Wow. I was going to remonstrate gently with Bob McAlister about one or two points in his op-ed column today, but now that I see this comment from Bud Williams on Bob’s blog, I know there’s someone out there in much more need of a few actual facts.
Let’s take his flights of fancy one at a time. Here’s the first:
I think the liberal tone of the paper comes from higher up.
First — and this is a question I posed just yesterday to Bob — what liberal tone? Secondly, however you define our "tone," it is ours, and no one else’s. A publisher will have an influence on editorial policy, as a member of the editorial board. (And that influence is gentler and more benign that most people realize; for instance, I can’t think of a single editorial position in the 11 years I’ve been on this board that was dictated by a publisher against the wishes of the consensus of the board.) As for "higher up" than the publisher? That’s unimaginable. There might be some newspaper companies out there that "dictate" editorial policy to their papers, but I can’t think of how they would manage it. People in San Jose don’t have the slightest idea about the issues and people we’re writing about here (and about 90 percent of what we write is purely South Carolina). How could they even form an opinion on these matters, much less communicate their wishes to us? And when I say the tone is "ours," to whom does that refer? Well, first, it refers to me. As vice president and editorial page editor, what appears on our pages is my responsibility. It also refers to a team of people whom I, a South Carolina native, have chosen to hire. Those are the associate editors. It also refers to whoever is publisher at a given time. All of the above are the members of the editorial board. And while publishers may come and go, the rest of the editorial board tends to be here for the long haul. The member of the board with the least seniority at this newspaper has been here for 15 years.
If you notice, many article are reprinted from other Knight Ridder papers and
they generally follow the same line of thought.
I don’t know what that means. The only columnists we regularly run on our pages who happen to work at KR papers are Trudy Rubin and Leonard Pitts. Perhaps the gentleman refers to the news pages, which run stories from KRT, a joint news service between Knight Ridder and the Chicago Tribune company, right alongside stories from the Associated Press, the New York Times News Service, and the Washington Post/L.A. Times service. But why are we talking about this anyway? That’s on the news pages. And Bob was talking about my bailiwick — editorial.
Writers like George Will give us thoughtful, well considered writing but veer
only slightly right of center…
Excuse me? George Will isn’t conservative enough? He’s the dean of conservative columnists (now that William Safire has retired). And maybe that’s the problem. He’s a REAL conservative, as in traditional conservative, as opposed to one of these newfangled nutballs who want to shrink government down to a size where they can drown it in a bathtub.
An occasional Michelle Malkin piece is thrown not so much, I think…
Well, I’m not familiar with Ms. Malkin (or is it Miss, or Mrs.?). If we’ve run her, she doesn’t show up in a search of our archives database. In any case, I’m betting that she doesn’t give her opinions away for free. And for the past few years, my budget has been shrinking to the point that all I’ve done is cut columnists and cartoonists (and the last columnist I cut, by the way, was avowed liberal E.J. Dionne), not add them. If you want to gripe about corporate influence, gripe about their influence on the newspaper’s budget. That’s something they care about, not our politics. (Of course, the real culprit is the stock market, which continues to demand unreasonable profit margins from newspaper companies.)
I suspect the publishers know they must toe the line or those promotions you
refer to won’t be made available to them.
Well, I can’t speak for publishers and their motivation, but I can reiterate that the only line they are expected to toe is the bottom line. They are expected to meet profit goals. And I can assure you that I’m not looking for a promotion. This is it for me. This was my career goal, and wish only for the opportunity to keep using this position to serve the people of South Carolina until I retire or until (and this is far more likely, given my pecuniary situation) I drop dead at my desk.
Is the mission of a newspaper to reflect the opinions of its readers or to
convert those opinions to the editorial board’s?
That’s an odd and puzzling question. If you’re talking about the editorial page, its mission is to do both (although I wouldn’t word the latter part that way). We run the opinions of our readers verbatim. And when we write our opinions, we certainly aren’t doing it for fun. We’re doing it because these are the things we believe, and certainly we want to persuade people to our point of view, if we can. If not, we hope they will at least have considered the points we raise. As for "converting" them, I don’t know what that means. Our basic values are pretty well aligned with the broad center in South Carolina. We would like to get the extremists on the right and the left to calm down and see reason, but we have no motive to "convert" most South Carolinians, because they’re right where we are.
I think people would be surprsied to see the liberal leaning of a paper called
The State in a state so solidly conservative.
Well, so would I, since I am not familiar with any newspaper called The State that fits that description.
This last one is my favorite:
I knew we were in for a major shift in philosophy shortly after Knight Ridder
bought The State when a senior editor wrote in her introductory column that she
was sitting in a coffe house in San Francisco when President Nixon resighned and
she celebrated by getting a tatoo.
There could be no better illustration of the fallacy that this is a more "liberal" editorial board than before Knight Ridder. That column was written by one of the pre-KR associate editors, who after having been here since (I think) the 1960s, retired seven or eight years ago. When I joined this editorial board in 1994, I was the only person in this department who had arrived after KR (and in my case, I got here only about six months after). And this is going to come as a shock, I know, but the only writer in the department who was as conservative as I was was my boss and predecessor, Tom McLean. Since then, all of those folks have retired, and I have been careful to hire people whose views — while they vary across the spectrum (intentionally, because I wouldn’t stand for having a group that thinks just alike on everything) — average out to being closer to the South Carolina mainstream than the old group’s were.
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What libearal tone?
The tone of whining every time more wasteful spending is thwarted by angry citizen backlash or a lawsuit.
The tone of expecting an every-expanding government at all levels, without any performance accountability or honesty.
I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. You’ll have to give examples.
Here’s the truth: Sometimes we strongly oppose new spending or taxes; sometimes we strongly favor them. Sometimes we take no position either way. We have no ideological tendency here; we look at each situation pragmatically — we consider what makes sense given the variables involved in the particular situation.
The problem is that people who DO look at things ideologically get very emotionally upset over our positions that disagree with them, and that’s all that matters to them, and all they remember. And from thenceforth they label us as being in that OTHER camp. So-called “conservatives” call us liberals; so-called “liberals” call us right-wingers. I use the quotations because the way those terms are popularly used today make almost no logical sense.
So give me your examples; I’ll give you examples that indicate the opposite. And therein lies the truth, as explained above.
Brad,
You stated:
“Sometimes we strongly oppose new spending or taxes; sometimes we strongly favor them.”
Please supply us with that list of taxes your editorial board “strongly oppose[d].” I’ve been reading The State for a lot of years and can’t recall one, but, then again I don’t have access to a free way to do the research — you do — and my memory may simply be bad, or perhaps I simply missed that rare gem of an editorial. While you’re at it, give us a little compare and contrast on those new taxes you’ve opposed and the ones you’ve favored.
Gives us some examples of those tax cuts you favored. Again, I can’t remember one, unless it was accompanied by a new tax somewhere else.
And this one kills me:
“So-called ‘conservatives’ call us liberals; so-called ‘liberals’ call us right-wingers.”
Your letters-to-the-editor section is one of the most disingenuous parts of a media source that excels in the disingenuous. Simply because your letters-to-the-editor staff are well practiced at matching accusations of liberalism from conservatives with accusation of conservatism from liberals does not mean that there is an equal response. This is a conservative state. The majority seem to speak everywhere, except in the pages of The State. Reading what you say, the accusations are equal. I know you don’t believe this and I know that you are misrepresenting the truth when you try to claim such.
I won’t even attempt to get into the liberal sources this newspaper uses for news reporting; I’m dedicated here to the manipulation of the letters-to-the-editor and the editorial board.
This is my first post on this blog. I’m already getting all warm and fuzzy over getting a chance to address you directly. Glad to see such a forum.
Off the top of my head (and without resorting to sophisticated technology), some tax increases we’ve opposed recently:
— The S.C. gas tax. This was proposed in the recent legislative session. We acknowledged the need for the road maintenance this would pay for, but opposed raising it without looking at our whole tax structure.
— Lexington’s prepared-food tax. It was ill-considered, particularly since the officials pushing for it didn’t even have a particular need for the money in mind.
— Tax increases that would be necessary to fund three proposed initiatives by local recreation commissions in Richland and Lexington counties. In fact, we reiterated our long-held position that the bodies shouldn’t even exist, because it is wasteful, inefficient and unaccountable to have all these extra little layers of government.
The one tax increase I can recall our favoring recently:
— The cigarette tax, which is absurdly low.
I can’t think of any recent tax CUT proposals we have favored.
All of the above is consistent with our overriding position on tax policy: Barring unusual circumstances, we don’t think there should be any tax cuts OR increases on the state level until the entire system is overhauled.
But isn’t our support of a cigarette tax increase inconsistent with that? No, because we started advocating it not for the revenue, but for the lives — such increases have shown to reduce teen smoking. And that’s a goal worth pursuing whatever the revenue implications. Of course, in this case the revenue would greatly help us with out-of-control costs in Medicaid — but only temporarily. Robbie Kerr, who oversees Medicaid in SC, tells me a huge cigarette tax increase would fund one year’s growth in Medicaid costs. That’s why he’s looking elsewhere for a real solution to the cost problem.
I should add that I didn’t quite understand what you were saying about letters to the editor. But I’ll share this fact with you: “Liberals” are far more likely to write letters to the editor than conservatives. I don’t know why that is, but it’s a real problem. They do so to the extent that they far exceed their actual representation among our readership.
A dramatic example of this was when the war in Afghanistan started. I knew that you could search the streets of Columbia all day and have trouble coming up with anyone who opposed our going after the Taliban. And yet we had this steady influx of war opponents, and hardly anyone sticking up for what we were doing. I don’t know why; maybe folks in the vast majority saw the need for our military action as being so obvious that it hardly needed defending. But whatever the reason, it was maddening to have a pool of letters that was so out of sync with actual public opinion. (Not to mention so out of sync with common sense, but we don’t choose letters to match our notions of what should be said, as anyone who reads the letters to the editor knows.)
The so-called Tobacco Settlement added a 50-cent per pack tax to each pack of cigarettes, which is passed on from the manufacturers to the wholesalers.
This money was supposed to pay for Medicaid, but Governor Hodges stole it and spent it all for handouts to buy his re-election. That failed, thank God.
Now the Deadbeat Class is back, calling for more taxes on cigarettes, without any mention of reforming Medicaid or the spending process.