Censorship is alive and well at the Pee Dee.
 

Thank you, Susan Goldberg, for continuing the fine tradition that warns all readers that its Cleveland paper doesn’t carry all the news that fits but all the news the paper sees as fit for viewing.
 

That’s the meaning of the quick demise of blogger Jeff Coryell – hired to blog, apparently to show the morning newspaper is innovative and exciting. He was one of four bloggers chosen to write for Wide Open on the PD site Cleveland.com.
 

Well, Wide Open became Selectively Closed rather quickly, after some six weeks.
 

What’s important about Coryell’s dismissal is that it reveals that Goldberg carries on a tradition of censorship well fashioned at the Pee Dee.  The story goes that Coryell to continue blogging for the paper’s website was asked not to write about Rep. Steve LaTourette.  The issue was that Coryell had supported and contributed financially to LaTourette’s opponent in the last election.  LaTourette apparently discussed this fact with Pee Dee editorial uber-boss Brent Larkin.  The hammer then fell.
 

The Pee Dee did not want Coryell, paid by the Pee Dee, to write about LaTourette on Wide Open or elsewhere.  Surely, the Pee Dee had recognized at his hiring that here was a partisan writer.  It seems odd that the paper would be so sensitive, particularly when this online writing likely had very limited exposure.

So, the not quite with it and not quite as adventurous as it wishes to be viewed Pee Dee, played its usual clumsy self.

However, this mind-set is nothing new.  Nor limited to the Pee Dee.

Any reporter who has not experienced censorship simply hasn’t been truthfully reporting.

I remember Homer Bigart, a famed New York Times war correspondent, who said he never read his pieces in the Times anymore as they appeared.  The editorial process had removed the vital ‘truth’ of his reporting.

Sander Vanocur, a Vietnam-era NBC-TV reporter, noted the difficulty of reporters informing the public...

“If you push too hard too often, you will find yourself odd man out.” Of Vietnam reporting, Vanocur said that he wished “…now that I had been as outspoken on the air as I was in private with friends.”

Wonder how many Iraq war reporters will or have thought similarly and how much we, the public, have been deprived of knowing?

Vanocur’s explanation reflects perfectly how reporters usually act...

“I practiced tactical dissent, saying just enough in those early days to register my disagreement with U. S. policy but never enough to force NBC to a position where the network would have to say, ‘Tone down your views or get out.’ That, at least, would have been an issue worth fighting about.”

James Aronson, once a Times writer, put the censorship issue this way...

“A censorship so subtle that it invisibly affected everyone on the staff. The ‘approach’ – it was never called a vulgar ‘line’ – was made clear in casual conversation, in the editing of copy for ‘clarity,’ and the deletion of any forthright interpretation as ‘emotionalism.’ Work became a conflict with conscience, although there was never an open challenge to conscience.”

Vanocur simplified it:  “I do not recall many incidents of rape, but seduction is rampant in the television industry.”

So much for freedom of the press.

One does have to remember too that Seymour Hersh had to go to a small news syndicate called Dispatch News Service to get the My Lai Massacre story into publication.  Even then, 14 of 50 major newspapers given the story by the news service didn’t use it.

The Pee Dee, as I have known it, has been clumsier than most.  It has censored reporters when it wants to impart a lesson.  The lesson is quite clear – there are certain people, institutions and issues best left alone.

Therefore, don’t expect too much freedom of the press from a newspaper.  It wouldn’t be healthy, as Coryell now knows if he didn’t already know.

You have to understand that with information you are dealing with power.  Truth is a powerful commodity. It must be rationed, controlled and directed.  That’s what editors as Ms. Goldberg and Larkin are hired to do.

The Pee Dee’s discrimination isn’t simply against bloggers.  It has censored even Pulitzer Prize winners.  The paper has always been able to attract good and sometimes great reporters.  Then spoil them and/or their work.

Back in the 1960s, the paper rejected one of a series of articles about a local foundation and its conflicting directorships.  Dan Barlett – who has won two Pulitzers and five George Polk awards – and Terry Sheridan wrote the piece censored at the Pee Dee.  Later it appeared in Point of View, a newsletter I wrote and published for years.  The article stepped on too many toes cherished of then Pee Dee Publisher Tom Vail.  “What’s wrong with this?” Vail wrote in a memo about the eight or nine interlocking and conflicted directors.

Barlett – now with Vanity Fair with investigative partner James Steele – got shafted by Vail on another series, a brilliant investigation of the state’s Lima State Hospital’s treatment of mental patients.  Barlett took a job as an attendant and revealed the institution’s criminality, only to have himself relieved of further investigation when Vail made a deal with then Gov. James Rhodes to end the paper’s pursuit of the wrong-doing.

The Pee Dee has made a habit of disgracing itself with future two-time Pulitzer Prize winners.  It did similarly with Walt Bogdanich who won a Pulitzer (and four Polks) with both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, where he is now an editor.

In 1981, Bogdanich broke a big story for the Pee Dee that Teamster boss Jackie Presser had been an FBI informer.  Later the Pee Dee, under pressure from its owners, the Newhouse family, and organized crime figures, reneged on its expose with a story that was a retraction and apology.  Presser was no longer a snitch.  Pee Dee reporters picketed the paper.  One sign read: “When the news breaks, we apologize.”  Bogdanich, of course was “outraged.”  Such events don’t happen any more.

James Naughton was the Pee Dee political writer in the 1960s.  He was covering the Nixon White House during Watergate for the New York Times, later became the deputy managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer when it was on a Pulitzer roll and ended his career as president of the Poynter Institute... a most distinguished career.

His success, however, came after being treated shabbily at the Pee Dee.  After the Glenville shootout in 1968, Naughton led an investigation of the tragedy.  The investigation failed to prove that the riots were simply the product of black nationalists but raised questions the Pee Dee did not favor.  The Pee Dee refused to publish the results.  The decision-makers ruled that the newspaper’s own assigned reporters were not competent enough to reach such conclusions as they had.  Shortly thereafter, in essence the same conclusions were reached in a long New York Times article about Cleveland’s riot.  The Pee Dee ran a version of the Times report, appropriately censored, of course.

When Tom Andrzejewski chided Dick Jacobs about too grand and costly a grand opening of the government-subsidized Galleria, his column was killed and Andrzejewski chastised.  That column also appeared in Point of View.  Andrzejewski was previously chastised for writing too favorably about a man who lost two legs in a railroad accident.  Railroad officials complained.  The pain of executives being written about too harshly in the newspaper apparently trumped the loss of two legs for editors.

Long-time Pee Dee watchers will remember Bob Holden.  He was assigned to do a piece on the fight between Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. and the city’s electric system during the Dennis Kucinich days.  After starting the assignment, he was pulled from the story.  CEI officials had complained.  His crime?  That he would be unfair.  Not that he had been unfair in the past, not that he was presently unfair.  However, the future of his possible unfairness was being averted, not too unlike Coryell’s fate.

On the other hand, the Pee Dee has shown incredible tolerance toward its reporters.  During the 1974 strike, the city editor (Dave Hopcraft) and the Pee Dee I-Team investigator went to work for Ohio Bell Telephone as did the business editor who also worked for White Motor, a company the newspaper covered.

George Steinbrenner, then a Cleveland mogul, hired 10 striking reporters (six from the Pee Dee) at $1,000 each to lecture Cleveland schoolchildren about journalism.  Those so employed all had connections with some aspect of Steinbrenner’s businesses.  Pay for future favors apparently.

It was a season of conflict of interests for reporters.  Utility reporters went to work for utility companies; TV/radio critics for television or radio stations; county reporters for county jobs; others to the sheriff’s office or the sewer district.  And on and on.

What didn’t happen when they all returned to their jobs was any sort of punishment or even admonishment for this shabby, unethical behavior.

Therefore, you know the score.  Expect pain if you are aggressive with the wrong people or institutions and pleasure if you cooperate with the same agents.

Bloggers do not feel troubled.  You are not being singled out.  It is business as usual.
 

A Strong Insurgency Provided Stokes a Lift