Commentary: We’ve Seen The Enemy of Journalism … And it is Us
New England journalism group awards a media company that enabled censorship and threatened the reporter who exposed it
BOSTON — In early February, the New England Newspaper & Press Association presented the Boston Business Journal with several honors at its annual meeting in Boston.
Awards are nice, but it was a missed opportunity for the association representing six states to send a message that media executives are as accountable for their actions as the officials their newsrooms cover. Instead of striking a blow for integrity, it struck out.
The presentation came months after Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting posted details about how the BBJ’s parent company, North Carolina-based American City Business Journals Inc., participated in a censorship case and then tried to cover its tracks by tying this reporter’s severance package to a non-disclosure agreement. When that didn’t work, the ACBJ’s parent company, New York-based Advance Publications Inc., then legally threatened the reporter who exposed how ACBJ ordered an Austin Business Journal story and related tweets about Dell Technologies Inc. quietly deleted from its website without explanation.
The missing story detailed how CEO Michael Dell received an award from a national environmental group after his Texas-based company donated $75,000 to the group for the first time. The facts were fully vetted, approved by editors and never disputed by anyone involved. Also, no one in Dell’s hypersensitive media relations department made the slightest objection after the piece was posted.
But ABJ managers said a senior Dell exec threatened parent ACBJ about a week later. The executive and ACBJ managers apparently decided that readers didn’t need the unvarnished truth, just sugarcoated information that made Dell appear better than reality. The truth was subsequently whitewashed, the Web sanitized, the public’s trust betrayed, and a pillar of democracy undermined — all with that simple phone call.
It wasn’t an isolated incident.
In 2014, the 20-year editor of the San Antonio Business Journal, Bill Conroy, resigned after refusing to compromise his journalistic integrity by assigning reporters to write advertorials and scripts for dubious award events to generate more revenue.
“The new publisher couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand my concerns and had made it abundantly clear he was going to ultimately ignore them,” Conroy wrote. “He said the battle to maintain editorial separation from advertising has been over for a while, and ‘journalism didn’t win.’ ”
MORAL COMPASS
On Feb. 8 the New England Newspaper & Press Association awarded the BBJ honors in several categories such as investigative journalism, design and general excellence. Instead, the association should have given the newspaper and executives of parent company ACBJ a moral compass.
It’s important to note that Advance Publications is controlled by the Newhouse family, a major donor to Syracuse University’s renown school of communications. It also owns the New Yorker magazine, journalism’s perennial hood ornament, the industry standard bearer. Ironic, huh?
The BBJ immediately posted a story about its awards. Why? To legitimatize its newsroom and mislead readers into believing that it’s a credible news organization despite past transgressions. As such, the Press Association is complicit in enabling a company undermining journalism and ethical reporting.
Just days after the BBJ received its awards, news broke that revealed the dire state of newspapers and underscored the importance they play. It also showed why now more than ever journalism groups need to police media companies causing irreparable damage.
California-based McClatchy Co., publisher of 30 U.S. newspapers such as the Miami Herald and Kansas City Star, filed for bankruptcy protection. CEO Craig Forman said, “When local media suffers in the face of industry challenges, communities suffer: polarization grows, civic connections fray and borrowing costs rise for local governments.”
Media execs love to portray their news organizations as fearless truth seekers undeterred by the rich and powerful. The reality is sometimes very different. But a diffusion of responsibility takes hold, U.S. journalism groups remain indifferent and complacent while media companies undermine the industry.
They give unprincipled media execs awards — instead of giving them grief.