A newspaperman stands on principle

Darcy Olsen is president of the Goldwater Institute in Arizona.

She has a priceless quote in a June 11 story by John J. Miller in National Review: "We're not in the business of getting invited to cocktail parties. We're in the business of delivering justice to taxpayers."

Good for her.

Once upon a time, those "Knights of the Keyboard," to borrow a Ted Williams phrase for newspaper reporters, were in the business of delivering fair and balanced news to their local readers and taxpayers.

Today, more and more, newspapers seem to be more agenda driven.

Consider the case of 25-year Cincinnati Enquirer reporter and columnist Tim Sullivan.

Ten years ago last month, Sullivan wrote his final column for the Enquirer; and for the past decade, he's been setting the industry standard at The San Diego (Calif.) Union-Tribune.

Until last week.

The New York Times' David Carr explains Sullivan's alleged sins in a story entitled "Newspaper as Business Pulpit."

In his lead, Carr writes: "There is a growing worry that the falling value and failing business models of many American newspapers could lead to a situation where moneyed interests buy papers and use them to prosecute a political and commercial agenda. That future appears to have arrived in San Diego, where The U-T San Diego (formerly the Union-Tribune), the daily newspaper bought by the local developer and hotelier Douglas F. Manchester, often seems like a brochure for his various interests."

Sadly, such industry tactics aren't isolated to the West Coast. A dozen years ago, the owner of an Ohio newspaper chain used his papers in an attempt to win votes for his failed congressional campaign. (Not all publishers in his company agreed or acquiesced with the directives from on high.)

Back to the Sullivan predicament.

According to The New York Times, Sullivan was skeptical of his paper's ownership in its support for a new San Diego sports stadium.

"The (newspaper) has become a player rather than observer in civic events," Carr reports. He goes on to say that the paper had suggested that "the sports pages should advocate for a new stadium and 'call out those who don’t as obstructionists.'"

You might call Sullivan the first obstructionist.

"(Sullivan) noted that the previous stadium deal had not worked out well for the city and wrote that if a new stadium was to be erected, due caution was required. A week ago Friday, he was brought in to the editor’s office and fired. A huge uproar ensued. Mr. Sullivan has since entered negotiations over his departure and would not discuss the specifics of his firing. But in the days after he was let go, he did comment to a local blog on what he believed was behind his dismissal," Carr wrote.

Sullivan's comments appear on The Sherman Report at shermanreport.com.

"Clearly, the two of us were looking at stadium issues from different vantage points," Sullivan said.

"My position has been that the paper’s primary responsibility is to protect the public from another bad deal, such as the one that resulted in San Diego agreeing to guaranteed sellouts for the (San Diego) Chargers. That document was so badly drafted that even a sportswriter could see its flaws: no limit to liability, no cap on ticket prices. I have felt that the paper dropped the ball in failing to scrutinize that deal (years before my arrival) and should be exceedingly careful in endorsing another stadium deal."

In other words, Sullivan did his job. He asked questions. He reported the facts without undue concern for public or private scrutiny. Keep in mind, too, that this was an opinion piece.

Years ago, I received a corporate directive from a previous employer (I believe I still have it) which mandated "Republican only" political endorsements on the state and national levels. To be fair, there was no encouragement of endorsing non-Republicans on the local level, either. Once again, not every publisher adhered to the policy.

“Be assured that I am in agreement with the basic principles of a multi-platform news operation, and recognize the need to expand through other media," Sullivan said. "If the printed paper is a dinosaur, as I fear it is, it must learn to adapt if it is to survive. My primary concerns relate to the inherent difficulty of serving multiple masters at the same time and serving all of them well in a finite number of hours. I wish I were more optimistic about how this new business model can work, and about our ability to bear the additional burdens being placed on a news operation that many staff members believe is already overtaxed, but I hope to be proven wrong.”

For Sullivan's sake, I hope the situation in San Diego is resolved. But from my professional experience, I'm willing to wager that his days at the San Diego paper are numbered – and it's a very low number.

That's too bad.

Sullivan arrived at the Enquirer in 1977. I was a junior in high school and enjoyed sports scribes like Bob Hertzel and Tom Callahan. Who was this new guy with the "Leave it to Beaver" hairdo, I thought?

Thirteen years later, during the Reds' wire-to-wire championship season in 1990, I observed Sullivan's workmanlike approach from within the Reds' press box. He seemed way too serious to me. (I covered 25 or 30 Reds' home games that season.)

Reds owner Marge Schott once banned Sullivan from the Reds' media dining room. My brother-in-law and I figured we may have had something to do with Marge ending the club's longstanding policy of free draft beer in the media room. But maybe that was Joe Nuxhall. I don't know.

In his final Cincinnati column in May 2002, Sullivan wrote: "I arrived in Cincinnati during the blizzard of 1977, a meteorological metaphor for the breakup of the Big Red Machine. I depart with a catalogue of characters vivid enough for a Dickens novel and a bulging book of memories. Before she had me banned from the Reds' dining room, Marge Schott once smoked a cigarette in my car. During an argument over locker room access, Sam Wyche once challenged me to interview him in the nude.

"Johnny Bench once lifted my infant daughter in his huge hands and caused her to stop crying. Tom Seaver once accepted a lift from the airport and tried to goad me into driving on the shoulder to beat the traffic. Later, in a Pittsburgh saloon, the great pitcher asked me about Dostoevsky. Years later, in another bar, Tom Browning explained the secret of his pitching success: 'Hitters,' he said, 'are stupid.'"

So are a lot of corporate-controlled newspaper companies. Which may explain their admitted infatuations with select politicians and certain other special interests. (At least some of them do admit the obvious without false pretenses.)

The industry needs less of them and more Tim Sullivans. And readers in San Diego – and other regions of the nation – will have to decide what they expect from their newspapers.

Rory Ryan is publisher of the only locally owned and operated newspaper in Highland County.