From: Orlando Weekly
May 7, 2013
By Steve Schneider
A few years ago, I went to one of those MoveOn house parties where the featured entertainment was a screening of Robert Greenwald’s documentary Outfoxed. A bunch of us Orlando-area libs sat and watched in horrified fascination as Greenwald laid out the way in which the Fox News Channel had established itself as a disinformation tool of the extremist right.
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| “We flip the coin, so you don’t have to.” |
When the movie was over, I was approached by an acquaintance who was then working for the Orlando Sentinel. “I feel so guilty,”
she said. She added something about serving Satan; I can’t recall the
exact wording. But I knew what she meant: Even though she was merely a
contributor to the Sentinel’s arts-and-entertainment offering,
not its news or (God forbid!) editorial pages, she was in her own way
helping to further a regressive, reactionary worldview that wouldn’t
have been terribly out of place on Fox. And she felt just awful about it.
I wanted to answer, “Yet you keep cashing the checks.”
Instead, I muttered something I hoped would fall between empathy and
absolution. The attitude I had then was the one I have now: Anybody who
is willing to suspend his principles for something as remuneratively
minor as a print-media job in Orlando, Florida, is just an awfully cheap
date.
That’s why I’m finding it hard to be as enthusiastic as I should be
over the Chicken Little routine that’s currently going on at the Tribune Company. It would be wonderful to believe that all of those Los Angeles Times reporters who say they’ll quit their jobs if
the Koch brothers buy the chain are telling the truth, and that their
departure would really matter. Then again, ever notice how many things
that would be wonderful to believe are also hard to believe?
Maybe this is the one thing on Earth I’m still cynical about, but the
prospect of mass walkouts at a daily-newspaper company strikes me as not
only unrealistic but vaguely uninspiring — for a few nagging reasons.
The first is that it’s just not all that credible a negotiating
tactic. To put it bluntly, anyone who is still slaving away as a
full-time employee at a daily in 2013 is doing it because she has no
place else to go. Quitting a dying trade is not a threat that carries
much weight. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the Kochs know it,
too.
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| “You read Charley Reese for years — you’re going to complain NOW?” |
A petition is going around to “support” the L.A. Times
people who are promising to leave – and while I admire the goals of the
petitioners, I can’t quite discern what they think they’re going to
accomplish. What does it mean for us petition-signers to demonstrate
solidarity with those staffers? Are we agreeing to help support them
financially after they quit? Probably not. So if we’re simply bringing
the issue to light, how is that going to dissuade the current owners
from selling? How is it supposed to scare off the Kochs? They would have
to replace a bunch of the staff; so what? They would probably end up
doing that anyway. Now they’d just be able to do it all at once, instead
of gradually phasing out whichever writers would be likely to obstruct
their vision.
Which brings me to a larger point: How many would that be, anyway? It
isn’t as if the standards of mainstream print journalism have remained
so estimably high that the concept of a “last straw” has much ethical
torque. It’s tempting to see valor in the mulled Tribune walkout, until
you realize what this bunch have gone along with until now. I just can’t
find a moral hero in somebody who decided that pushing the agenda of Sam Zell was something he could live with, but that the Kochs are a bridge too far. To return to my old Sentinel
pal’s infernal analogy, it’s like selling your soul to the devil and
then pulling a hissy when he accepts an eBay bid for it from Pol Pot.
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| Sam Zell displays his deep regard for several U.S. Presidents. |
The other day, I received an email from someone who was considering ways to show support for the Sentinel staff should they stage a walkout of the kind being mulled in California. I didn’t bother to point out that this hasn’t actually happened yet, and that we should probably wait until it does; I was too busy stifling the urge to snark back, “A petition to help show Sentinel writers the door? Sure, I’ll sign! But where were you 10 years ago?”
Behind that childish display of professional discourtesy lies a soberer truth, which is that, at this late stage, a compromised Sentinel
would be a hard thing to identify. If our paper of record ever had a
Local section with a real zeal for advancing the public good, it was
well before I moved here 18 years ago; and I highly doubt there was a
time when the daily’s editorial board wasn’t (to use the words of yet
another Sentinel arts writer I used to know) “to the right of
Attila the Hun.” This is not the sort of tireless champion the little
guy dreads losing.
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