The Harrisburg Patriot-News - the paper of record in my long-adopted Pennsylvania hometown (where I live across the Susquehanna in a Cumberland County suburb) - has been in the national news. For embarrassing itself (see here) with a snarling, anti-First Amendment-sounding tirade against readers who dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage. A decision the paper enthusiastically supported. Last Sunday, a rare missed-church morning, I looked up at Fox and Friends to find co-host Tucker Carlson grilling the paper’s editor John Micek on this kerfuffle. It did not go well for Mr. Micek.
Yow. How could this happen?
Once upon a time the Patriot-News was the Washington Post of Harrisburg - and I don’t mean that as an insult. Harrisburg, of course, is Pennsylvania’s state capital, and journalistically speaking the Patriot-News was it in terms of newspaper coverage. If you wanted to know what was up with the governor-of-the-moment and his battles with the state legislature-of-the-moment, the Patriot-News was the place to go. If you were involved in local politics as a candidate for the state legislature - as I was once in my misspent youth - a visit to the Patriot-News editorial board was a must. You were fairly grilled - and knowledgeably so. The same was true, I learned, when in a later life as a young staffer for then-US Senator John Heinz, you sat down with Heinz and the editorial board for a visit.
If you wanted to know what was up in your area - with news, culture, local politics, religion, education - the Patriot-News was the place to go. If, to note a fairly recent story that captured national attention, you wanted to follow the saga of Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal and the fate (living and in death) of the legendary Penn State coach Joe Paterno ( renowned in this area somewhere just shy of God himself), the Patriot-News was definitely the place to get the scoop. The paper’s Sara Ganim and the paper’s staff won a Pulitzer for their work.
The people who did the paper’s heavy lifting in the state capitol years ago, longtime professionals John Scotzin and Carmen Brutto, were reporters of the old school who physically prowled the state capitol sniffing out stories from the most senior and powerful legislators to the youngest and most inconsequential staffers (ahem!) Editorially speaking the paper had another serious professional - Dale Davenport, now sadly gone before his time - who herded the cats of differing opinions (including mine) - on the editorial pages. Liberals? Conservatives? Syndicated or local yokels we were all there.
For sure the challenges of the Internet’s arrival has made life in the print business difficult everywhere. The printed version of the paper has gone from seven days a week to a mere three. It is, in more sad ways than one, filled with obituaries. Online one finds the Patriot-News in the form of what has become known as PennLive.
But something seems amiss at the Patriot-News. How in the world could my hometown paper ever find itself in the news - and at the center of a most unfavorable story? That story, of course, being a fit of self-righteousness in which the paper haughtily informed its readers as follows:
“On Friday, the United States crossed a similar threshold, continuing a long road to acceptance of same-sex unions.
And this news organization now crosses another threshold.
As a result of Friday's ruling, PennLive/The Patriot-News will very strictly limit op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage.
These unions are now the law of the land. And we will not publish such letters and op-Eds any more than we would publish those that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic.”
The firestorm was immediate.
A more graphic example of what many would see as a bigoted intolerance towards religious liberty would be hard to find. The idea that because the Supreme Court says something discussion is closed was particularly stunning. If that’s the standard then Abraham Lincoln’s opposition to the Dred Scott decision - in which the pro-slavery Justices of the 1857 Supreme Court sought to write a right-to-slavery into the Constitution - would apparently have made Lincoln and the entire brand new Republican Party nothing but a bunch of anti-judicial bigots in the eyes of the Patriot-News. Come to think of it, only two years ago the Patriot-News finally got around to retracting an editorial from November of 1863 that panned Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as nothing but “silly remarks.” Really. Then there’s Plessy v. Ferguson. That was the 1896 Supreme Court gem that allowed “separate but equal” - ie: segregation - to poison America for decades to come. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s was nothing if not a refutation of the notion held by the Patriot-News that Americans who find themselves in major disagreement with a Supreme Court decision should be intimidated into silence.
Editor Micek, suddenly in the glare of the national media spotlight, felt compelled to apologize with a mea culpa. The Patriot-News apology said, in part:
“What almost immediately followed was an object lesson in the law of unintended consequences. And, sadly, the strongly worded message included in our editorial was lost.
By day's end, I'd received dozens of emails and several phone calls -- not to mention the hundreds of comments appended to the editorial -- accusing me (and this news organization) of being "fascists" opposed to both the First Amendment and the right to freedom of expression.
And those were just the polite ones.
And as I rolled it over in my head yesterday, after hearing from professional colleagues and good friends on the right and left who questioned our policy, I reached a number of conclusions:
First: No one at PennLive and The Patriot-News is an opponent of the First Amendment. It's a right that's foundational to us as a people. And it's a right for which many brave and noble men and women have given their lives. And I would never trample on that legacy or dishonor their sacrifice by limiting our readers' right to express themselves in a civil way.
Second: And I cannot stress this one enough -- that's in a civil way. More than once yesterday I was referred to as "f****t-lover," among other slurs. And that's the point that I was trying to make with our statement: We will not publish such slurs any more than we would publish racist, sexist or anti-Semitic speech. There are ways to intelligently discuss an issue. The use of playground insults is not among them. And they are not welcome at PennLive/The Patriot-News.
Third: I fully recognize that there are people of good conscience and of goodwill who will disagree with Friday's high court ruling. They include philosophers and men and women of the cloth whose objections come from deeply held religious and moral convictions that are protected by the very same First Amendment that allowed me to stick my foot in my mouth on Friday. They are, and always will be, welcome in these pages, along with all others of goodwill, who seek to have an intelligent and reasoned debate on the issues of the day.
These pages, I remind myself finally, belong to the people of Central Pennsylvania. I'm a conduit, I recognize, for them to share their views and to have the arguments that make us better as a people. And all views are -- and always will be -- welcome.”
Well. Good. Very good. Although I would add on Micek’s second point that one of the unfortunate but decidedly universal problems with the Internet is the peculiar sense of commenters across the political spectrum that the ability to hide their identity is grounds for unleashing incivility. This ugly habit is all over place and it is indeed ugly, but it most assuredly isn’t limited to the subject of gay marriage. Perhaps the Patriot-News has scolded liberal comedian Bill Maher for calling former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin the “c” word - on television at that - and I’ve missed it. But in any event, gratuitous slurs are and should be out.
But the question remains: How in the world did the Patriot-News get in this fix in the first place?
For starters, let’s look at these two different lines from the paper’s PennLive web site. First is this, a statement of sorts about the paper’s identity - who, exactly, it says it is: The line reads:
“The Patriot-News is a reader-focused, community-oriented and results-driven source for state and local news”
Great. But look now at this info provided on the same page:
“The Patriot-News reaches business decision makers and consumers in Dauphin, Lebanon, northern Lancaster, Cumberland, Perry and northern York counties.”
For non-Pennsylvanians, these are six counties in Central Pennsylvania. This is the audience, as it were, for the paper. Now two more things. First, this headline on the editorial page from October 28, 2012. It reads: Four more years: The Patriot-News endorses Barack Obama. Among other things the endorsement says - disapprovingly - that Mitt Romney has “altered his moderate stance to one of a self-described “severely conservative” leader.”
OK. Fair enough. But take a look at the election returns that came in a few days later in the six counties the Patriot-News professes to serve with a “reader-focused, community oriented” paper.
Cumberland - 58.5% Romney.
Dauphin - 52.4% Obama.
Lancaster (Northern) - 58.9% Romney
Lebanon - 63.2% Romney
Perry - 68.6% Romney
York (Northern) - 59.9% Romney
Notice anything? In the six counties that the Patriot-News professes to serve, only one, Dauphin, voted for Obama and that with a modest 52.4% of the vote. Of the remaining five, all voted in a landslide for Romney, the smallest margin a resounding 58.5% in my own Cumberland County. All the rest had even larger pro-Romney votes, with two counties well over 60% and one of those closer to 70%.
One election does not a pattern make. But in fact there is a pattern. The paper endorsed Obama in 2008, with the five same counties choosing John McCain. In 2010 the paper chose left-wing Democrat and Congressman Joe Sestak over conservative Republican Pat Toomey for the US Senate. Every single one of the six counties that compose the paper’s readership voted for Toomey. In the 2006 race between then-incumbent US Senator Rick Santorum and Democrat Bob Casey, five of the six counties voted Republican. The paper endorsed Casey.In the 2014 gubernatorial race, the Democrat was endorsed - but five of the six Patriot-News counties voted for the Republican.
There is, of course, no obligation for the paper to endorse any Republican much less every Republican. But I would gently suggest that an editorial mindset that is so wildly out of touch with its readers when it comes to these elections has a problem that is much larger than editorial endorsement of this or that candidate.
What appears to have happened to the Harrisburg Patriot-News is the same thing that is discernible in other journalistic homes. Which is to say there is a problem battling the media disease that is “liberal elitism.” A problem that results in the hire of journalists who essentially all share the same cultural, political and educational biases of today’s liberal establishment. A bias decidedly not shared by the vast majority of its readers. In the announcement of Mr. Micek’s appointment the paper noted that he succeeds Heather Long. Ms. Long, it says, departed the Patriot-News “to take position (sic) overseeing opinion pieces in the New York office for the Guardian, a British-based online news publication that covers events around the world.” Unmentioned is that the Guardian is famously a left-wing British paper. The notion that an editor for the Patriot-News would be simpatico intellectually to head off for The Guardian as opposed to, say, The Washington Times, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or conservative publications such as The American Spectator, National Review or Fox News or indeed right here at NewsBusters is a small yet telling sign of the ideological mindset that runs the paper.
Given all this is it any wonder that Micek and his team wandered so guilelessly into sniffing that well, no, the paper would tolerate no more dissent on same-sex marriage from the rabble that composes its readership? There is apparently no one in the Patriot-News editorial ranks who is a bona fide conservative - someone who can speak not just with authority but with a real sense of just when the paper is heading in a direction that is sure to have the conservative readers that are clearly the overwhelming audience of the paper rolling their eyes somewhere just before they finally stop reading the paper altogether.
It’s too bad. There is a reason Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham and other talk radio hosts - not to mention Fox News - are thriving not just here in Central Pennsylvania but with a national audience. While liberal others struggle or fail outright. What happened in this incident with the Patriot-News isn’t really about gay marriage at all. It is about a newspaper that has lost its way and has no idea of the fact because everyone in the room is some variant of a liberal.
In a day and age when news outlets from the determinedly left-wing Newsweek (which spent its time mocking Palin and other conservatives right up until it was sold for a dollar and went out of print) to MSNBC and CNN persist in valuing liberal elitism over an audience - and wind up paying the price by losing readers or viewers - what happened with the Patriot-News is hardly unusual.
But it is a shame.
