Several years ago when I was the editor of the Hallertown Beacon, I was paid a visit at the office one Thursday by one of the most powerful people in town and his three sons.
Bruce Clifford was the owner of Clifford Engineering, and had made a considerable fortune by taking large tracts of open space and converting them into large tracts of residential real estate with houses of ungodly proportions. I’ve no idea how many millions he was worth, but as is often the case with money, there’s never enough. At the time, Clifford Engineering had an application in before the Hallertown Planning Board that would allow it to build hundreds more houses.
Housing developments of this scale represent a tremendous windfall for the developer, but not such a good deal for the municipality. The prospective homeowner gets to buy a house in a municipality with a great school, and the township meanwhile has to deal with an increased loads on its infrastructure and on its tax base, the revenue generated by homes being considerably lower than the revenue required to provide basic services, particularly schooling.
Not surprisingly, a number of people in the community were against it. So was the paper.
This particular week, we had run an editorial calling on Clifford Engineering to scale back or just eliminate the proposed development, and to dedicate the land for preservation as open space. We’d laid out an argument that the proposed development would not be in the best interests of the township, and called on him to reconsider.
So they came to see me.
“This is quite an honor,” I said as I greeted them and shook each man’s hand.
“I don’t know that I’d say that,” growled one of his sons.
“Of course it is,” I said smoothly. “You think it’s going to take four of you to intimidate one of me. My office is too small; why don’t you come on back to our conference room?”
I led the way back to the conference room, such as it was, and bid them all be seated. It was in many ways a mark of the growth of the paper’s influence that they wanted to see me. When I’d become managing editor, I had immediately enacted a policy that if an article didn’t have a profound relevance to Hallertown, then we weren’t going to run it. That went double for guest columns and was immutable law for editorials. Circulation was up, local officials read us and listened to what we said, and the paper was credited (or blamed, depending on whom you asked) for some part of the sweep Democrats had made in the most recent election.
“So what can I do for you gentlemen?” I asked, once we were all seated.
They laid it out for me. The Cliffords had been some of the original settlers in the Hallertown area, and I didn’t even live there. Bruce Clifford had been extraordinarily generous to the people of Hallertown, and had even donated a school from the largesse of his fortune as part of one of his developments. There was more of it, including some rhetorical questions meant to imply that I just hate progress and development, but in the end it boiled down to this: “I don’t feel the Beacon’s coverage is very fair,” Bruce Clifford said. “It’s one-sided.”
“Absolutely it is,” I said, and before they could get over their shock at that admission, I pressed my point. “My reporter has called you for every story he has written about this development of yours, and you have never returned a phone call of his. He’s called your attorney, and your attorney has never called back either. We do our best from the information that’s presented at Planning Board meetings and public documents, but if you’re unwilling to talk with us and provide us with your perspective or with clarification on sticky points, there’s not much we can do.”
When they’d piled into their car to pay me a professional visit, I expect the Cliffords had had a pretty good idea of how things were going to go. I’ve no idea what they really planned, but I expect it involved something along the lines of the craven liberal news journalist caving before their integrity, and promising to be less craven in the future. That Bruce Clifford would admit that I had a valid point and would change the policy of their company for dealing with the media, probably had never occurred to them.
And yet that’s exactly what happened. I called Clifford Engineering myself a week or two later when there was a question about an application the company had before the Planning Board, and my call went straight to the big man himself.
I thought about the Cliffords recently, after reading an article about Saran Palin in Vanity Fair. The article is overwhelmingly negative in its depiction of Palin. The intro says it all:
Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her. Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author delves into the surreal new world Palin now inhabits—a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family—and the sadness she has left in her wake.
Palin’s reaction, predictably, was to slam the Vanity Fair piece. On the air with fellow FOX pundit Sean Hannity, Palin said:
“Those who are impotent and limp and gutless and they go on their anonymous — sources that are anonymous — and impotent, limp and gutless reporters take anonymous sources and cite them as being factual references. … It just slays me because it’s so absolutely clear what the state of yellow journalism is today that they would take these anonymous sources as fact.”
I have to agree with Palin on this point: The credibility of the Vanity Fair piece is undermined by its reliance on anonymous sources. Of course, there are reasons for using anonymous sources that every journalist knows, and writer Michael Joseph Gross states these right up front: The people he cites were reluctant to speak out publicly because of a fear of reprisal.
Palin is a big one for slamming news media other than FOX for their biases, real or perceived, to the extent that she has coined the phrase “lamestream media” to dismiss media outlets that she feels depict her in an unflattering light. This isn’t a new policy of hers; it’s been in effect since part way through the McCain presidential campaign when aides realized how badly underprepared Palin was for media interviews after her disastrous interview with Katie Couric. (Couric, it should be noted, is hardly regarded as an attack journalist, and both Ark. Gov. Mike Huckabee and Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain adviser, defended Couric’s performance in the interview.)
I’d like to suggest a new strategy for Palin, though I doubt it’s one she wants to hear: Instead of encouraging people to be fearful of a conspiracy by media elites to keep us all in the dark about what’s really going on, instead of encouraging an us-vs.-them divide in our nation, instead of branding yourself as a person with nothing more to offer the country than sarcasm, she ought to try actually talking to the press.
Some journalists are jerks, it’s true, even some who work for major news outlets, but most are not. Most are hard-working and decent people who enjoy things like time with the kids, the sight of Fourth of July fireworks, and even singing in the church choir. Talking with reporters, and not just with pundits who already agree with you, means talking to a broader-cross section of America.
Refuse to talk with the news media, and, well, the impression that generates is that you have contempt for people who disagree with you. It might not be true, but without someone willing to voice it, there’s no way for that side of the story to get out.
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