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I had the opportunity on April 21st to attend a meeting with Tim McGuire,
the editor of the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!). The
publisher of the Strib recently convinced the editor to develop a “purpose
statement” and a list of values for the newspaper to live by. Mr. McGuire
has done so, and lately has been publishing a column on this and related
editor-type issues in the Sunday Strib. He came to this meeting to talk
about some of those values and to see if he could get, as he put it,
some “fodder for a future column.” I don’t know if he succeeded in this
latter goal, but I took along a notebook and a tape recorder and I certainly
got a column out of it. Here it is.
The meeting included about 20 interested citizens, and Mr. McGuire’s
intention was to have us talk about why there is so much “meanness”
in public discourse. For some mysterious reason, this topic is quite
popular of late among pundits, TV talk-show hosts, and other opinion
leaders. It has to do with the phenomenon of people biting each others’
heads off when they disagree in public, rather than simply expressing
a polite disagreement. “Civility in public discourse,” it’s often called,
and I find it very tedious. (I spent years in therapy learning how to
express my feelings freely, and I think it makes for much more interesting
and honest discussions than this passive/aggressive “politeness” that
seems to be the goal of these wonks. Anyhow...)
I was happy to find that the group had a much more interesting agenda
than the editor (hereafter referred to as TM). It took us a while to
veer from the tedium, but finally the group got to asking about some
interesting things, like the role of the media in our community, and
the nature of accountability.
The first interesting question came at about the halfway point of the
two-hour meeting, when a citizen asked TM about the statement of values
that the editor had written up at the behest of his publisher. (John
Scheuler is the publisher, and the Star Tribune is a subsidiary of the
California- based McClatchy Company.) I print the question and the answer
verbatim:
Question: “Mr. McGuire, about the values: you said you wrote
them. Now, I’ve been involved in this where I work...and what we’ve
always tried to do is involve the people who are going to be subject
to the values and the mission statement. And I didn’t get that out of
your comment. If that’s the case, how are you going to get buy-in from
the reporters, and the editors, and the columnists, and so on, if they
weren’t in fact involved?”
TM: “Well, that’s a fascinating question. To be completely honest,
we’ve kind of been down that road, and I’ve found that it didn’t work
that well. In a newsroom, you’ve got lots of interesting, different
opinions, and they go completely across the spectrum. And it’s clearly
not like 3M sitting down and saying ‘We want to focus on innovation.”
It just isn’t like that. And the responsibility to the public is one
that I don’t think can be made by consensus. I would like to be a consensus
kind of guy; that’s my basic orientation. And what I basically decided
is that the values and, to a certain extent, the purpose statement,
were more like a ‘State of the Union,’ and more like an aspirational
set of goals that the leader needed to set forth. And then the leader
does need to engage in the process that you’re talking about. We have
begun that process of promulgating them. I got in today the wallet-sized
things that have the values and purpose, and I started disseminating
them. Last night we were starting a series of meetings to hone the values.
And very much what I am going to do is ‘OK, where would you like to
take this? The value is here, now what would you like on the “how” to
make them work?’ But I did make the decision, with some scars on my
body from the past, that I had to set forth my vision of the values.”
Yours truly translated that answer as follows: “Sure, we can have some
democracy, but not until after the real decisions have been made.” It
occurred to me that this was a pretty clear statement of the typical,
and very undemocratic, nature of the corporate environment. So I chimed
in with the following:
Nygaard: “The crucial difference being, of course, with the
President’s state of the union, people vote for him, and they don’t
vote for him if they don’t like it.” (This brought laughter from the
group, but not from TM.)
When it comes to deciding what information is available to the citizens
Minnesota, why would anybody think that it’s acceptable for those decisions
to be made by someone who is only really accountable to a corporation
in California? That’s why I find this discussion about “civility” tedious:
it really doesn’t have anything to do with how we get information, or
how important decisions get made. Does it make any difference if the
editor of a major daily newspaper lays down the law in a polite way
rather than in a rude manner? The rules are the same either way. The
powerful among us want to continue to hold the power and impose their
decisions on the rest of us, and they would like us to act as much as
possible as if that doesn’t bother us too much. This, as near as I can
figure, is what “civility” means.
I wanted to explore the issue of accountability further. Authentic
accountability has nothing to do with how “nice” or “not-nice” a person
one may be. It has to do with the relations of power within the structures
and institutions within which we function every day. I doggedly pursued
this line of thinking as follows:
Nygaard: “Which leads to my question, which is a more structural
question. I don’t have any opinion one way or another about the personalities
involved. But, for example, for a person in your position: McClatchy
signs your check, so we know where they stand. And the advertisers pay
the bills, so we know what power they have. Now, the other two groups,
that you don’t see as clearly, are the workers...”
TM: “Now, just to interrupt, your statements aren’t following.
Just because they advertise doesn’t mean they have power. But, go ahead.”
[Ed. Note: I’m not making this up.]
Nygaard: “As a group, they certainly do. If, as a group, say,
a dozen large corporations decided to pull their advertising from the
Star Tribune, there would be changes, I would say. Just as a group;
I’m not personalizing it.”
TM: “The first change is the editor. If anyone tried to make
changes, the editor would be gone. But nobody has ever tried.”
Nygaard: “Right, and so...”
TM: “I want to work that point a little bit, because it is important.
I mean, you’ve just - unlike what I thought the spirit of this was -
you’ve leaped to an assumption, and said, “This, therefore, this.” That
is not true. Advertisers have had no influence on the Star Tribune in
the last 20 years. We have gone through at least seven boycotts over
the last 20 years. You’ve never heard about them, and the staff has
never heard about them. I have a firm rule: I never tell them about
boycotts. We go through them all the time. They don’t affect our news
coverage. At all.”
Nygaard: “Well, I must have hit a nerve, because I didn’t say
that. What I said - correct me if I’m wrong - is that McClatchy signs
your check, and the people who pay the bills are the advertisers.”
TM: “And you said, “‘And that’s where the power lies.’”
Nygaard: “I said, ‘So I know where they stand. We know what’s
up with that.’ That’s all I said. I didn’t say anything about how it
affects you or anything like that. I said, ‘They [McClatchy] sign the
check. They [advertisers] pay the bills.’ And then there’s two other
groups that I want to talk about: one would be the workers at the paper,
the people you just referred to in relation to the values, etc. And
then the readers. And the reference to the readers was, you have letters...
I just want to ask, what are other channels of accountability to the
people in the newsroom, and to the readers? How do you respond to those,
or how do you hear from those - other than unsolicited letters?”
TM: “Well, I think the marketplace is a great discipliner. If
people stop buying your paper, if people call, or write... You always
are taking the temperature in lots of different ways. I think the Star
Tribune takes the temperature probably as well as any paper in the country.
We have the Reader’s Representative. Larry Werner now spends a lot of
his time getting groups together to tell us what they think about the
newspaper. We are constantly taking the temperature of the readers.
We do it also in very formal ways. Readership surveys, attitude surveys,
surveys about readership of specific sections. So we have a lot of ways
that we continually take the temperature of readers.
 “As far
as employees, I’ve never had any difficulty taking the temperature of
employees. They usually have their hands on my throat [laughter] when
they are concerned about something. That has never been a particular
challenge.”
15 minutes later, after some intervening comments about the perception
that many people have about the influence that corporations have on
the news, and the negative effect that this has on citizen influence,
the following question was asked by Ken Pentel, recent Green Party candidate
for Governor of MN:
Question: “One of the things I wanted to ask you...There are
some things we cannot ignore, that I think do shape the way we live.
One is the consolidation of market power that has taken place in the
information era. We are seeing a massive consolidation. So, it limits
our diversity of choices. Rather than decentralized, it’s centralized.
And this is true in the financial field, and so on and so forth. So
that, to me, creates a reality, not just a perception, but a reality
of the condition of people being left out more and more.
“The other
thing I wanted to talk about is the ‘smorgasbord’ of choices. In my
adult life, the last 20 years or so of reading the newspaper, there
is not a smorgasbord of choices that are available that give us proportion.
And so proportion is lost because you need to sell newspapers. Part
of it is, there’s always a ‘Motoring’ section, there’s always a ‘Business’
section, but I don’t see the ‘Labor’ section, or the ‘Environmental’
section from a sustainable, rooted environmentalist point of view. And
so, in my whole life of reading the Star Tribune, I’ve seen certain
sections prominent all the time.
“And then,
also, without your control, is the conditioning of advertising on the
general public over time, and the pattern of seeing certain things and
feeling closer to them because they’re familiar. And so there are some
things that maybe in the print word you are not influenced by, but over
time I think a conditioning takes place, through who pays our way.”
TM: “I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that.”
So there you have it, readers. 15 minutes earlier, Mr. McGuire got
quite upset when I made what I thought was the non-controversial point
that the people who supply the money (advertisers) to a money-making
operation (McClatchy) might have some power over that operation. Now
he “wouldn’t argue” with essentially the same point. I guess the word
“power” is off-limits in the realm of “civil discourse.”
I was still puzzling over which words were the bad ones when I heard
Ken Pentel again, commenting on the need for columns on such things
as appropriate technology, the power industry, and other under-reported
issues. Mr. McGuire’s answer was that these are “advocacy” positions,
and should not be covered on a regular basis. In this context, he made
the following statement:
TM: “Don’t misunderstand me. Absolutely, economics has a role
in what we do. It doesn’t affect our coverage, but we wouldn’t have
a “Motoring” section if we didn’t have lots of advertisers who want
to advertise in it.”
That’s pretty clear. If the advertisers want it, we’ll have it. And
if they don’t, we won’t. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
The moral of the story:
The accelerating trend toward increasing size and concentration of
capital makes more obvious the negative effects of our dependence on
advertising to pay for our information. In a more diverse capitalist
business environment, rather than the monopoly capitalism under which
we live today, the class makeup of the decision-makers is more mixed.
There might be large numbers of small, independent businesses - retail
merchants, farmers, mechanics, craftspeople - and the “regular people”
who run these businesses can and will supply some of the necessary capital
to support smaller-scale, local media. Unlike the managers of the huge
multinationals upon which today’s media depend for revenue (heck, today’s
media often ARE huge multinationals!), small businesspeople are much
more likely to live in the community, to have their kids in public schools
with the kids of their employees, and to be known in and accountable
to the very people upon whom they depend to supply their labor and their
market. Many of them may even have working-class backgrounds, and be
willing to support a media outlet that reports with a primary interest
in the welfare of the community.
When our media is supported by advertising dollars from “Marie’s Dairy
Treet” instead of from Burger King, it affects more than our fast food
choices. It affects how we see the world, and how much power we have
to change it.
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