By design or neglect, all this filler and flotsam crowds out a remarkable amount of real news, especially world and national events and news analysis. What's left over is an assortment of stories dominated by the staple of every tired newspaper -- "official" event-based news taken from police reports, government hearings, meetings, studies, legislative action, and news conferences, as well as lots of feel-good features. While some of this "paper of record" reporting is essential, the Oklahoman rarely balances it with the more inconvenient, incisive journalism one finds at papers where creative editors and reporters captivate their readers.

But then again, this is not just any normal newspaper. Reporters learn quickly that things are done differently here, like when the Oklahoman ignored reports by The Washington Post and The New York Times in June 1986 that Sen. William Armstrong, R-Colorado, and Sen. David Boren, D-Oklahoma, had sponsored "a one-of-a-kind, multimillion-dollar" tax break that would benefit only eight wealthy investors -- one of whom was publisher Ed Gaylord.

But that's not to suggest Gaylord is shy of publicity. A sampling of headlines since 1984:

oklahoma christian dedicates gaylord center; gaylord stock a hit in first week trading; gaylord building on state's future; opryland extravaganza to honor gaylord; state fair honors gaylord; olympic committee to honor gaylord; college forum area to be named for thelma gaylord; oklahomans hold lively tribute for edward l. gaylord; gaylord named top horseman. (Oops, that's his son.)

Reporters cringe when they have to attach their bylines to F.O.D.s ("front office deals") -- comically inflated stories involving Gaylord's business, religious, or social interests. Reporters must also fill those cheesy special supplements on, say, the health care or petroleum industries, with what former Oklahoman business reporter Stacy Martin calls "fawning, nauseous" puff pieces.

With news judgment like this, many journalists weren't surprised that when faced with the greatest reporting challenge of its life -- the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City's federal building -- the paper seemed to operate without a clear strategy. While the entire staff worked heroic hours, earning the paper a national award for deadline reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, its quantity-over-quality approach and predictable story angles failed to impress the Pulitzer judges. (The paper has won the award once, for editorial cartooning, in 1939.)

"The greenness of their reporters and lack of initiative showed through," says Mike Carrier, who worked for Gaylord's now-defunct Oklahoma City Times. "I know it was deeply hurtful that they didn't win the Pulitzer. Maybe their reputation cost them the biggest prize of their lifetime."

In an earlier day the Oklahoman's reputation actually might have helped.

Edward King Gaylord, son of a farmer and patriarch of the family whose multibillion-dollar empire now includes radio, cable, TV stations, and Nashville's Opryland Hotel, was regarded as a fine journalist during the seventy-one years he ran the paper until his death in 1974 at the age of 101. Once Gaylord printed an "extra" about the sensational murder of a Fort Sill soldier, despite the efforts of a chamber of commerce president to suppress the story. Although a strident opponent of unions, welfare, and socialists, Gaylord vowed that his newspaper would never become "offensively" partisan. "We shall strive," he wrote in a 1916 editorial, "to be a people's paper in the best sense of the term."

After E. K. Gaylord's death these lofty words were trashed, as control of the paper and its parent, the Oklahoma Publishing Company (OPUBCO), fell to his son, Edward Lewis Gaylord, then fifty-five, who turned the Oklahoman into a partisan bully. His paper's front-page editorials eviscerating political enemies and its prudish scolding tone became an embarrassment to many Oklahomans.

Paraphrasing Mencken, a local journalist once said, "Gaylord is the classic Puritan. He's haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

"Gaylord wants to destroy the Democratic party in Oklahoma," wrote Frosty Troy, editor of the alternative biweekly Oklahoma Observer. "He deplores all political philosophies except his own and is determined to bend the state to his will."

A businessman-before-journalist, Ed Gaylord was so resentful of his domineering father's stranglehold on power at the paper that on the day after E.K.'s death he fired his father's secretary of over fifty years. In 1997 readers of Oklahoma City's alternative weekly, the Gazette, voted Gaylord second place as "Best Local Villain." Bomber Tim McVeigh won first.

A former student at Harvard Business School and a Forbes billionaire since 1982, Gaylord has built his fortune on everything from Colorado land to California thoroughbreds, cable's The Nashville Network, and the Oklahoma City Redhawks minor league baseball team. Now seventy-nine and feisty as ever, Gaylord has given millions to hospitals, universities, and charities over the years, and has provided the paper with state-of-the-art printing facilities. But he's legendary for squeezing profits. Over the years dozens of his reporters have been classified as part-time, thirty-nine-hour-a-week workers, to avoid paying them benefits.

But that's pocket change compared with the Oklahoman's ad revenue. Although its weekday circulation of about 205,000 ranks it fifty-fourth nationally -- and despite an unremarkable percentage of homes (41.8 percent) it reaches in its own hometown -- the monopoly operation has more expensive ad rates than all but a few of the country's 100 largest papers. Using the standard accepted throughout the advertising industry -- cost per thousands of circulation, or CPM -- a full-page, one-time, black-and-white ad costs about $78 per thousand in The New York Times, $80 in The Dallas Morning News, $72 in the rival Tulsa World, and a budget-busting $145 in the Oklahoman. (Figures are based on circulation and inch-rates listed in the 1998 Editor & Publisher Yearbook.) Consequently, the Oklahoman makes profits that far exceed the 20 percent industry average, says the paper's general manager, Edmund Martin.

Those profits are evident in the gleaming, twelve-story, black tower that houses the Oklahoman several miles north of downtown, which it abandoned physically in 1991, and spiritually decades ago. The elegant glass and granite structure houses an auditorium and fitness center, and stands tall over the stark Oklahoma prairie, whose small towns like Guthrie, Perry, and Seminole have sent some of their brightest to the Oklahoman. "I'd say more than 90 percent of the staff was born here, schooled here, or spent most of their lives here," says Ed Kelley, a Perry native who was promoted to managing editor in 1990. "I like to think of Oklahoma as one giant small town."

part 1: The Worst Newspaper in America
part 2: By design or neglect
part 3: But Oklahoma City isn't
part 4: Democrats claim
part 5: ...sucking intelligence from its readers

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