The Inland Empire's Voice

Cradled between the northern Rockies and the Cascades is a vast area--eastern Washington and parts of Montana, Idaho and Oregon--which natives like to call the Inland Empire. Bigger than New England, it is rich in wheat, minerals, apples, lumber, scenery--and atom-bomb works. The-chief bellringer and arbiter for the empire is the Spokane Spokesman-Review, a newspaper which President Truman in one of his cocky moods once paired with Bertie McCormick's Chicago Tribune as "worst" in the country.

The President was judging the two papers solely on their bitter opposition to the New and Fair Deals. Like the Trib, the Review is dedicated to the task of turning the rascals, i.e., Democrats, out. Beyond that, there is only a casual resemblance between the papers. The Review is neither so skillfully written nor so brightly edited as the Tribune, and typographically it still wears high-button shoes. The source of its journalistic power is that, like the Trib, it fusses over its inland empire like a hen on eggs--and covers the empire as efficiently.

Portrait of a Paper. This week, the camera-shy Spokesman-Review sat for a public portrait. Idaho's Caxton Printers Ltd. published a fat, 494-page biography of the paper by Ralph Dyar, longtime Spokesman-Review promotion man. Its title: News for an Empire. Dyar gilds the Review, but in doing it, he also unintentionally presents a case history of how a well-run newspaper can monopolize a city and dominate a sprawling region. Through the history of Spokane (pop. 160,484) there have been dozens of papers. Now there are two, the Spokesman-Review (circ. 87,000 mornings, 135,000 Sundays) and the evening Chronicle (circ. 77,000). Both are owned by the heirs of William

Hutchinson Cowles (rhymes with poles).* Spokane was a town of only 16,000 in 1891 when Cowles, a onetime Chicago Tribune police reporter and son of the Trib's treasurer, at 24 became business manager of the wobbly 16-month-old Spokesman. He won readers with his good local coverage. In the depression of '93, the Spokesman merged with the rival Review, and later Cowles bought out his partners. In 1897, he took over another competitor, the evening Chronicle.

He kept separate news staffs for the Spokesman-Review and the Chronicle, encouraged them to compete with each other. The Republican Review concentrated on regional news; the Chronicle, which was "independent" politically, focused on Spokane. The papers won power and prestige by their crusades against gambling, liquor and prostitution, and for lower freight rates for the Northwest, better parks and other projects which helped build up Spokane and the region. In one fiercely fought local campaign, a crank twice tried to dynamite the papers' plant. The Review also battled plans for Grand Coulee dam, but even former Staffer Dyar now admits that the dam brought "a new era of prosperity and growth" to the Northwest. Cowles built a quartet of still thriving tabloid weeklies, the Idaho Farmer, Washington Farmer, Oregon Farmer and Utah Farmer (total circ. 192,706).

Births & Deaths. A stubbornly determined man who insisted on walking two miles to work each day though he had an artificial leg, Cowles's energy, and his papers' fine-toothed coverage of the empire, killed off dozens of less able competitors. In 1939 his last opposition, the Scripps

League's Press (which had no connection with the Scripps-Howard chain), folded.

Since his father's death in 1946, the boss of the Spokane papers has been W. H. Cowles Jr., now 49. Unlike his father, who held a firm finger on the whole operation, diffident "Billy" Cowles leaves the Review news department to 38-year-old Managing Editor James Bracken. Though the paper still covers its region like a tent, it no longer has its former editorial prowess. Bracken has been trying to restore it by scraping some of the moss off the Review's Republicanism to bring it more in line with the increasing industrialization of the area. His progress has not been empire-shaking. Many a Spokane citizen still pines for a chance to read news that isn't Cowles's news.

*Old W. H. Cowles was a distant cousin of Owners Gardner and John Cowles of Look, the Des Moines Register and Tribune, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, etc.

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