CITY HALL FIGHTS BACK

By: Mark Fitzgerald Mayors, Editors Clash Over Freedom Of Information


In some of America's biggest cities, the mayor and the local paper just can't
stand each other.

Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White complains that The Plain Dealer
"willfully and premeditatively trashes every journalistic ethic on an ongoing
and continuous basis." Shrugging off the criticism, Plain Dealer Editor
Douglas C. Clifton says White "has the strangest operating style that I've ever
seen."

Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell rarely misses an opportunity to say how much he
"distrusts" the Journal-Constitution. Editor Ron Martin counters that
rather than respond to reporters' questions with straight answers, Campbell's
administration "has dragged its feet very deliberately pretty much on an ongoing
basis."

Philadelphia Mayor John Street is so disdainful of the local news media, he
has never bothered to name a communications director. Street holds so many
closed-door "briefing" sessions with the City Council that Philadelphia Daily
News Editor Zack Stalberg created a feature intended, he
says, to "shame" the mayor into obeying Pennsylvania's open-meetings law.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration - irritated by continuing
Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times exposes of City Hall
cronyism and sweetheart deals, and by a Tribune columnist who refers to
Daley as "Little Big Mayor" - is apparently deliberately slowing the time
it takes to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests it gets from
newspapers. The Tribune is firing back with a lawsuit accusing the city
of "persistently and systematically violat[ing] both the spirit and letter of
FOIA."

Miami Mayor Joe Carollo probably did not really order his former city manager,
as the man claimed last year, to follow people on an "enemies list" that
included The Miami Herald's publisher and City Hall reporter. But the
mayor has a history of lashing out at staff members from the Herald and
its sister paper, El Nuevo Herald. A favorite tactic is calling a
reporter a Cuban "spy" or "propagandist."

Of course, fights between mayors and newspapers are nothing new. Consider
Richard J. Daley, father of the present Chicago mayor. Newspapers pinned one
scandal after another on his legendary political machine, and as Adam Cohen and
Elizabeth Taylor recall in their recent biography "American Pharaoh," the Boss
gave as good as he got. "There are even crooked reporters," Daley pere said at
one press conference in 1960, "and I can spit on some of them right here!"

But this latest round of confrontations between mayors and newspapers has a
fundamentally different feel to it. It's not so much anymore about a newspaper
taking shots at the mayor and getting flak in return. What's happening now,
newspapers say, is that these big-city mayors are centralizing public
information in their offices, hoarding it, and hiding it from the press and, of
course, the public. In some cases, the mayors are even hiding themselves as they
freeze out the paper in favor of a more friendly electronic news outlet - or
simply avoiding the news media completely.

"Sure, this stuff has always gone on, but it's getting so bad that [journalists]
are not able to get the job done," says Charles Davis, executive director of the
Freedom of Information Center at the University of Missouri in Columbia. "I
think what we're seeing from mayors and other public officials is a combination
of apathy and ill will. ... Many of them are ignorant of the role of the press
in a democracy - that's the bigger problem."

Ben Burns butted heads with a recalcitrant mayor when he was executive editor of
The Detroit News during Coleman Young's long and turbulent. But Burns,
now chairman of the journalism department at Wayne State University in Detroit,
says mayors now increasingly don't care what newspapers think of them: "I think
it's a trend around the country. Officials are very casual about [the FOIA], for
example. They redact everything they feel like redacting and give only what they
want to give. I think they feel the public is on their side on this - and
it seems to me they may be right. I don't know how you stop it."

The mayors involved in these troubled relationships have their own grievances.
Each complains that the local daily, often the only one in town, takes a
consistently negative approach to municipal coverage, never credits the mayor
for successes - and, most infuriatingly, includes inappropriate personal
information in its coverage.

Mistakes by the lake

Hammertoes. It was The Plain Dealer's reporting on hammertoes, a foot
ailment typically suffered by women after years of wearing high heels, that was
the last straw for Brian Rothenberg, press secretary to Cleveland Mayor Michael
White.

Around last Christmas, the mayor, a Democrat, was scheduling an operation to
correct his hammertoes. Plain Dealer investigative reporter Christopher
Quinn, complaining that the press secretary was treating the hammertoes surgery
as if it were a "state secret," faxed Rothenberg a letter asking whether the
mayor, who stands about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, "used lifts under his heels, thus
crushing his toes into the front of his shoes?"

Even though Quinn's story on Jan. 2 did not speculate about lifts, Rothenberg
believes that this was "when most people kind of noticed that the PD's
coverage was unbalanced ... that it had gone way over the top."

In City Hall offices overlooking Lake Erie and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
and Museum, The Plain Dealer was anathema long before the hammertoes
story. The mayor goes out of his way to stiff the newspaper. He does not notify
The Plain Dealer of his rare press conferences. He has made announcements
on such major events as expansion of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport
without inviting the paper. He has never sat for a one-on-one interview with
The Plain Dealer's City Hall reporter.

"Why would I talk to a media outlet that purposely distorts the truth?" White
asks. (White agreed to take written questions from E&P, but responded
with the same answers he provided to the alternative newspaper Cleveland
Scene for an article this year.) "The decision to phase out the PD
was made after years of attempting to obtain fairness and balance in the
coverage of this administration. Clearly we were unsuccessful."

If White didn't like The Plain Dealer years ago, his antipathy only
deepened when Doug Clifton arrived from The Miami Herald in 1999. In
Miami, the last two mayors Clifton had to deal with were nicknamed "Crazy Joe"
and "Mayor Loco." But he says White's behavior in trying to punish The Plain
Dealer is the oddest he's ever seen from an elected official.

"It's just an ever-changing strategy on how to stick it to The Plain
Dealer," says Clifton. White's strategy of trying to exclude the newspaper,
Clifton says, just makes the mayor look silly and hurts the image of the city.
"But it shows you the height of stupidity here and the depth of the relationship
that the guy will literally bite his nose off to spite his face. ... He's not
particularly astute," Clifton says.

Longtime Cleveland media critic and investigative reporter Roldo Bartimole,
however, says White is astute enough to use The Plain Dealer's monopoly
news position against it: "Radio in Cleveland has disappeared as a news media,
and TV has just about written off government news, so the mayor has an
opportunity to isolate the PD. If they [at City Hall] don't comment on a
story - and there's nobody else to pick it up - there's no real
opportunity for the PD to keep the story going. And so the story dies."

In some ways, the White/Plain Dealer relationship is like a bad divorce.
Once upon a time, the Advance Publications newspaper doted on the black mayor
and his pro-business agenda. "For years,
reporters would complain they couldn't get anything into the paper if it was
critical of White," Bartimole says. "When Clifton came, then they could get into
the paper."

The editor and the mayor butted heads almost immediately. "When I came here,
public records were severely restricted, and I was determined that that would
change," Clifton says. Though the city's response is better, he adds, it will
still do things such as black out the rest of the page in a public document if
it doesn't relate specifically to the newspaper's request. "You almost think
they're playing games, but at times you just think that they're so anal-
retentive, that's just the way they do it," he says.

The mayor says he responds quickly to every Plain Dealer request -
though "readers should ask why other public officials have not been asked to
submit all their e-mail, phone logs, weekly reports, and every letter they
wrote." White is still irritated about a 1999 Plain Dealer story,
accompanied by an aerial photo, reporting his purchase of a second home far from
Cleveland. "Why aren't they flying over the homes of any other elected official
in Ohio?" asks press secretary Rothenberg.

Covering Campbell like the dew

"Those jerks!" Glenda Blum Minkin, director of communications for Atlanta Mayor
Bill Campbell, is talking about the Journal-Constitution. The previous
Friday, she had predicted their Sunday paper would make a big deal about a
vendor who had a Y2K contract - and, sure enough, it did.

"Nobody here knows the guy," Minkin said before the story ran. "He was a sole
source [contractor] on Y2K work. He was paid a lot - $10 million - but
it was totally legal and aboveboard. Yet somehow they've got to question the
process because every black mayor has cronyism and corruption stamped on their
back. He gave the mayor a campaign contribution: $1,000 at the end of '99. But
nobody knows him around here!"

The story, by Richard Whitt and Julie B. Hairston, was just the latest in a
series of investigative stories documenting the many problems in Campbell's
administration. Other Journal-Constitution stories hit the mayor
directly. The papers have chronicled Campbell's fondness for casino gambling,
his free trips to resorts, and his use of city staff to schedule and write
speeches to private groups that earned him in excess of $150,000 from 1994 to
1999. And, for months, they have detailed the progress of a reported FBI
investigation into corruption in the city.

It's not what they're reporting but how that rankles Campbell's spokeswoman:
"The most frustrating thing for us if they don't like him, which they are
absolutely entitled to do - they didn't endorse him in either campaign
- then they should make that part of the editorial page. Don't make it part
of the news pages. There's example after example - I could give you a
thousand - in which the bias comes out with facts omitted or the way the
headlines are written."

And it's what doesn't get in the paper that rankles, too, Minkin says: "Murder
has dropped to the lowest total in 34 years. In any other city, that would be a
front-page story. Not here. Look, we're not asking for boosterism - just
balance."

If the mayor's viewpoint isn't reflected in some stories, that's not only the
mayor's fault - it's his intention, says Journal- Constitution
Editor Ron Martin. "His pattern is just continually to not be available -
and then come back later after the story has appeared and complain about it,"
Martin says.

Campbell, a Democrat, makes not only himself scarce, Martin adds, but his City
Hall has adopted something of a siege mentality about public-records requests
from the newspapers. "We have great difficulty in getting the details we need," he says.

Campbell spokeswoman Minkin says it's the Journal-Constitution offices
that are impenetrable. "I've come to the conclusion that headlines are written
by leprechauns, because when you ask who wrote a headline, they are never
anybody's responsibility," she says. "Talk about a pass-the-buck industry, they
take the cake. And bureaucracy - my God, they make us look like we have
none!"

Some observers agree that the Journal-Constitution should occasionally be
flagged for piling on Campbell. In an issue of the Atlanta Business
Chronicle, Crier Newspapers Publisher Dick Williams complained of an
editorial that was "strident and personal ... [and] blamed Campbell for every
social ill except the Irish potato famine." But he added the paper's tone has
since become more "reasonable."

Minkin says she once attempted to broker a truce between City Hall and the
papers by asking a well-known business figure to arrange a meeting between
Campbell and Martin. "He came back and said
Martin told him, 'You tell Bill Campbell he knows where my office is. I'll
provide coffee, and Bill Campbell can bring his own doughnuts,'" Minkin says.

But Martin replies, "I don't think that story is accurate. We are always
available and interested in talking with the mayor at any time - but I
don't want a conversation with a public official to take the place of a reporter
being able to get answers to his or her questions. And we're not going to let
public officials tell us who they want covering them and who they don't."

Martin is far more irritated by the Campbell administration's repeated
suggestions that racial bias accounts for the tone of the paper's coverage.
"He's not the first black mayor in Atlanta," he says. "We've had good days and
bad days with all the mayors. Mayor [Maynard] Jackson was twice mayor. He
understood the role of the mayor and the role of the newspaper. He was
responsive, and we had what I felt was a perfectly acceptable and proper
relationship. The same thing was true when Andy Young was mayor.

"But we've never seen an administration that has dragged its feet so
deliberately," Martin concludes.

Street closed ahead

If Mayor Campbell in Atlanta is touchy about the coverage he gets, Philadelphia
Mayor John Street gives every indication he doesn't much care what the
newspapers - or any other news organizations - say about him. He has
never filled the position of director of communications, and an acting
representative would speak to E&P only on background.

A good example of Street's diffidence emerged during the Republican Party's
national convention last summer. Getting the convention was a huge coup for the
city and the brand-new mayor, even if he is a Democrat. Yet, he froze out the
media at odd times, most famously when he took GOP officials on a trolley tour
of the city - and left reporters and photographers behind.

Still, Philadelphia Daily News Editor Zack Stalberg is hoping he can use
the power of the press to stop Street's habit of convening the City Council in
secret sessions. To the city's secretary of external affairs, George Burrell,
the sessions are simply "briefings" that minimize grandstanding by politicians
and don't violate Pennsylvania's open-meetings law. To almost everyone else
outside city government, these sessions - which get virtually perfect
attendance from council members - are illegal closed meetings.

"The [Philadelphia] Inquirer and I went down to City Hall more than a
year ago to try to resolve this cordially," Stalberg recalls. "We met the mayor
and City Council president, and they promised to improve the situation in some
fashion - and they never did. They continued doing what they were doing. We
reported on it, and it didn't seem to change the situation a great deal."

Then Stalberg hit upon "Behind Closed Doors," a feature with its own logo that
runs whenever Street convenes the meetings. "We're attempting to shame them into
different behavior," Stalberg says.

After such voluble Philadelphia mayors as Ed Rendell and Frank Rizzo, Street's
style is a bit of a shock. "It's the first time we've had a problem like this in
my memory - which, unfortunately, goes way back," Stalberg says. "At least
previous mayors would bother to adhere to the law. There's no administration
that has been as open as we'd like them to be - that's asking too much
- but basically this has been the toughest administration. They really
don't care much about getting any kind of story out."

Nothing Burrell says indicates the Street administration is linking this no-
media policy specifically to coverage in the Daily News or
Inquirer. "I think in general everyone [in the Street administration]
would agree that though the papers have acknowledged the success the mayor has
enjoyed in his first year in office, the tenor and the tone of many of the
articles written about him continue to have a reserved tone," Burrell says. "You
know, 'He's done these good things, but ... .' If he's doing good things, report
the good things."

If Street doesn't change his closed-door policy, the Daily News may yet
sue him.

But Stalberg says that would bring its own problems: "It's a macho thing for a
newspaper to do, but after that it doesn't accomplish much until you get an
outcome way down the road."

A Daley ration

Faced with a City Hall that was sitting on requests for public records,
sometimes for months at a time, the Chicago Tribune is doing the macho
thing. In December, it filed a lawsuit asking a state court to order Chicago to
comply with the time limits in Illinois' freedom-of-information laws.
"Information is the lifeblood of a newspaper," the suit says. "The city's
approach to FOIA is the equivalent of a tourniquet."

A big drawback of lawsuits is that participants stop talking. Dale Cohen, the
Tribune's operations editor and senior counsel, limited himself to a few
carefully chosen comments and would not let newsroom employees comment to
E&P about the situation. Phone calls to the mayor's press office and the
city's FOIA response office were not returned.

But the Tribune is not the only Chicago paper that believes the city's
FOIA policy is designed to frustrate newspapers. "We find the process
cumbersome, and we find that our requests get bogged down in bureaucracy that
sometimes, frankly, looks intentional," says Chicago Sun-Times Managing
Editor Joycelyn Winnecke.

Reporters say newspaper requests get flagged by the city FOIA office and sent to
the fifth-floor offices of Mayor Richard Daley. "It used to be all
decentralized, and you could sneak up on everybody by going, say, to Streets and
Sanitation," says Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown. "But when [the Daley
administration] came in, the first thing they did was shut everything down. Now
the City Council doesn't even get information."

Daley has "a kind of medieval notion of this obligation," says Michael Miner,
media critic for the alternative Chicago Reader. "Certainly, they feel
they're entitled to make you work for everything - and that half the time
they can wear you down."

Since the Tribune's lawsuit, the Daley administration has slowed its FOIA
response even further by becoming "very lawyerly," says Senior Counsel Cohen.
"It's very Clintonian: If we ask for 'all correspondence relating to a subject,'
they respond by saying they're not clear about what we mean by
'correspondence,'" he says.

The most frustrating thing, Cohen adds, is that the lawsuit isn't hitting Daley
where he lives: among voters and political players. "I'd like to think there was
a political price to pay, that the people would ask why the city is wasting
taxpayer dollars on litigation over what are clearly public records, but, thus
far at least, there hasn't been much of a political backlash," he says.

In its answer to the Tribune lawsuit, the city claims the newspaper makes
requests that are at once "vague" and voluminous. While the paper complains of
laggardly response times - one request submitted Feb. 10 of last year
allegedly did not get filled until late June - the city claims reporters
sometimes wait weeks before dropping by to look at records.

In one sense, Daley is not a big-city mayor who avoids the media. Almost every
working day, he has a formal or informal news conference. But as the Sun-
Times' Winnecke says, "There's the public schedule - and then there's
his schedule." More than once, the paper's gossip columnists have reported Daley
huddling with other public officials in a get-together the political reporters
knew nothing about.

Hence, the Sunshine State

That couldn't happen in Miami, says Mark Seibel, The Miami Herald's
managing editor for news. The reason is Florida's tough FOIA laws. It's also the
reason why Miami mayors, who often have tempestuous relations with the
Herald, never try to withhold records. "You just go down and pick
[records] up. It's never a problem," Seibel says.

The paper is enjoying a respite from its frequent war of nerves with public
officials. "Right now, I believe most mayors are talking to us," Seibel says.
"There are about 32 mayors in our area, but the [Miami] and [Miami-Dade County]
mayors seem to be basically accessible."

Even the most combative mayors may find reaching peace with newspapers is their
best bet. Bob Berg, the aggressive press secretary for former Detroit Mayor
Coleman Young, says fights with the press ultimately weaken a mayor's agenda.
"When you get into these ongoing controversies where there is a headline every
morning, it's very draining," Berg says. "You end up spending so much time on
that [press] stuff, you can't concentrate on the job you really have to do.
You're too busy fending off the Vandals and the Visigoths."



Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at large for E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.