'Sacramento Bee' Editorializes On Same Issue Six Weeks Straight

By: Joe Strupp If Editorial Pages Editor David Holwerk is against something, readers of The Sacramento Bee are going to know it. Take his paper's recent opposition to a planned expansion of the California state pension program, which will give earlier retirement benefits at a higher rate to some 3,000 additional state employees.

Claiming the benefit boost will cost the state more than $11 million per year at a time when fiscal problems are mounting, the Bee began editorializing against it on May 10. The paper that day offered a stinging rebuke that ran the same day as a lengthy story on the proposal, which is set to take effect July 1.

Every day since, the paper has offered up an editorial page rant against the pending increase, with plans to keep publishing such opposition comments until the measure takes effect or is repealed, whichever comes first. That would mean two straight months of daily editorials on a single issue.

"It says something that this is unusual," Holwerk, 57, told E&P. "If you look at newspaper advertising people, what do they say is the key? Frequency. One of the biggest tools we have to be effective is repetition. It works for ads, it works for advocacy."

The editorials have called the idea everything from a "rollover ... for the powerful public employee unions who bankroll [state lawmakers'] campaigns" to "a pension giveaway."

Holwerk said the issue seemed important because it comes at a time when California is in need of budget cutting and cost-saving alternatives. Right now, the pension program provides such "safety pension benefits" mostly for police and firefighters, who can retire at 50 years of age with 90% of their annual salary in many cases.

The expanded benefits would increase rates and lower retirement ages for thousands of other workers, including emergency dispatchers, motor vehicle driving examiners, and billboard inspectors.

"The state can't afford it and shouldn't pay it," an editorial on May 26 screamed. "Safety retirement should be reserved for police and firefighters, workers who daily risk their lives to protect public safety."

This is not the first time Holwerk has beat readers over the head with consecutive editorials on a single subject, day after day. In September 2001, shortly after he joined the Bee, Holwerk took on the issue of lowering bus fares for public school students riding public transit.

Focusing on a local family with three children who rode the bus daily to school, Holwerk ran their photo on the editorial page each day for a month and a half with a chart tallying how much it cost them to travel to school. Editorials accompanied the photo on nearly every day, Holwerk said, adding that the school bus fare was eventually lowered.

A similar approach occurred with a 1993 series of editorials in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader that Holwerk oversaw during his time as editorial page editor there. Those writings dealt with a pile of debris that had been left behind from a downtown building demolition that included asbestos.

After the mess remained uncleared for more than 10 days, Holwerk recalls, the paper wrote its first editorial against the toxic site, with consecutive editorials for the next 45 days.

"One day, with no notice, trucks showed up finally and hauled it away," Holwerk said. "That showed me that for some things, repetition is good, but not for all things."

Holwerk, who also lectures on editorials at the American Press Institute, says three requirements are needed for a paper to take such an ongoing stand on an issue: It has to be a problem with an obvious, doable solution; it has to be clear who can solve the problem; and it has to be in the public interest.

"When you get the right issue, you can get people to see it is important," said Holwerk.

But the editorial page editor's latest cause may not come out in his favor. With less than a week to go before the pension expansion takes effect, the state legislature seems reluctant to block the measure. An Assembly committee voted Wednesday against a proposed repeal of the plan.

"I don't know what else we will do, but we will certainly do it until July 1," he said. "We will have to see where it goes."