The Washington Post: Monopoly Profits and Broken Promises
Noah, Timothy
The Washington Post: Monopoly Profits and Broken Promises By Timothy Noah Every now and then those of us who enthusiastically endorse the virtues of capitalism get a glimpse of its unattractive...
...this competition provides the customer with a range of choices and also tends to make each business try to do a better job than the other guy...
...When these stories appear in the Post, it tends to be on someone else's initiative...
...Post employees are quick to explain that although this lowered the unit cost of producing a newspaper, it also required buying a new plant, acquiring more newsprint, and hiring more distributors, all of which threatened to lower the Post's overall profit margin if ad rates didn't rise...
...about its insensitivity to its captive advertisers...
...But how can workers justify carping about "getting their fair share" when they're so obviously better off than most people...
...One story that cuts to the heart of the workings of government in any community deals with the extent to which any given government bureaucracy has become overstuffed with personnel who place their own survival over the interest of the citizens they serve...
...But the Post didn't become a great newspaper by behaving this way, and there's reason to hope that both Katharine and Donald Graham are aware of that...
...When you buy a newspaper, your quarter doesn't cover the full cost...
...This can be seen in the Post reporters' argument that they should be paid as much as their peers at other successful newspapers...
...But the Post may have more freedom to forgo some of its impressive profits than it thinks...
...It was for just this reason that Katharine Graham had anxieties about allowing the Post to go public in 1971: The Post had been a family business to Katharine Graham ever since her, father had -bought it back in the thirties...
...In response to the recent herbicide spraying, a few local environmentalists contacted Guy Knight, a corporate spokesman for the Post, and asked about the gap between theory and practice...
...The Washington Post has less of a stake in that than the people of Nova Scotia:' he answered...
...The New Yorker has been making the same judgment for years...
...Indeed, it would be hard for people as conscientious as the Grahams to cross a picket line before the Post's entrance where the signs said not "Give Us a Raise:' but "Stop Spraying Dangerous Herbicides" or "Don't Accept Cigarette Ads:' After all, the newspaper's rank and file would only be telling the bosses to take the Post's highest goals seriously...
...Discussions about whether Washington had to become a one-newspaper town with the folding of the Star usually begin and end on this point...
...4 WAYS TO SPOT A MONOPOLY 1. The Price Test When Washingtonians reached down one recent Sunday morning to pick up their Sunday Posts from their front stoops, they were greeted with an announcement discreetly boxed in the lower right-hand corner of page one that said home delivery to "Sunday-only" subscribers would henceforth cost not $1 per copy, but $1.25 per copy, a 25 percent increase...
...Buffett is fully aware of the virtues of a newspaper monopoly...
...Rather than answer that question, Graham pointed out to me that, actually, the Post's reporters do a little better by the "comparability" measure than its executives...
...Certainly one thing they do is clean the homes of people who work for the Post...
...This is generally considered a banal point nowadays, but cigarettes annually cause 300,000 deaths...
...Elizabeths Hospital, "frittering away their medical skills talking to the worried well!' These stories were models of what the Post needs to do more of...
...the key was not to maintain an expensive advertising staff...
...But in the best companies, and particularly monopolistic ones, you expect a dedication to both the enterprise and the community that occasionally puts questions of profit and individual gain aside for the sake of something larger...
...The charges about the cocaine turned out to be unfounded, and the Post ran an editorial denouncing the "smear quality" of the allegations...
...he has spent a good portion of his career investing in them...
...See "Making It At The Post" by Joseph Nocera, January 1979...
...of Wall Street Does all this mean that when the Post editorializes about its willingness to be a publicspirited, vigorous monopoly, that it is actually scheming to be an immoral, lazy one...
...purpose that made it rightly feel that it was "more than a business!' If any corporation among the Fortune 500 could be expected to behave in a way that would make us proud to be capitalists, it would be the Washington Post Company...
...As Donald Graham, the Post's publisher, pointed out to me when I asked him why the Post paid its top executives so much money, "It's a little tough to argue that on the one hand the Post ought to keep a weather eye on The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times and the other top papers in deciding how much reporters ought to be paid but that business executives ought to be paid much less than those at other companies" But couldn't an organization as prestigious and idealistic as the Post deny the "comparability" measure to both labor and management...
...One particularly vivid moment of self-examination for the news business came in 1981, when the Washington Star ceased publication, abandoning the field to The Washington Post, for the past two decades the capital's number-one newspaper...
...And who could blame the cop for confusing the two...
...They Want to Dominate' We seem to keep getting back to that word, "monopoly' Try as the Post might to be genuinely public-spirited, it can't avoid falling prey to unchecked fantasies of ever-larger profits...
...In the year after the Star folded, the Post's circulation shot up more than 18 percent, from 627,000 to 744,000...
...In the liberal lexicon, "public" is generally a good thing, implying as it does the balance of private desires against a public good...
...You may feel responsible for freedom of the press, and I'm committed to that, too:' Beebe told the Post's national editor, Ben Bagdikian...
...The man who replaced Meagher, Richard D. Simmons, was lured to the Post with not only a salary of $275,000, but an additional $275,000 for saying "yes,' He also got "incentive compensation" in cash and stock worth $361,050 in the first four months on the job, plus a guaranteed annual bonus of $110,000...
...It says that we all need to feel responsible for the behavior of the institution of which we are a part...
...The answer is, by pretending to be the victim of something beyond their control...
...and local Washington TV stations and The Washington Times did indeed pounce on it...
...2. The Prima Donna Test Perhaps you wonder whether the Post's combination of power and wealth encourages reporters to be just a teeny bit more childish than they might otherwise be...
...The herbicide 2,4,5-T has caused particular concern because it contains dioxin...
...But it shouldn't be too much to ask of the kind of people we associate with enterprises like the Post—people who could have gone to law school or business school and joined the system, but instead chose to work for an institution that at its best stands skeptically apart from the system...
...The Post's recent rate increases make it clear that the paper's desire to serve the community doesn't get in the way of taking full advantage of its captive market...
...But even if the Post's guild members and managers could be shaken from their narrow pursuit of "comparability" and gave up their bickering about how to divide the company's monopolistic profits, a third barrier would stand in the way of the Post's fully achieving its philanthropic goals: its public ownership...
...To some extent, the Post does embody that spirit...
...Yet, it takes only the most modest knowledge of political reality to know that each ordinarily represents the tip of an iceberg and that together they call for a major investigation effort by the paper...
...As any redblooded capitalist will tell you, our system thrives on competition...
...Shouldn't a company that owns 49 percent of a paper mill be curious about its daily operations...
...now, thanks to the whistleblower's heroism, the offending officer was entering a guilty plea in court...
...Can't the Post afford to be a little less scrupulous about protecting the rights of its advertisers to hawk harmful products and a little more scrupulous about judging the dangers those products pose to public health...
...But a sense of this responsibility did move the Post to declare in its editorial on the passing of the Star, "We are first and foremost a local paper for the people of the Washington area:' and to boast that in absorbing reporters from the Star, the Post was "adding more to our local staff than to any other:' It is therefore disappointing to observe that while the local staff has indeed been beefed up, and the number of column inches for local reporting has increased, the Post's local coverage has failed to fill the gap left by the Star's passing, and in some areas has actually declined...
...That's a shame, because if the game of economic leapfrog so typical of labor and management in our economy didn't have to be factored in, the Post would have more freedom to live up to its pledge to take responsibility for the larger community of which it is a part...
...Laborers in other professions—both the automobile and the steel industries come to mind—aren't always so honest...
...It compounds money.' The fact that the Post is now a publicly held corporation places its idealism at least partly at the mercy of its duty to the stockholders...
...The only thing labor and management seem to agree on is that, so long as the usual contributions to the United Way and assorted other charities are made, the Post's profits shouldn't weigh heavily on anybody's conscience...
...According to the company's projections, if 125,000 copies could be sold at 25 cents apiece, the enterprise could break even...
...they exist, at least in part, to hold the rich and powerful accountable to ordinary people, a task that the Post performed most memorably in its coverage of the Watergate scandal...
...The editorial expressed deep sympathy for those who had to endure the "recurrent nightmare,' and concluded that "if regulators must err, they should do so on the side of caution!' But the Post's own primary paper supplier—the Bowater Mersey Paper Company in Nova Scotia, which the Washington Post Company owns jointly with a company called the Bowater Corporation Limited—itself routinely ground sprays the evergreens that it uses to make pulp with the herbicides 2,4,5 :1' and 2,4-D...
...Feeling like a victim makes it easier for Post reporters to make demands that might otherwise seem to have a make-believe quality: for example, in the past they have asked for a 28-hour work week with double-time pay for overtime and a 13-week paid vacation every five years...
...But at the same time, the moral standard that the Post sets for itself—the standard not of mere profitability but of responsibility and excellence— needs to be taken seriously, and by that measure, the Post has failed...
...Although Buffett seems to harbor a genuine enthusiasm for the enterprise of news gathering, his perspective is naturally inclined toward the bottom line...
...In Pennsylvania, the number of combined state and local government employees per 10,000 people is 386...
...Dave Kindred, the sportswriter who wrote eloquently about the virtues ofnewspaper competition when the Star folded in 1981, hadn't heard the story at all when called for a comment several days later...
...Since Barry first came to office in 1978, a number of Post stories on city government have left the strong impression that the Barry administration is rife with corruption at worst, and gross inefficiency at best...
...As John Morton, a newspaper analyst, explains it, "The theory is that you've always got to operate in the best interest of the shareholders, but there's a very broad area over how you can exercise that interest:' The more intractable problem is that in entering the world of Wall Street, the Post has become subject to a kind of corporate peer pressure to conform to the ethic of profit maximization...
...Well, yes...
...Last March the Post assigned a reporter to investigate charges that the mayor had either used cocaine or witnessed other people using cocaine when he stopped by a strip joint in the city's redlight district...
...The comparatively unglamorous task of providing local news to the people of Washington is the Post's most important task, if only because there are so few other places where that news is likely to appear...
...Ultimately, however, it's a trivial issue...
...3. The Night Baseball Box Score Test Immediately after the Star folded, The Washington Monthly announced the Night Baseball Box Score Monopoly Test...
...For example, a column by Molly Sinclair headlined "Evaluating Emergency Clinics" appeared last month in Metro...
...And the sidebar did not tell you that during the period the crimes were committed a Mercedes was parked in the Barry's driveway, or suggest that Barry might have had some idea of where the money to buy it came from...
...According to one of two fairly brief accounts in the Post, the D.C...
...The Post also had reason to be wary of entering into a partnership with Time Inc., which had done a surprisingly poor job of running the Star...
...This was the awkward question faced by The Washington Post when its long-suffering rival finally succumbed in the summer of 1981...
...The pressures of public ownership began to make themselves felt within the paper even before the initial underwriting agreement for the stock had been finalized, when the Post was considering whether to publish the Pentagon Papers...
...When I asked Knight why the Post didn't interest itself in Bowater Mersey's "operating decisions:' he explained that the Washington Post Company was a "minority shareholder" in the company...
...But rather than provide the essential information about where the best and worst clinics were so that a Post reader might finish the story with a better idea about where to go if he broke a leg, the story lazily provided questions that the reader should ask in order to evaluate the clinic himself...
...A reporter for a local television station found that the bulletproof vests the city had bought after a widely publicized fund-raising drive were purchased without bids...
...This wasn't the first time the Post put profit maximization over the concerns of local businesses during hard times...
...I just don't feel comfortable doing that!' Graham says...
...And its refusal to take cigarette ads has not kept it from being hugely profitable, even though it is not a monopoly like the Post...
...What do they do to keep alive...
...In the city of Washington, where the problem of overlapping functions between state and local government is avoided by having everyone work for the District of Columbia, the number is even higher: 730...
...If Jones—who is one of the most public-spirited employees at the Post—feels-this way, one can only wonder how little fretting goes on about the environmental problems of far-off Nova Scotia among those Post managers who are less predisposed to worry about such things...
...But it gets taxed to death,' she added, only half-kidding...
...instead, the goal is to take from the executives in order to raise the pay of reporters...
...The change in attitude is illustrated in the procession of Graham's confidants: whereas in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate years she seemed to favor Ben Bradlee, in the mid-seventies she began to rely on Warren Buffett, a Post director and savvy Wall Street financier who owns the largest block of Post stock outside the Graham family...
...When Barry's former wife, Mary Treadwell was convicted last summer of conspiring to defraud the federal government and the tenants of a low-income -housing project that she ran—a conviction that resulted, in part, from an investigative series that ran in the Post in 1979—no mention was made in the Post's front-page story that Treadwell and Barry not only had once been married, but had together founded the housing project's umbrella group, Youth Pride, Inc...
...Rather than denounce absurdly high corporate salaries as a threat to their company's productivity, unions tend to use these grotesquely high wages as a sort of Golden Fleece to pursue for themselves...
...in fact, the information has been widely circulated in a series of memos written by Morton Mintz, one of The Washington Post's ablest investigative reporters, for the Washington/Baltimore guild unit...
...As one reporter involved in guild politics explained it to me, "People aren't complaining they're not being paid well...
...we're talking about the right of cigarette advertisers to try to entice readers into buying products that their government says will kill a significant number of them...
...Presumably, if he didn't like the answers he got, he'd hobble out the door and go to the next clinic down the list...
...These riches were put on lavish display last winter when the Washington Post Company spent more than $1 million to celebrate Newsweek's 50th anniversary...
...It's like a thirdworld chemical-dumping issue to the people here,' says Peter Cumming, a local writer who has been following the herbicide debate...
...auditor found that the selection process bypassed the usual safeguards against favoritism, and "served to bring the integrity of the entire selection procedure under question:' The Post stories (along with more extensive coverage in The Washington Times) did lead the city to scrap the bid and start all over again, but the paper never really explored how Barry's relationship with Fitzgerald may have influenced the city's initial decision—despite the fact that Barry had previously gotten into trouble by accepting a below-market mortgage from Independence Federal...
...And what's wrong with that, you may ask...
...You always have to remember,' one reporter who had just gotten a raise confided to me, "that you work for this big, ugly corporation which wants to make money' Another reporter, who worked on the bargaining committee, agreed to tell me her salary: it was over $40,000 a year...
...Cohen wrote...
...I have to worry about stock in a $193 million corporation!' If anything, that responsibility weighs even more heavily on Katharine Graham, not only because she heads the Washington Post Company but also because she entered the world of Wall Street late in life, and has made a considerable effort to show her new peers how well she's learned that world...
...But if all these able and idealistic people can so easily fall victim to the seductions of monopoly power and its financial rewards, fretting about how to maximize their share of the take, what does it say about the system...
...the Consumer Price Index rose only half that amount in this period...
...This is the attitude that prevails among members of the Post's guild unit...
...This isn't to say that the Post can't rise to the occasion once in awhile and provide the sort of local story that raises the local coverage to the level of those areas of the paper that compete with prestigious national newspapers like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal...
...If you've heard these figures before, it's because Post reporters haven't been shy about making a big stink about them...
...The Washington Post: Monopoly Profits and Broken Promises By Timothy Noah Every now and then those of us who enthusiastically endorse the virtues of capitalism get a glimpse of its unattractive side...
...There are no fans like Giant and Jet fans...
...There are also a number of stories about life in Washington that the Post allows its readers to glimpse only peripherally...
...These temptations have repercussions not only for the newspaper's environmental policies and the way it treats its advertisers, but also for the editorial product itself...
...Even among the rank and file, who could plausibly plead ignorance about the details of the plan, the most common reaction seemed to be surprise that anyone was still talking about that option...
...Unambiguous epidemiological studies linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer have been reported on in newspapers like the Post for years, and recently the Post quoted Surgeon General C. Everett Koop as announcing at a press conference that "smoking actually causes more deaths annually from coronary heart disease than from all cancers:' Ironically, the same news story quoted Koop as saying that ending federal price supports for tobacco probably wouldn't help much because lower prices for tobacco would leave cigarette manufacturers with more money to lure customers through advertising...
...But instead I found that people who had participated in discussions about starting the second newspaper wouldn't say anything beyond yes, they'd considered it, and no, it hadn't been a good idea— some pleading a faulty memory for the particulars, others saying they simply wouldn't say more...
...they took cigarette ads off the air two years before the federal government issued its compulsory ban in 1971...
...The problem is compounded by the admiration she feels for people like Buffett...
...Katharine Graham, after all, is the woman who twice stood up to the powerful— with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and her paper's pursuit of the Watergate story—at no little risk...
...Easing their consciences with the sure knowledge that the rank and file will never achieve salaries comparable to their corporate adversaries, union leaders nevertheless seek to inch a little closer so as not to be played for suckers, even if the rank and file are already overpaid...
...Mark Meagher, for example, who was president of the Washington Post Company until just before the Star folded, was given $537,587.50 for his stock options when he left, plus a 15-year golden parachute of $1,258,600—a total of almost $1.8 million...
...But Post Company profits in the years since the Star's demise haven't just held steady...
...Among the festivities was a sumptuous black-tie dinner that the company threw in New York to impress Newsweek advertisers, followed by pious recitations from Lauren Bacall, Hume Cronin, Jessica Tandy, and James Earl Jones on what it meant to be a journalist, and a multimedia celebration of Newsweek's first 50 years produced by Lorne Michaels, the man who gave you "Saturday Night Live.' Far from being a bout of momentary giddiness, the Newsweek bash was typical of the Post's willingness to spend money on things that do little to serve its readers...
...But because Shales was late in returning two recent videotapes to a local station in time for The Washington Times's TV critic to see them, the Times was unable to review the programs before they aired...
...But it would help energize the local coverage...
...Although an owner can allow himself to be motivated by pride in his work and dedication to his community—which includes many people who don't have a stake in the owner's earning high profits—a public corporation suffers pressures to sacrifice some of that pride and dedication for the sake of the bottom line...
...The message the Post was trying to convey was that it was being responsible because it hadn't had a cost-of-living increase since the Star folded...
...If the guild ever achieved this goal, the result would be a redistribution of income among people who, by the standards of the outside world, are all well-off...
...both her father and her husband devoted their lives to it...
...As Dave Kindred, a Post sportswriter, wrote after the announcement of the Star's closing, "You save nothing back, no good lines, no good quotes, when you know the guy at the next typewriter will miss nothing...
...To unearth this important piece of information, you had to dig into a sidebar buried on page 16...
...Knight told them that Bowater Mersey's decision to spray the herbicides was an "operating decision" that was up to Bowater Mersey, not The Washington Post, a position he reaffirmed to me when I called to check up on this...
...The reporter, Paul Berry of WJLA, found a number of potential bidders who said they could produce cheaper vests that would stop 9mm bullets, which the vests purchased by the city could not...
...For example, the Metro section recently had a story on the outrageous prices still charged by funeral homes—but only because a group called the Washington Consumers' Checkbook had already done the legwork...
...And for another, real stockholder revolts are rare, even in corporations less tightly controlled than the Post...
...But there was a better alternative open to the Post to preserve newspaper competition in Washington: it should have started its own afternoon daily...
...Didn't I realize that the Post was a business...
...When I asked Shales about this, he said, "I can't schedule my life around the logistical problems of The Washington Times...
...So the Post has no way of knowing—and won't make the effort to find out— whether you got the late-night box scores in yesterday's paper or today's—or not at all...
...The Post raised classified and retail advertising rates .13 percent in 1982, and an additional 9.5 percent last February, when the recession was just beginning to subside...
...For one thing, Katharine Graham retains a majority of the voting stock in the Washington Post Company, and thus the right to still think of the Post as largely a family enterprise...
...Moreover, the Post had a long tradition of family control, which gave it a sense of pride and Timothy Noah is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Finally, there are what city magazines generally call "service pieces!' Such where-to-get-it pieces can be frivolous at their worst, catering to tastes in ice cream and roller skates and other knicknacks of the good life...
...The Canadians are particularly rankled by the fact that the polluter is a newspaper that has editorialized sanctimoniously about the dangers of herbicides...
...at the time the Post ran its editorial, the Environmental Protection Agency had already banned its use in forestry, and last October— under an administration' not known for environmental activism—the EPA banned all other uses of the chemical...
...Isn't making money what capitalism's all about...
...It simply means that these goals tend naturally to be overcome by the anxieties of labor and management of being suckered out of their fair share of the profits...
...There's no business like it',' Buffett is quoted as saying of monopoly newspapers in Howard Bray's book, The Pillars of the Post...
...The reason is that the various editions of the Post aren't distributed in any systematic way...
...the difference, and the profit, come from advertising...
...Barry responded by asking for the money in cash...
...They're complaining about not getting their fair share' There is something refreshing in the willingness of Post reporters to concede that their wage demands have nothing to do with the real world...
...But what happens when one business competes so successfully that it eliminates the competition...
...it was what he was doing there at all...
...That doesn't keep reporters at the Post from hungering to leave the Metro desk as soon as possible to join the more prestigious national and international staffs...
...The story had first come out the year before in a Post investigative series...
...Wringing the Retailers Closer to home, the Post has contradicted its self-proclaimed commitment to the community since the passing of the Star by taking advantage of its monopoly status and tightening its grip on advertisers...
...Who could blame [a cop observing this scene] for thinking that this sleaze-ball of a club enjoys if not the protection, then certainly the patronage, of the city's highest elected official...
...when Ben Bradlee first met Buffett, he said, "I understand you're the Woodward and Bernstein of Wall Street:' no doubt repeating his employer's own description...
...And yet, people who work at the Post tend not to allow themselves to worry about such things...
...One area where the Post is doing a noticeably worse job is in its coverage of Marion Barry, the current mayor of Washington, D.C...
...But let's examine another reason: the pressures brought by employees and stockholders to maximize profits...
...Thus the wiser Post reporters scrupulously avoid defining social justice in terms of the world beyond the walls of the Post building...
...although this suggested incompetence or deliberate corruption in the selection of vest manufacturers, the only story the Post ran on the matter covered a press conference in which the police chief said he stood by his decision...
...The Post avoided that angle in the Koop story...
...But the Post was oddly diffident: the only coverage it gave the interview was a parenthetical reference to the Times's headline, "Joe Theismann Loves New York," which was buried in the Post's sports gossip column—under the heading "Boxing...
...Before the Star folded, there was some talk about the Post entering into a joint operating agreement with Time Inc., the Star's last owner...
...It's a living hell as it is trying to review television...
...As Donald Graham told me, "The policy of the paper is that we try to allow people a very broad right to say what they want in paid advertisements in the paper:' But we're not talking about political speech...
...Neither side wanted to talk about the larger question: whether the Post's nobler ideals were really served by having its reporters and corporate executives fret more about whether they were being paid better than their friends at other companies than about whether their company was upholding its responsibility to the people whose lives are affected by the Post but who aren't on the payroll...
...As " corporate enterprises go, newspapers are unusually idealistic...
...I love New York," Theismann said...
...The city chose a bid by a company headed by William B. Fitzgerald Sr., who is also the president of Independence Federal Savings, where the mayor's wife is a director...
...As Donald Graham now remembers it, the decision was "not primarily an economic one',' but rather grew out of a sense that "it is a damn hard job producing one good newspaper" But that's exactly the point: it is much more difficult to put out a good newspaper when you don't have a competitor to keep you on your toes than it is when you do...
...In addition to going after the corruption issue, the Post should dig much harder into the story of how effectively the Barry administration is delivering services to the public...
...And Donald Graham's own life has been exemplary in its dedication to public service: unlike most of his wealthy peers, Graham willingly served in Vietnam, and upon his return to Washington he schooled himself in the life of his city by walking the beat as a policeman...
...No such luck...
...Still, the EPA in America hasn't said 2,4,5-T can't be used near population centers...
...The question was especially awkward for the Post because it was a newspaper, and therefore obliged to comment on its new monopoly status...
...Taken as a whole, Mintz's memos illustrate what's wrong not just with the Post but with the way corporate executives are paid generally...
...No Mersey We'll begin our inquiry into the Post's adherence to its idealism with a 1979 editorial that appeared in the Post after a rash of miscarriages in Oregon that were attributed to spraying of the herbicide 2,4,5-T...
...This is the first increase in the Sunday-only home delivery price in almost three years, or since March 1, 1981," the paper proudly proclaimed...
...And if the Post's reporters want to siphon some of the fruits of their labors their way, why shouldn't they...
...Doesn't he feel queasy about the Post spraying chemicals abroad that its government won't permit it to spray at home...
...The problem is summed up in one Mintz memo this way: "Everyone is rationally responding to individual incentives, but the sum total of those individually smart decisions is social stupidity: Those aren't Mintz's own words...
...This is something you don't read enough about in the Post...
...It's a matter of resources:' Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., the Post's in-house lawyer and a member of the Bowater Mersey board, was slightly more reassuring when I spoke to him about this...
...That is a lot to ask of a capitalist...
...you may get an early edition thrown onto your stoop one morning and a late edition thrown onto your stoop the next...
...and about its unwillingness to subject its reporters to the rigor of outside competition...
...Since the Star, which was an afternoon newspaper, always picked up late-night box scores that the Post's early editions missed, Washington sports fans had no trouble getting the details on these games...
...4. The Asleep-At-The-Wheel Test Dave Anderson of The New York Times scooped the Post on November 30 with an interview in which Joe Theismann, the Redskin quarterback, said he'd- like to leave Washington and play for a New York team...
...it has said the chemical can't be used at all...
...Even when the Post does do a story about such essential services on its own initiative, the effort can be lackluster...
...On Wall Street, the values of the newspaper are neatly reversed: rather than question the rich and the powerful, one seeks to join them, and rather than dedicate oneself to quality, one hankers after profitability...
...but at their best, they can tell us what we really need to know—where are the best schools, the best emergency rooms, the best counseling centers...
...For example: —In the fall of 1982 the city collected bids for development rights to the abandoned trolley tunnels below Dupont Circle...
...When the Post published its editorial on the Star's passing, it in effect answered the monopoly question with an assurance that now there were "new obligations on this newspaper',' and that the Post would have to "search for ever more ways to make our pages and our services responsive to the needs of the community!' It is reasonable to assume that these words were more heartfelt than the usual corporate PR...
...But I have a responsibility that you don't...
...The example of Tom Shales, the Post's television critic, certainly suggests this...
...company profits for the first three quarters of this year are up 170.7 percent from the comparable period in 1981, largely thanks to the fact that The Washington Post is now a monopoly newspaper...
...its reporters and editors genuinely care about making the world a better place in a way that people who work for, say, DeBeers do not...
...If the Post wants to live up to its high ideals, the people who derive their livelihood from its profits need to make life inconvenient for themselves...
...But having satisfied itself that the mayor didn't snort cocaine, the Post failed to investigate the far more important payoff question in a follow-up story...
...They need to holler about their company's hypocrisy on environmental safety...
...Who's Minding the Mayor...
...When the paper's advertising linage fell during the 1974-75 recession, it chose to raise rather than lower its rates, comfortable in the knowledge that even with a competitor in town, the Post had a firm hold on its advertisers...
...Harden's departure from the Post for The Washingtonian is thus a particularly keen— and perhaps symbolic—loss for the paper...
...But what if newspapers like the Post refused to run the ads...
...The Post thought enough of this idea to appoint Howard Simons, the managing editor, to head an ad hoc committee to look into it, and to do some preliminary market research...
...No guild activist at the Post has been so idealistic as to suggest that both corporate executives and reporters would be well taken care of if executive salaries were radically lowered while reporters' salaries stayed the same...
...Ben Holmes provided research assistance for this article...
...But while the Post was eagerly digging into these stories during Barry's first administration—when the Star was still around—there has been a slackening now that the Star has left town...
...Mintz borrowed them from one of Lester Thurow's Newsweek columns in order to underline the Post's hypocrisy...
...A second newspaper in Washington might not be necessary to energize the Post's national and international staffs, which have always tended to compete with the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times anyway...
...Nor does the Post work hard enough to provide information on which agencies in the city government work well and which work poorly—the District's Department of Human Services is widely suspected to be one of the great bureaucratic disasters of all time...
...But when the "public" is defined as stockholders in a corporation, the end result is often a less truly public-spirited enterprise...
...Yet the question of how the property tax burden is shared among homeowners and businesses is fundamental to anyone who pays property tax or cares about fairness in government...
...But the worst consequence of playing the victim is that it keeps workers from raising larger questions about the enterprise to which they belong...
...Residents of Nova Scotia, where 2,4,5-T remains unrestricted, are understandably resentful of the idea that an American company is permitted to do to someone else's environment what it is forbidden to do to its own...
...For example, when the Post recently reported that a government study found that homeowners in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia paid more in property taxes than homeowners in the rest of the country, while owners of commercial and industrial properties got away with paying less than the national average, it buried the news on its Saturday real estate page and didn't follow up on the story...
...Instead, they worry about money...
...It's not because we're not interested:' Knight explained...
...And when a Post story last spring revealed that there was only one free clinic in all of Washington, the facts appeared not in a full-blown investigation but as an aside in a routine District Weekly story covering the clinic's tenth-anniversary party...
...But Frederick Beebe, Graham's lawyer and financial guru, persuaded her that going public was the only way the Post could cover immediate cash-flow problems, and, further down the road, the only way to protect the Post from inheritance taxes that might otherwise wrest control of the paper from the family...
...The Post found out about the episode in 1982 but never published what it knew...
...Could this have happened in a newsroom that constantly fretted about what its local competition was up to...
...One of Barry's supporters offered him several thousand dollars...
...thus, when the matter of the second newspaper came up, he advised Graham against it...
...In part, this is because of attitudes and values among the staff that have long plagued the Post...
...None of these stories is in itself conclusive evidence that Barry and his administration are corrupt...
...But the apparently booming market in good help doesn't seem to be making many headlines these days...
...If Katharine Graham wants to throw a party, or overpay her executives, why shouldn't she...
...Given the Post's prosperity, you would expect that in the midst of the 1982 recession it would have been willing to go easy on its advertisers, who were suffering far more than the Post...
...Why would they encourage some system that would make their lives miserable...
...But inflation hasn't gone up 25 percent since March 1981...
...This uncharitable attitude has only grown now that the Post has become the only major metropolitan daily in town (excluding The Washington Times, which has failed to acquire a significant circulation and thus carries few 4 WAYS TO SPOT A MONOPOLY advertisements...
...Everybody who works at The Washington Post is well-paid, but the best-paid, of course, are in management...
...Enormous salaries and perks adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars are routinely lavished on top management...
...In Massachusetts, where it seems nearly everyone's brother-in-law is on the public payroll, the number is 444...
...Playing the Victim That isn't a frivolous question...
...The irony is not a new one: the Bowater Mersey plant has for years been a target of complaints from local environmentalists...
...Why didn't the Post try an afternoon newspaper...
...The logistics were tricky, but not impossible...
...Meanwhile, the Newspaper Guild, which has never had much reason to worry about the ability of the Post's reporters and editors to keep a roof overhead—the average salary on the newsroom floor is $43,500—has acquired a new militancy in its clamoring for higher cost-of-living increases, higher minimum salaries, and more overtime...
...A quick glance through the paper should tell you why: the Post routinely carries even the most outrageously immoral ads—the ones that sell cigarettes not on the basis of "low tar content" but on the basis of sex appeal or rugged, Marlboro-man individuality—even though company policy dictates that the Post refuse ads which "harm people:' The Post chooses to defend its cigarette advertising on free-speech principles...
...And Post Company profits for the first three quarters of 1983 were nearly three times those for the same period in 1981...
...One can't help suspecting that one reason the effort has not been a continuing one is that the Star is no longer there to compete, and so there is no longer a chance that the Post will be embarrassed by being beaten on the story...
...Any Washington sports fan would immediately recognize this as a major story...
...Although the Post made the admirable decision to go ahead and face the wrath of the Nixon administration, it did so over the objections of Beebe...
...The reporters stand among the best in their profession, and their profession is one which many consciously chose over the more cynical routes open to society's ablest members...
...Interestingly enough, the Post's own TV and radio stations have been willing to make the judgment that Graham won't make for the Post itself...
...Unfortunately, the words apply equally well to labor's traditional reaction to inflated executive pay...
...When Katharine Graham reads about her paper in the business press, she doesn't see her aspirations to make the Post a top-notch, self-sacrificing institution congratulated...
...Advertising is the traditional bane of second newspapers because it flows disproportionately to the number one newspaper...
...After all, unlike greedy managers and unions in, say, the steel industry, these people find themselves in the pleasant position of having hefty profits to divvy among themselves...
...Two particularly memorable examples were stories by Blaine Harden—one, a detailed study of how failures of the political system in both the congressional and executive branches led to the demise of Washington's crumbling Union Station at a cost of $117 million, and the other, a devastating look at how psychiatrists in the city were, in the words of Dr...
...Of course not...
...E. Fuller Torrey of St...
...After the Star folded, we expected to see a better effort at the Post to consistently report these latenight box scores, but readers often miss them...
...Let's consider one particular economically "foolish" decision that has been ruled out: the decision to start up a second paper...
...Barry's explanation in the story for why he went to the party—he wasn't there for pleasure, mind you, but to pick up a campaign contribution—made Cohen's speculation about a possible payoff especially relevant...
...The herbicides kill off any deciduous trees that might spring up amid the evergreens...
...At worst the Post might have lost five or six Million a year on the proposition—considerably less than the $20 million it lost on Inside Sports, a publication whose sole reason for existence was not foolish idealism but a misplaced "commercial" calculation that Sports Illustrated's market could be snatched away...
...about its complicity in the death by heart disease and lung cancer of cigarette smokers...
...instead, she reads criticism of the Post Company's ability to be something more than just a good newspaper and make the kind of smart corporate acquisitions that win respect in the financial community...
...unfortunately, there were some fairly daunting obstacles to this, probably the most decisive being that the Star was distributed by the Teamsters, a union the Post had long avoided by working through a complicated network of independent distributors...
...This obligation rests just as much on the employee as on the employer...
...he said that the Post had asked Bowater about the herbicides, and had been told that all use was far away from population centers...
...The Post deserved to take a bow for its role in getting the whistleblower's story out, but I couldn't help wondering why its own employees wouldn't follow his example...
...they've risen quite steeply-60 percent in 1982 alone...
...The first order of business at The Washington Post is to maximize the profits from our existing operations:' she proudly announced to a gathering of security analysts the year after the Post went public...
...On the other hand, there is one group of advertisers that the Post has been too generous to: cigarette manufacturers...
...Thus it is particularly distressing that the Post is unwilling to take a step that would not only benefit its captive readership but also promote the long-term excellence of the newspaper: namely, create some editorial competition for itself...
...As far back as 1970, Dirk Van Loon, a Nova Scotian, detailed in The Washington Monthly the company's policy of dumping untreated effluent into the' Mersey River, acidifying the waste and sending noxious sulfur dioxide into the air...
...Another story about the growing Hispanic community in Washington gave evidence that there may be as many as 60,000 Hispanics living in the District illegally...
...You go full-bore every day, all day: Perhaps naively, I expected that, in talking with reporters, editors, and corporate officers about the Post's decision against starting a competing newspaper, I would hear bitter expressions of anger—off the record, of course—at the company decision to take the safe, profit-maximizing course rather than the risky, adventuresome one that might keep the enterprise first-rate in the years to come, when memory of the Star had faded...
...But the Post's "minority share" is actually 49 percent...
...Advertising would not be needed if the huge expense of home delivery were avoided by selling copies only through newsstands and vending machines...
...Along with a few other local TV critics, Shales shares advance videotapes of upcoming TV shows that are distributed by local stations...
...Washington Post Company stock has shot up 117.9 percent in the last two years...
...But, as the Post's own columnist, Richard Cohen, pointed out, the real story had little to do with whether the mayor used cocaine when he paid his visit to the red-light district...
...The latter story received wider play than the tunnels story when it ran in the Post in 1979, no doubt in part because the Star was all over it...
...Blaine Harden, a Post reporter who recently left to work for The Washingtonian, put it this way: "They want to dominate things...
...So it is a little disappointing to find that two years after the fading of the Star, the talk these days on the Post's newsroom floor seems to dwell less on how to be "responsive to the needs of the community" than on how to divide up the newspaper's impressive new profits...
...Prisoners...
...The head of the Post's guild unit, Martha Hamilton, spent some time trying to prove the opposite to me— that, actually, the reporters do a little worse on the "comparability" scale...
...The irony of these newspapermen refusing to criticize their own organization hit home soon after I conducted these interviews when the Post ran a story about a local police officer who had blown the whistle on a fellow policeman who had committed assault on a defenseless suspect while several other officers silently watched...
...A comparable figure for the newspaper itself is harder to determine—the Post's profits get mixed in with those of the Everett Herald and a few other holdings—but there's no question that at the very least, the paper's profits nearly doubled that year...
Vol. 15 • January 1984 • No. 10
