Miles was named editor and publisher of the Detroit News in 2019. Previously, he served as managing editor for five years and in various other editing roles at the News since 2000.
In September 1972, President Richard Nixon huddled with aides to discuss ways to keep the Watergate break-in from being linked to the White House. News coverage from the Washington Post came up.
“The Post … it’s going to have its problems,” Nixon said of the newspaper most aggressively following the bugging of Democratic headquarters. “The Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station.”
His point wasn’t lost on his audience. He could transfer the Post’s lucrative federal broadcast license.
Almost a half-century later, publications across the country this spring filed applications to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program, a $659 billion federal economic stimulus to help small businesses stricken by the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s impossible to blame them. Here was a federal program on which their very survival might depend. Extending that kind of aid permanently, however, would be akin to the wolf taking the shepherd out for dinner.
When a publication is dependent on the government for its survival, it cannot help but be susceptible to its influence. Even if none was exerted, the very perception would erode credibility.
As Nixon proved, politicians can’t be trusted to suppress their darker instincts. “The game has to be played awfully rough,” he told his aides that day.
If there’s any doubt, recall that President Donald Trump, unhappy over coverage in 2017, threatened action against NBC’s license (a misnomer of sorts, since local stations are licensed).
It was an eventual president, Thomas Jefferson, who insisted that the U.S. Constitution immortalize press freedoms in what became the Bill of Rights.
“The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in his opinion on the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”
One can only imagine the self-restraint that might be exercised if a news outlet depended on the government to meet its payroll.
The perils facing the news business are real, as are those facing the nation (growing indebtedness among them). Ultimately, newspapers must stand because readers choose to support independent coverage of the facts. If readers choose not to, they will fall.
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