July/August 2000 | Contents

HEARST 101

San Francisco Fiasco is a Textbook Case

BY THOMAS C. LEONARD

How can a journalism school beef up its study of values? This may be the year we need Hearst Studies.nnnnn
The new textbook is The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, by David Nasaw (cjr, May/June). This is a story of the conceptual breakthrough that created modern media enterprises. Nasaw is the first biographer to see clearly how Hearst reached beyond print to the new media of his times. The Chief gives us something more to think on than the legends of the bully-swell of a war in Cuba and the cankered old man in the film Citizen Kane. Hearst stirred news and entertainment into the multimedia soup.

His Hearst Corporation has been providing fresh case studies for almost a year now since announcing it would sell the Chief's flagship, the San Francisco Examiner, in order to acquire the larger, more successful Chronicle. The move would end a Joint Operating Agreement that had kept the Examiner alive. The assumption was that after a fig-leaf effort to find a buyer to satisfy the letter of the antitrust laws, the Examiner would go away and then the company would make a lot of money, some of which would go to improving the Chronicle by the addition of the Examiner staff.

It didn't happen that way. Under Justice Department pressure, Hearst offered to subsidize an Examiner buyer, and a deal was made with the Fang family, politically active publishers of community papers. One of the unsuccessful bidders, Clint Reilly, filed suit to block the sale on antitrust grounds. That case went to trial, which turns out to be a rich source for the Hearst ethics class . . . and a headache for the corporation.

It seems that Examiner publisher Timothy White had conversations with Mayor Willie Brown in which a tradeoff of Brown support for Hearst's takeover for a more positive editorial policy toward the mayor was discussed. Did Hearst swap the editorial independence of the Examiner in order to get the mayor's help in extracting itself from a JOA and gaining the larger paper? Hearst president and c.e.o. Frank A. Bennack told a federal court that the firm's twelve newspapers held to the core values of "Journalism 101." But both Bennack and George B. Irish, president of Hearst Newspapers, testified that they were unsure what their California publisher was up to. These New York executives had missed signs of trouble sent to them in e-mails and witnessed by company lawyers. The Examiner has used both its front and editorial page to defend its reputation. There are already enough URLs with documents on this matter to keep an ethics class busy most of the semester, including a recent allegation that Hearst corporate executives had ordered an Examiner story about the Chronicle killed.

Hearst executives are testing a classic question in public relations classes: Is it better to keep your mouth shut while you investigate or to face reporters' questions head on? The company has appointed a former federal judge to see if influence was traded in San Francisco. Key Hearst executives have taken the stand, but shunned the press. Hearst Corporate Communications says it has provided sixty contacts with the press during the trial. None of these have been press conferences. For two weeks the Hearst team in San Francisco appeared in television news reports mostly as suits leaving a building who refused all comment.

This is not the way others are defending their reputations. Ted Fang, buyer of the Examiner, answered all questions put to him after he testified (a grilling that began with the revelation that he had shaded the truth about a Berkeley degree in Ethnic Studies). Reilly, the wealthy San Franciscan who is suing to stop the Chronicle-Examiner deal, followed Fang to the microphones. Reilly's talkative attorneys have dominated the news cycle and his Web site (saveournews.com) has been the best single source of information on the case.

Jane Kay, a veteran environmental reporter at the Examiner, corrected me when I suggested that clinical depression might be found in the newsroom. "We're beyond that," she said. "We are like the abused children in daycare." Stephanie Salter wrote a column about this for the Chronicle-Examiner Sunday paper. "Living in fear and uncertainty is a fiesta compared to having your newspapers' guts pulled out and displayed in federal court," she said. Debra J. Saunders said in her Chronicle column that she and her colleagues felt "a kick in the stomach." "We found out we're garbage" is what Examiner columnist Rob Morse told his readers after spending three days in the courtroom.

With Hearst business enterprise and editorial dysfunction so much in the news, it is hard to appreciate how much of the story is being missed. Even at ground zero in the Bay Area, the stunning ethnic change for San Francisco journalism has gotten little attention. A Hearst Studies course can be built around two headlines:

YELLOW JOURNALISM WINS A SIGNAL VICTORY IN FIGHT TO KEEP THE CHINESE OUT OF THE UNITED STATES
San Francisco Examiner, March 13, 1902

SOLD! FANG FAMILY TO ACQUIRE EXAMINER
San Francisco Examiner, March 17, 2000

The Fangs wIll get the Hearst paper's archives as part of the deal. Ted Fang cited this in court as a valuable asset that he had his eye on. If he goes through those archives, he will find a news organization that was once tone deaf to the new Californians from Asia.

"Velly suspicious . . . velly wily . . . velly much dope," was the way the old Hearst reporters and headline writers would refer to Chinatown. "The exclusion of Chinese immigration, now and forever, is the unalterable demand of the Pacific Slope States," the Examiner thundered in 1892. "The Chinaman is always a foreigner," said the paper early in the 1900s. Like many metropolitan papers in the West a century ago, the Chronicle was equally confident that Chinese families were not really part of the American public -- this during a period without any threat to national security from China and at a time when the Chinese population of the city never rose above 10 percent. San Francisco's editorial writers exploded against the Chinese in years when fewer than 2,500 Chinese had moved into their town.

Today, both papers understand what life would be like without the enterprise of a particular Chinese family. Absent the Fangs, the Chronicle owners and Hearst would be trapped in what they claim is a damaging JOA. They would be fighting the Justice Department over antitrust issues. Bad as their problems are today, they would be worse without the enterprise that came from Chinatown. Like governments in the old South (and many universities across the country) these papers have been renewed by people they once could not recognize as fellow citizens.

In the April 3 edition of Editor & Publisher, Ted Fang spoke with cautious praise of the Chief: "Hearst had a lot of good newspaper instincts. But I would not go so far as to say I admire him." Fang told me that his family stands for "inclusion" and that he feels part of "an American story dripping with irony." The subtleties of the "post-ethnic" are being discovered in many academic fields; this is a sign of them in the newspaper game.

In San Francisco, it is too early to tell whether ethnic bile has been purged or amnesia has set in. But a sick feeling about journalistic values has spread. Publisher Fang set his jaw and spoke with emphasis at the press conference following his testimony: "The Hearst Corporation is going to have to live with the things that have come out in this case."

Thomas C. Leonard is associate dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. He is writing a book on bad character in the media.