On October 17, the Seattle Times ran the first of a string of full page political ads endorsing the Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna.They were paid for by the business side of the paper, and there was a lot of assurance from that side and from the editorial leadership that the ad buy didn’t impact the objectivity of the reporters. Indeed, most of the editorial staff didn’t know about the purchase, which also included full page ads for a marriage equality referendum on the ballot. More than 100 reporters and photographers penned a letter of protest. Editors touted the fact that they were so independent of the corporate folks who support McKenna that they did a piece evaluating whether the McKenna ad was true or not. They found it half true, which is another way of saying half false.
I was livid and immediately wanted to drop my subscription. The customer service person I reached talked to tried to sell me on just doing a two week protest break from the paper. I’ve been struggling with the decision for the last week. First, it’s the only paper in town (yet another reason to bewail the demise of the Seattle Post Intelligencer and our descent into a one-paper town), and I like actually holding dead trees in my hands in the morning with a cup of tea. I like the crosswords and the comics. I like some of the columnists. I think they could do better, use more local talent rather than purchasing wire copy for their food pages, business coverage, and to fill in the blank spaces in the main and local news sections. I know times are tough for papers, but there’s a lot of hungry writers out there. Some of them are really good, and while I don’t support the idea of writers working for exposure or for pennies per word, there’s a happy medium where you can pay a reasonable amount of money and get good coverage. But that’s an aside.
Frankly, given the hard times papers are having, maybe the corporate side should be selling ads rather than giving $150,000 of space away for political purposes.
That the Times supports marriage equality and is running full page ads for that confuses the issue. Marriage equality is, in my mind, a civil rights issue that I believe every thinking person should support. I don’t mind those ads so much. But McKenna for Governor isn’t a civil rights issue, or an equality issue. It’s a choice. And frankly, a strange one, given the paper’s support for marriage equality. Referendum 74 is in a tight race for approval right now, and McKenna doesn’t support it. If it fails, I can’t see him doing anything to move Washington State towards marriage equality. And the support the paper has given to reproductive rights also makes the McKenna support odd. If Romney is elected and begins to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, I can’t see McKenna doing anything to ensure that women have equal access to primary care services like birth control.
My main gripe with the paper’s executives for running the ads is that it blurs the lines between objective news reporting and being a shill for a particular ideology. I don’t care what the editors and journalists say: when I, a journalist for nearly 30 years, see any report in the Times about McKenna, I question its veracity. My first thought is, “Well, they’re for McKenna anyway, so of course they’d say that,” or “I wonder what they aren’t saying.” I know there is a separation between business and editorial, but it’s my first thought, regardless.
Imagine there is a CBS-purchased ad for Romney during the CBS News. No one is going to be able to help but think that the news people are supporting that candidate. It’s the same thing here. You put an ad for your candidate in your paper, which is supposed to be objective. Frankly, if the Seattle Times wanted to show its support for McKenna and the power of newspaper advertising in election season, they could have bought an ad in another paper. The Blethen family could have made a donation to McKenna. They could have done a lot of things, but instead they did something that their own employees object to, which any journalist with a slice of sense would tell you is flat out wrong, and which other media outlets have decried as wrong. I’d bet my house that the Columbia Journalism Review will have a dart for this in one of its next issues.
I’ll miss the paper. I might substitute the Sunday New York Times, but that won’t help with my comics fixation. And Darling Son will be unhappy, but he’s such a staunch Democrat that I think he’ll be okay with it.
I’m curious what my other writer friends think about this. Would you drop your subscription?
