Two weeks ago, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s editor and publisher, Roger Oglesby, abruptly called a full meeting of his staff. He knew they were feeling down in the wake of Seattle Times Publisher Frank Blethen’s claims–made most recently in a fawning February 5 Seattle Weekly cover piece–that the P-I‘s days are numbered; he also knew they were angry that the P-I‘s owner, the New York-based Hearst Corporation, had not stood up publicly to defend their paper. Oglesby asked them not to read ominous meaning into Hearst’s silence, and explained that the looming legal battle over the joint operating agreement (JOA)–whereby the two papers are allowed to compete editorially while sharing business functions–made it extremely unwise for Hearst to comment publicly. But when political columnist Joel Connelly stood up and suggested that P-I staffers go out on their own to make their paper’s case, Oglesby said he wouldn’t object.
That’s why on the following Friday afternoon, at a cafe a couple of blocks from the P-I building, four members of the Post-Intelligencer old guard have gathered to make the case for their paper’s continued relevance. Joining Connelly (who has spent 30 years at the paper) are fellow columnist Susan Paynter (34 years), transportation reporter Jane Hadley (24 years), and public affairs reporter Neil Modie (32 years). If there’s going to be a propaganda war, they say, the public needs to hear both sides. Blethen has been popping off for months now, badmouthing their paper as he makes the case for a one-newspaper town. Because the famously tight-lipped suits at Hearst haven’t seen fit to fire back, Blethen’s had free rein to make his case unopposed.
Until now. In Blethen’s eagerness to win the public-relations war over the JOA, he’s crossed the line, attacking the P-I‘s editorial viability, and P-I employees are pissed. In a wide-ranging, no-holds-barred discussion, all four writers take turns defending the P-I as a journalistic enterprise, countering Blethen’s verbal brickbats with a few of their own. From the outset, the session is more knife fight than coffee klatch; they skewer what they see as Blethen’s distortions, fallacies, and hypocrisies in his effort to crush the P-I.
Here’s the gospel according to Blethen: Seattle’s century-old daily-newspaper war is all but over. In the face of the vastly superior news and editorial product put out by the Seattle Times, the smaller, weaker Post-Intelligencer can no longer compete–and, whether it takes a few months or a few years more, the P-I must inevitably die.
But before you start crying in your beer, Blethen says, know that the Times is a local, family-controlled paper, while the P-I is in the clutches of a massive, rapacious national media conglomerate that is willing–even eager–to sacrifice journalistic quality on the altar of the almighty dollar. In fact, the P-I‘s dark overlords have long been angling to use their vast wealth and power to snuff out all the good that five generations of wise, benevolent Blethen family stewardship has painstakingly achieved with the Times. Given that market forces demand the demise of one of the papers, Seattle should count itself lucky that the independent Times is on the brink of victory.
Frank Blethen is just out for himself, the P-I‘s defenders counter. “On the face of it, Frank’s line is so self-serving,” Paynter says, her voice rising with indignation. “He’s saying, ‘We’ve already won, so why fight?’ It’s a whole campaign of disinformation.” Blethen, her colleague Modie continues, has proven himself a rank hypocrite–railing for years against national media consolidation, then turning around and trying to get rid of his local competition–and his recent statements are nothing more than an extension of the Times’ tradition of self-aggrandizing puffery.
But what about the P-I‘s declining circulation? Blethen says it’s increasingly difficult to sell the P-I–and since February 1999, when the Times began publishing in the mornings, the P-I‘s weekday circulation has slipped from 191,169 to 157,558, while the Times has held steady around 225,000. That’s true, Hadley responds, but it’s more a sign of the Seattle Times Company’s persistent subversion of the P-I‘s circulation (which it handles under the JOA) than of flagging public interest. Every P-I staffer can reel off a string of anecdotes about friends and colleagues being steered away from purchasing P-I subscriptions, seeing the Times get more prominent placement on newsstand racks, inconsistent deliveries of the P-I, and the like. “When you hear the same anecdotes over and over, you start seeing that as a pattern,” Connelly says.
It’s an allegation that has become almost an article of faith among P-I employees, but it’s one the Times forcefully denies. “The sales and marketing function is clearly and carefully spelled out in the JOA, and we adhere to that absolutely,” Times spokesperson Kerry Coughlin asserts. “We’ve managed the JOA successfully for 20 years, and will continue to do so.”
Such denials don’t hold much water with P-I staffers. “From watching Frank’s behavior, [we] might get some tips for dealing with Saddam,” Connelly quips. Clearly, Frank Blethen is not a popular guy at the P-I. And whatever Blethen has said, the P-I contingent emphasizes, their paper will not go down meekly. “You can expect there to be some close-quarters legal combat over the JOA,” Connelly says. “Hearst has given every signal it’s going to fight,” Hadley concurs; Connelly chimes in again by paraphrasing a statement made by Oglesby during a recent CityClub event, saying that the P-I “has been the best in the Northwest since 1863, and will still be around in 2063.”
This would be good for Seattle, all four contend–especially since they believe that Blethen’s paeans to the virtues of “independent, family journalism” are not all that convincing, not when Blethen himself is more petty tyrant than benevolent patriarch. Exhibit A in their argument is the Times publisher’s conduct during the Seattle newspaper strike that ran from late 2000 to early 2001. While Hearst dealt with the strike calmly and rationally, they say, Blethen took the low road, revealing his ugly, vindictive side. “As for cuddly, family journalism–well, you could count the barbed-wire strands,” Modie recalls. “Blethen brought in armed guards, boarded up the windows, did everything but call in air strikes.”
When Times staffers finally ended their walkout after 49 days, they were met with “major retaliation,” Paynter says. The others nod in agreement. Dozens of Times staffers either left on their own or lost their jobs or their columns in the Times’ post-strike downsizing. “It’s pretty obvious from who they brought back and who they didn’t that punishment was part of that,” Modie claims. “If that’s what family journalism means, let me be an orphan any day,” says Paynter.
They juxtapose the Times’ reaction with the way P-I staffers were treated when they returned to work (striking P-I employees settled with Hearst 12 days before their Times counterparts did). Marching back into their building as a group to the strains of a bagpiper, P-I employees met a line of editors and managers who each made a point of effusively welcoming back every returning striker. Connelly, who was given his current column the next day, says that Hearst exemplified “a rational and civil way of doing business.”
The Times, unsurprisingly, denies any retaliation against employees active in the strike. “Absolutely not. It was quite the opposite situation,” Coughlin responds. “The company bent over backwards to put the strike behind us and move forward as a unified group.”
The P-I defenders bristle at Blethen’s claim that the Times is a clearly superior newspaper. Though the Times has built a national reputation on the back of the five Pulitzer Prizes it has received in the last 21 years (the P-I has won one), they dismiss the Times‘ huge investment in big-ticket stories as irrelevant prize-chasing–a sop to “Frank’s ego,” Hadley says–divorced from the day-in, day-out battle for important breaking news stories. There the competition remains fierce, despite the Times’ larger staff–and the P-I, they believe, has had a long history of getting to those stories first. In last year’s local Society of Professional Journalists competition the P-I won 32 awards, Modie emphasizes, while the Times only won 19.
Plus, though she admits she’s far from a neutral observer, Paynter baldly asserts that the P-I‘s columnists are better than their counterparts at the Times. “What memorable Times columns can you name?” she asks. Modie supplies a ready answer: Times columnist Nicole Brodeur’s column justifying her decision to cross the picket line during the strike, which he describes as a “self-righteous attempt to claim it was a statement of principle.”
All four agree that Hearst has a far better record of staying out of newsroom and editorial decisions than the Times’ management. Connelly remembers that in the 1970s, when William Randolph Hearst Jr. was loudly proclaiming his right-wing views, the P-I endorsed first Jimmy Carter and then independent candidate John Anderson. “All the years I’ve worked at the P-I, I’ve never been conscious of Hearst’s thumb,” Paynter says. She contrasts the corporation with Blethen, “who clearly uses his editorial page to push his own agenda.” As Connelly sees it, the Times endorses “whatever candidate advocates repeal of the estate tax”–a reference to Blethen’s ongoing personal crusade against the levy, which he believes threatens his family’s long-term ownership of the paper.
They also deride the Times‘ relentless efforts at self-promotion. Modie, for example, singles out Times Executive Editor Michael Fancher’s page-two Sunday column as almost laughably self-serving, with its regular homilies to the wisdom of the Blethens and the value of family journalism. “They do a much better job of self-worship,” he says. Connelly tells what he describes as an old joke. “How many Times employees does it take to change a light bulb?” he asks. “Six,” he answers. “One to do it and five to write about it.”
All jokes aside, P-I staffers understand the deadly seriousness of the fight on their hands. At the beginning of the interview, Connelly tossed me a balled-up T-shirt. It was old and rather dingy, since Connelly’s dog had been sleeping on it, but the P-I veteran, along with his colleagues, had a message he wanted to pound home–that his paper represents a distinctive voice in our community, and Seattle would be much poorer in losing it–and he said the image on the shirt captured it perfectly.
Emblazoned on the T-shirt’s front is a cartoon. There are three figures: A surly bride in the center is straight-arming a respectable-looking older man on her right as she kicks (in the balls) a bloated, prosperous-looking gentleman on her left. The bride represents the P-I. The older man, her father, is Hearst, while the now-emasculated fat guy she’s supposed to wed is tagged as the Seattle Times. The caption below the image reads: “KEEP THE P-I FEISTY.”
The shirt dates back more than 20 years, to before the JOA went into effect. Back then, Connelly was part of a group of P-I staffers fighting both Hearst and the Times against the imposition of the agreement, which they believed would undermine the P-I‘s editorial voice. They lost that fight and their fears never materialized; the P-I stayed fiesty, says Connelly. Ironically, Connelly and others at the P-I now believe that saving the JOA is the only way to save their paper.
But their fierce loyalty to the newspaper to which they have devoted their working lives may not be enough. Asked to predict the JOA’s future, Hadley responds, “I don’t think anyone really knows how this is going to come out.”
