The Vanishing Home-Town Editor

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Nobody talks more about the necessity for an independent press than the press itself. Does it matter then that all over the country chain ownerships are gobbling up what used to be locally independent newspapers?

The trend is accelerating: chains now control 71% of the nation's daily circulation, and it looks as if most dailies will be in the hands of a dozen giant publishers by the end of the century. Arizona Congressman Mo Udall, whose home-town paper in Tucson was sold to a chain last year, wants the Government to give local owners special tax breaks and begin a three-year study of the effects of concentrated ownership. This seems a very bad idea to Allen Neuharth, the head of the Gannett chain, which bought the Tucson paper and owns more dailies (73 in 28 states) than anyone else. Udall's proposal has not got far yet. Perhaps concentrated control over newspapers is not the dramatically fearsome thing it once was, before television and radio news coverage and the growth of newsmagazines brought alternative sources of news into millions of homes.

There was a time when William Randolph Hearst, at his megalomaniac whim, could order his papers from coast to coast to lambaste Franklin D. Roosevelt on the front page, build up the career of Hearst's mistress Marion Davies on the movie page, and fill the intervening space with scandal. The Hearst papers have long since moderated their ways. No other newspaper chain nowadays commits such abuses. Instead, the damning indictment of most chain papers is that they have become flat, boring and timorous.

Instead of issuing editorial commands from headquarters, today's chains practice something called "local editorial autonomy," a soft-shoe phrase that can cover a lot of omissions. Now that more than 95% of American communities are without competing papers, a monopoly paper can be as much of a gold mine as a TV station. On chain papers, editors and publishers brought in from the outside and just passing through in their careers are often anxious not to rock the boat locally. Some have about as much feeling for a community's sense of itself and its needs as does the imported manager of a franchised taco joint on the highway outside town. A study of two dozen West Coast newspapers reported in the current Journalism Quarterly concludes that chain papers "have fewer argumentative editorials in controversial contexts on local topics ... The impact is not helpful to readers who seek guidance on local matters."

The richest chain publisher of them all, Sam Newhouse, now 82, has 30 newspapers and more circulation than anyone else. Feeling no Hearstian ego need to parade his prejudices in print, Newhouse focuses myopically on the bottom line, exemplifying Udall's thesis that "today, what the titans of the chains want is profits--not power--just money."

Not every chain publisher is so modest in his opinions--or, if you prefer, so content to shirk his editorial responsibility. John S. Knight, 83, has exercised self-restraint in inflicting his decided views on the 34-paper Knight-Ridder chain, which includes such fine dailies as the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Detroit Free Press. Knight, an Eisenhower conservative and friend of Nixon's, lost a son in World War II. From Dien Bien Phu on, he warned against American involvement in Southeast Asia, and when the U.S. did get involved, he continued to oppose the war in the "Editor's Notebook" he wrote. This went out to all his papers, but with no instructions that they must run it. "Most of my editors were against me personally," he recalls cheerfully now. His editorial chairman, Lee Hills, remembers how some editors ran Knight's column "on their Op-Ed page, as just another signed opinion." In the end, Knight's "Notebook" won a Pulitzer Prize.

The exercise of local editorial autonomy results in political schizophrenia--some papers Republican, others Democratic--which the chains all defend as wholesome diversity rather than cynical moneymaking indifference at headquarters. In the 1976 election, one of Knight-Ridder's Southern papers endorsed Gerald Ford instead of Southerner Jimmy Carter, while the Detroit Free Press in Ford's home state chose Carter. On the Gannett papers--"without any guidance at all from corporate headquarters," says Neuharth--endorsements went about 60% Ford, 40% Carter. The well-managed, publicly owned Gannett papers have been described not too unfairly by a critic as "one of the largest, most profitable and least influential journalistic enterprises in the country." Gannett papers are like a good chain drugstore--well lit, well stocked and impersonal.

What is missing as local ownership disappears, says Congressman Udall, is publishers who were "an independent spirit in the community, who had the power and the disposition to blow the whistle on the people in that community." A crusty editor willing to risk all for what he believes best for his town is an honored American institution. Such paragons still exist among local papers, agrees John C. Quinn, Gannett editorial director. But Quinn knows others where "the editorial position is discovered after the publisher comes back from lunch," presumably after consulting the local fat cats.

It may be a handicap to Udall's position that virtue and vig or in newspapering do not turn solely on whether a paper is in local or absentee hands. Some individually owned pa pers, like William Loeb's Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, are more noted for oldfashioned, blatant, goofy and mean-spirited eccentricity than any chain paper. Yet ideally a good independently owned paper with deep roots in its community is best for that community. That is Udall's argument. A lot of editors are properly leery about political intrusion in their business, but the trend toward concentrated ownership is worrisome enough that Congressman Udall's ideas at least deserve a hearing.

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