The Review has forgotten the community

As the newspaper of record on Bainbridge Island, the Bainbridge Review has enjoyed a monopoly power that it has done much to cultivate and preserve. The Kitsap Sun, which is the better paper overall, hasn’t been able to come up with a credible island alternative, because–in my opinion–its editors can’t quite find the pulse of this community and seem to cater to those of its Kitsap County readers who don’t like Bainbridge Island.  So far, blogs and stand-alone online news sites like the former Bainbridge Buzz (of which I was a co-publisher) haven’t had the funding or the track record to compete with established news organizations.

Black Press Ltd., the Canadian conglomerate that owns Sound Publishing, publisher of the Review, has bucked the trend of the dying newspaper by buying up small local papers in  Canada, Washington and Hawaii. Black Press is perhaps best known in Western Washington for its purchase last year of the struggling King County Journal Newspapers, and its 9 newspaper properties, and the subsequent shutdown  of its namesake daily, the King County Journal.  

The Black Press formula seems to be to acquire small papers that publish two or three times a week, with minimal attention to content, low pay for reporters and maximum effort in ad sales. Advertisers can get more bang for their buck by advertising to a string of local communities instead of just one small town where circulation can’t justify ad prices.

But how long can this coast-all-the-way-to-the-Canadian-bank party last? Recent decisions at the Review may be giving us a hint. The stagant circulation numbers and plunging ad sales plaguing the newpaper industry apparently call for desperate measures at Sound Publishing.    

Last August the Review ran two full-page ads by Jeffrey Sneller, attacking City Council candidate Kim Brackett and City code enforcement officer, Meghan McKnight, as well as the mayor and the City of Bainbridge Island in general. The ads strongly implied that Brackett was connected to the unsolved June 2006 arson of a house Sneller was building on Tolo Road, because she wrote an article for the Buzz, in which she described a wetland clearing on an adjacent property of Sneller’s. The Sneller ads also claimed that the City was “rewarding” the arsonist by insisting he comply with City regulations before he could rebuild the house.

In fact, the City issued a notice of violation to Sneller because of the wetland clearing, and he and his attorney are still negotiating a restoration plan. State and federal authorities have also asserted jurisdiction in the matter. Police have no suspects in the arson case, and have found no evidence of an environmental motivation for the fire.

The Bainbridge Review management knows this because the Review has covered the story. Yet when the paper received letters from outraged readers about the Sneller ads, editor-in-chief Douglas Crist wrote an editorial thumbing his nose at the whole community. “Not that it really has anything to do with the editor, who has no say in the advertisements that appear in this newspaper…” he began his August 22 editorial. But since readers asked, he ventured, “A newspaper is, after all, a business supported by advertisers and…this one will usually sell you some space.”

He went on to equate selling newspaper space for outlandish speculations, twisted logic and vicious personal attacks with the civic virture of presenting a range of political views. To ice the cake, he scolded islanders for not feeling bad enough that Sneller’s house burned down. Case closed. Move on.

Well not quite. Last weekend the Review published another Sneller attack ad, this one accusing Brackett not only of arson-incitement in the first degree, but of having a bad personality (now there’s a real disqualifier in politics). There were a few quotes from anonymous former colleagues of Brackett’s that sounded like they were wholly made up by Sneller. He also wrote that he is suing her, though she says she’s neither been served with papers nor notified in any manner about legal action by him or anyone else.  

I’ve been struck by how differently the New York Times treated the questionable Moveon.org ad last month. The Times, a national paper with perhaps less motive to care about the communities it serves than “The only newspaper in the world that cares about Bainbridge Island,” worried in public about the ethics of running a political ad in which the American commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, was lampooned as “General Betray Us.”

After a national outcry, the Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote a column in which he concluded that the Times gave Moveon an unwarranted price break on the ad and violated its own advertising policies to boot. ”[T]he ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, ‘We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature,’” he wrote.

He reflected on the collision of two values that are of utmost importance in journalism: “The right of free speech — even if it’s abusive speech — and a strong personal revulsion toward the name-calling and personal attacks that now pass for political dialogue, obscuring rather than illuminating important policy issues.”  Hoyt wrote that the controversy hurt the Times’ credibility “as a newspaper that sets a high standard for civility.”  Moveon eventually paid full frieght for its ad and Hoyt’s column was widely quoted as a Times mea culpa.

The flap reminded me so much of the local controversy, I wrote Sound Publishing President Manfred Tempelmayr and Chris Hoch, Review publisher, asking if they had written advertising policies such as those used by the Times. That was two weeks ago. Both of them are apparently on extended vacations and have not responded, though Hoch was due back yesterday. Neither Lisa from the ad department nor Susan Brashears, who was attending to advertising matters in Hoch’s absence, could answer my question. I sent a second unanswered email to Hoch last weekend.

The Review has replied in actions rather than words, and it has demonstrated that, whatever its policies, the highest priority is revenue. Not important stories, which are all too often ignored. Not legitimate differences of opinion within the community, which are dismissed with a paternal editorial (Review links often don’t work. I’m referrring to the September 5, 2007, “Park failure puts open space in doubt” editorial).

I realize by writing this I can kiss good-bye any chance of having a letter to the editor published in the Review. The commonly-held perception that the Review delays or deep-sixes letters from critics is itself a troubling symptom of a newspaper that considers itself above the community. As Crist gloated, ”A half-dozen readers have instead cancelled their Review subscriptions to protest Sneller’s ads, which (at the risk of sounding smug ourselves) probably means they’ll be borrowing their neighbor’s paper next week to find out what they’re missing.”

That’s the attitude of a monopoly that thinks it’s invincible. 

But monopolies that forget about the communities they’re supposed to serve can’t last forever. With the seismic changes going on in the news business, the pressures on Sound Publishing and Black Press are enormous. I don’t know how things will shake out, and it may be years before the combination of technology and pent-up community demand results in sustainable, community-focused local media.

In meantime, the toxin of negative politics, which we have come to expect on the state and national levels, is poisoning our own small community. Worse, it’s being abetted by our hometown newspaper, under the guise of political dialogue and business acumen. Perhaps most people ignored the ads, or will vote for Brackett because of them. But that’s not the point. 

The more we accept lies and smears masquerading as political discourse, the more our system of government is tainted. Ideas no longer matter as much as the sensationalism of our suspicions. Citizens of all political stripes see corruption and underhanded dealing in every government action. Watch a City Council meeting or two and you’ll see ample evidence right here on the island, including last week’s meeting at which our mayor broke down and cried after a citizen leveled accusations of lying at the mayor and the City Attorney.

We all play our part in the health of the body politic. But the media has a special responsibility to the community it covers, because for better or worse, it directs and shapes the public conversation. The Review has been clear that it will go on serving its own interests, at a time when the divisive issues on the island are paralyzing our collective will. For the health of the community, we need a local news source that will fairly and fully report the issues, provide a forum for honest, lively debate, and maintain ethical standards both in its reporting and its advertising. 

Time will tell whether that news source is the Review.

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