Friday, May 25, 2012
City Is The Seattle Times Bullying the Mayor? Expert Says: "No."
Posted by Eli Sanders on Fri, May 25, 2012 at 3:04 PM
“If you are the mayor of a city, I can pretty much guarantee that you are going to be closely scrutinized by your local newspaper," said Kelly McBride, an expert on media ethics at The Poynter Institute, in response to this morning's claims by Mayor Mike McGinn's wife that he's being bullied by the Seattle Times.
"And," McBride continued, "that’s how it should be. Nobody wins when the local press is a champion of the most powerful person in town.”
At my request, McBride read the article that led McGinn's wife, Peg Lynch, to cancel her subscription to Seattle Times last year.
“Sure, there’s a fair amount of snarkiness there," McBride said of the piece. "I don’t think that that’s unusual in politics. And even from the news side, I think that there is a trend in this country to make news writing more edgy, and I think that it’s an attempt at being edgy. Bullying? No.”
(It should be noted that David Boardman, executive editor of the Seattle Times, is on Poynter's board of advisers. McBride, who volunteered that information, said that Boardman has no authority over Poynter's budget or its hiring and firing decisions.)
I told McBride that the editorial page of the Seattle Times is definitely not fond of McGinn, and that McGinn's wife feels that dislike has seeped into the paper's news coverage, in more than just the article in question.
“Maybe there are lots and lots of little digs over time, but even then, that is really common," she responded. "Go and see what the The New York Times says about Bloomberg, or what’s going on locally in D.C.... Seattle’s a big city, and you would presume that the chief executive is a pretty worldly person—meaning, he’s been around the block a few times. You don’t get to that kind of position without being roughed up a bit.”
Lynch, McBride said, "may not understand the nature of the relationship between the watchdog and the guy with all the power.”
A question McBride cannot answer, but that's on my mind: Given McGinn's anemic poll numbers and the precarious state of newspapers all over the country, who actually is "the guy with all the power" in this situation?
To the polls!
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The truth is that the media has as much power as government. In some cases it's more, in some cases it's less. But neither one are white knights. They both pursue their own objectives, they both can work to distort and deceive, and neither one should be given the blind trust of the public. Both should be viewed skeptically.
In the case of a newbie mayor without strong political connections and facing low approval ratings (which the Times helped create) they definitely have more power overall. That's especially true in that the Times can use its power to destroy the mayor, whereas the mayor cannot use his power to destroy the Times. Government in America, especially local government, still has significant checks and balances on its powers. That's not true for the media.
McBride isn't an independent voice here and Eli should not be using her as if she were. She's a self-interested defender of an institution in this country that has a huge amount of power, often abuses it (and there can be no doubt that the Times regularly abuses it, regardless of what one things of Mike McGinn), and ought to be treated more skeptically than Eli did.
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Lynch is entitled to buy or not buy whatever fucking paper she wants and not be harassed for it. She's also entitled to her opinion about the paper, which, in my opinion, is far more valid that anyone presumptuous enough to call themselves an "expert on media ethics."
And either nobody reads or cares about the Times (as I read here constantly) or it wields tremendous power. It can't be both.
I can't believe we're getting this worked up about a light-hearted story about a stolen bicycle.
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I think the Zillow developer who got shot in his van is going to be the Rodney King of the middle class gentrifiers.
Mark my words as professionals will be rioting (on the web) sending emails and finally ganging up on the corrupt, ineffective claptrap origination run by incompetent local yokels known as the city, state and county governments.
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Everybody wins!
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Ultimately they've done more to damage their own credibility (such as it already was) in my eyes than to harm him. I may be alone in this, who knows? But when it comes to the mayor, I just don't believe or respect anything they have to say about him.
If I really want to know what's up with Hizzoner, I look to the Stranger, because even though you endorsed him, you haven't shown any reluctance to criticize him when it seemed called for, and to give him a fair shake when that seemed called for as well. That's how journalism is *supposed* to work. The Weekly and the Times don't practice journalism when it comes to McGinn, they practice caricature instead.
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