone attempting to screw around with our work."
Sirota's account of the Denver Post's compromised existence under conservative publisher Dean Singleton, his area of expertise, is downright chilling — and echoes a national trend.
“If a paper has financial competition, it errs on the side of the idea that information must be free: that you publish news first and ask political questions later,” one Denver source told Sirota. “If it has no competition, it instead errs on the side of the owners’ politics, the fear of getting sued, [and of] not wanting to challenge the establishment.”
And much of his article does reflect what is going on here in Philadelphia, including “the greater reliance on wire-service copy in place of original local content and more rolling newsroom layoffs.”
Ditto his analysis of how the monopoly Denver Post ignores outside reporting that it finds inconvenient. The Inquirer frequently fails to follow or report stories broken in other outlets, and not just this outlet: a probing Times investigation of school-voucher-like tax credit programs in Pennsylvania and other states got no play in the Inquirer (at least not that I've found—Daily News reporter Will Bunch, however, did pick it up).
I think this has more to do, however, with The Inquirer's provincial and old-fashioned notion that if the Inquirer didn't break it, it didn't happen in Philadelphia. Not so much cold and self-interested political calculation.
But really, the most important matter facing Philadelphia journalism is whether the new owners continue to invest in the newsrooms they promised to save. Journalism in this city depends on the work done by a lot of great reporters — including quite a few who likely hate that I write media criticism pieces like this about them — whose jobs are on the line.
Good column. Anyone who can't get sheaves of Inquirer quotes on the record isn't trying. Start with our elected union leaders at least.— Joe D
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