Monday, June 24, from 9am to 3pm Everett Herald News Guild staff will picket and hold a one day strike, following the layoff last Wednesday of 10 (out of 18) CWA union staff members and two editors. The strikers and supporters will meet at the intersection of Colby and Hewitt in downtown Everett, marching to Colby and 41st near the Herald Office.
The Everett Herald is not just the main journalistic newsroom operation in Everett, Washington. It serves a growing area of several large counties north of Seattle to the Canadian border, with roughly a million people and another quarter of a million at least expected by 2050 or so.
These journalists were suddenly fired this past week following a purchase of about fifty Northwestern newspapers from Alaska to Oregon, by the Carpenter Media Group out of the Deep South which owns a total of 100 local papers. Sound Publishing plans to layoff as many as 62 employees across the 43 newspapers owned by Sound Publishing, local subsidiary to Carpenter Media.
The staff hopes to gain some ground back in negotiations this week with the new ownership.
Online media such as blogs or Facebook do not represent a step forward in the development of the enlightened public that the founders had in mind when drafting the First Amendment that gives Americans freedom of the press. Over the course of time, since Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, journalism has grown as the study of intellectual discipline for discerning facts and reporting what the public needs to be aware and educated about public affairs. It is that offshoot of the entire concept of education and enlightenment that we value, that discipline. Career effort.
I spent a good deal of time, back in the eighties, working back and forth between freelance journalism and political media activism, exploring the media landscape as well as the political landscape. I made a headline in an edition of the Columbia Journalism Review (9/88) for leading a unique protest against the Austin American-Statesman in which about one hundred local citizens politely and eloquently reminded the publisher and editor of intellectual integrity from Journalism 101.
What resulted was that the Statesman launched an ad campaign with the slogan, “You should see what we said today.” Brilliant riposte, actually. But also evidence of fusion between editorial content and advertising spin doctoring.
Coming out of Texas, I saw how the big business interests, especially real estate developers, used either advertising clout or whole staffs of lawyers on retainer to keep reporters and editors away from the stories that were public interest but against their private corporate interests. In Texas, this actually went as far as protecting wealthy landowners from any who might uncover drug shipments coming in from Mexico by the planeload out on remote landing strips. Corruption of the honest effort to gather information was not limited to Wild West shenanigans, but was really about the prerogatives of big money in general and quickly ramified to any taboo that someone might put forward who had some clout. It amounted to the use of the Fourth Estate to foster a sweet magnolia scented Old South oligarchy in the 20th and 21st centuries, which could become a designer pastel corporate fascism in our future.
The biggest problem with the Everett Herald mass firing last week is really that abrupt and painful tactics that leave people crying suddenly, are easily associated with other rough truths about our world which we could wish that those in a position to buy newspaper organizations would understand.
Do We The People need to fear that people who own newspapers are going to treat the whole public to equal, if more unobservable, betrayal?
There are powerful forces at work in a populous and complex society. We would rather see newspapers on our side rather than against us. Democracy is precious as a way for a huge population to succeed and thrive and not be a danger to itself. “A Republic, if you can keep it,” said Franklin.
Indeed.