The Inquirer's new owners

The power of self-delusion:
Can we talk, please, about the Inquirer's new owners?

DAN ROTTENBERG

Excuse me while I splash cold water on the orgy of wishful thinking currently engulfing the Inquirer and Daily News. Within the past three months these two Philadelphia newspapers have been sold twice, first by the once-respected Knight-Ridder chain to the still-respected McClatchy chain, and then by McClatchy to a freshly assembled local investment syndicate headed by a public relations/advertising executive (Brian Tierney), a builder of upscale homes (Bruce E. Toll) and various other business and civic leaders whose primary common trait is their lack of experience in the business of reporting and analyzing news.

These developments would depress (or maybe terrify) most conscientious journalists. But the Inquirer’s reports suggested hopefully that its rescue from the clutches of California-based chains is cause for celebration. “In Local Hands,” shouted the Inky’s front-page headline on May 24th. Tierney was quoted to the effect that “his ‘homegrown ownership’ would take a longer-term perspective on profitability than would Wall Street investors.” Veteran journalism critic Ben Bagdikian, a usual suspect in stories of this sort, was trotted out for this benediction: “Local ownership is always a plus. They pay attention to the paper; they care about what’s in it.”

I realize that the human capacity for self-delusion is infinite. I also realize that, thanks to several recent rounds of buyouts, hardly anyone is left at the Inquirer and Daily News who recalls the last time such a celebration took place there. So let me remind you. The specific cause of celebration was the papers’ rescue by a national chain from the clutches of a meddlesome local owner.

Annenberg's problem (and Tierney's)

In 1969 Walter Annenberg sold the two newspapers to the distant, publicly-traded Knight Newspapers chain (later Knight-Ridder). Thanks to that sale, the Inquirer was transformed seemingly overnight from a despised tool of a vindictive proprietor into one of America’s most respected newspapers, the winner of an unprecedented 17 Pulitzer prizes during an 18-year period between 1972 and 1990.

Like Brian Tierney and Bruce Toll, Walter Annenberg was an accomplished Philadelphian of considerable talent and vision (among his many achievements, Annenberg built TV Guide into the nation’s best-selling magazine and kept it in the #1 spot for more than three decades). Like Tierney and Toll, he yearned to make the Inquirer a respected paper. But also like Tierney and Toll, he lacked any grounding in the journalistic process— the sort of Pavlovian instinct that would prevent him from using the paper to reward his local friends and punish his enemies. The result was a newspaper that, among other things, blacklisted Dinah Shore, the president of the University of Pennsylvania and even the 76ers because of slights perceived by Annenberg or his deputies.

It’s no accident that the best newspapers in America have been run by families: the Sulzbergers at the New York Times, for example, or the Grahams at the Washington Post, the Bancrofts at the Wall Street Journal, and of course the Knights (and even, for the better part of 85 years, the McLeans at the Philadelphia Bulletin). Journalism, practiced well, requires the fortitude to sacrifice friendships— which is easier to do when your support group consists of blood relatives marinated in a noble family tradition. It’s tough to make the right journalistic decision with your friends and investors looking over your shoulder; much easier when your ancestors are looking over your shoulder, reminding you not to besmirch the family name.

Tierney as anti-journalist

Tierney, the chief executive of the papers’ new parent company, presents an especially difficult case. The problem is not merely that he lacks roots in journalism; his roots are in public relations, which is to say anti-journalism. For most of his career Tierney has zealously and often effectively charmed and bullied the news media on behalf of his clients. PR is a necessary and perhaps even honorable profession, but its goal is not to find out what’s going on, but to influence public perceptions of what’s going on. Hiring such a man to run newspapers is like hiring Stephen Starr to review restaurants, or Karl Rove to run The Nation.

Something of this sort happened in the ‘90s when Ned Johnson, patriarch of Fidelity Investments, America’s largest mutual-fund complex, launched Worth magazine with the well-intentioned goal of offering consumers an independent and sophisticated publication about investing The magazine foundered after a year or two when it became evident that Worth would look foolish if it ignored Johnson’s own company, and equally foolish if it tried to write objectively about Johnson’s company.

That 'strong' pledge not to meddle

Tierney, somewhat like Ned Johnson, has sought to deflect criticism along these lines by pledging to respect the independence of the Inquirer and Daily News newsrooms. Although he has given $200,000 to political campaigns in the past decade, he now says his partisan political days are over. Tierney notes that the partnership agreement signed by the new owner-investors includes a clause pledging that “no member shall attempt to influence” news articles. Inky editor Amanda Bennett, ever the optimist, declared in a May 28 column, “I choose to believe our new owners’ strong commitment to respect this newspaper’s independence and integrity.”

A truly hard-nosed journalist would perceive that in fact there is nothing "strong" about the new owners’ commitment at all. Readers with long memories— both of us— may recall that the Australian tabloid tycoon Rupert Murdoch provided similar written guarantees in 1981 as a condition of acquiring the respected and venerable London Times. Within a year, according to then-Times editor Harold Evans, Murdoch had violated all of the guarantees, commenting at one point, “They’re not worth the paper they’re written on.” Editors who objected wielded no leverage other than their resignations.

On the other hand, consider William Safire

I don’t doubt Tierney’s good intentions (he’s as vulnerable to wishful thinking as anyone else in this matter). And he may well pump some much-needed fresh thinking into the newspapers’ business side. He may even transform himself into a dedicated champion of the public’s right to know. Stranger things have happened: William Safire, for example, was a partisan political flack and Nixon/Agnew speechwriter until the New York Times transformed him into a journalistic statesman. But the more likely scenario, I suspect, is that over the next decade some nimble entrepreneur will find a better and more profitable way to deliver news and analysis to Philadelphians, in much the way that Michael Bloomberg found a way to eat Dow-Jones’s lunch in the 1990s. (And Dow-Jones in the ‘90s, of course, owned a much stronger franchise and reputation than the Inquirer and Daily News enjoy today.)

Must such a savior be a Philadelphian? The Inquirer’s golden age, remember, occurred during the 18-year regime of Eugene Roberts, a North Carolinian (by way of Detroit and New York) who transformed the Inquirer (and overtook the provincial Bulletin) by aggressively and explicitly recruiting outsiders to work for him. Roberts was widely ridiculed at first for assembling a staff that couldn’t find 14th Street and didn’t know what day the Mummers’ Parade was held, but he never budged from his strategy.

“Yuh kin turn a good newspapurman intuh a good Philadelphian,” he once remarked to me. “But Ah’m not sure yuh kin turn a good Philadelphian intuh a good newspapurman.” His successors ignore that drawled wisdom at their peril.



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