Circling the wagons

It took two columnists and three editors Sunday, along with a lengthy lead editorial Monday, to try to defend and rationalize the Erie Times-News’s wacky decision to send a reporter and a photog to Mexico recently to profile, in a ponderous series, the status of the Steris Co., formerly Erie Sterilizer. To much local knashing of teeth, Steris closed down its Erie plant last year and moved to Monterrey, laying off some 450 local workers in the process.
The Times-News ran lengthy articles three days in a row recently by its junketing duo on the Steris/Mexico “concept,” starting on Page One, then jumping to full-page layouts inside, all festooned with copious space-devouring color photos.

The paper’s scripted rhetoric Sunday was in response to an angry outpouring of criticism from many of those and their families who have suffered untold anguish over the past year, and still suffering, as a result of the dislocation caused them by Steris’ relocation to sunny MAYheeko.

The Times-News’s circle-the-wagons reaction to the public outcry was cohesively orchestrated in Sunday’s paper by three of its editors, Kevin Cuneo, public editor, so-called; Pat Howard, managing editor and Doug Oathout, assignment editor who apparently conceptualized the series, presumably with the concurrence of these two and other editors at the newspaper.

They made a concerted after-the fact effort Sunday and Monday to justify their decisions to commit the two-man team to Mexico from a staff that is already overcommitted and can’t cover its circulation area adequately, then devote hundreds of column inches to their coverage over a three-day period, squeezing out more important local news stories.

In his Sunday column bearing the headline “Erie must learn lessons from Steris,” Cuneo, writing as the “public editor” (in an earlier edition, his headline read “Erie needs to learn lessons from Steris,” prompting one to wonder why it was changed), quoted his colleague, Oathout as saying: “This is a story of vital importance, and we wanted to examine the reasons why this company decided to leave Erie.”

Well, if the Times-News didn’t know why Steris left Erie for Mexico, just about everyone else did. The outpouring of criticism graphically demonstrated that the newspaper’s readers are smarter than its editors. It is Cuneo and his colleagues who need to learn lessons from Steris, not the community.

The Times-News didn’t need to send two staffers on a paid vacation to the sunny south for a week, then regurgitate the globalist conventional wisdom, clichés and jingoism inherent in the disastrous national policy handed down by Bush One and Clinton One in the 1990s known as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Without NAFTA, Steris and its 450 jobs would still be in Erie, and doubtless hundreds more. I say this as one who never belonged to a trade union, and never will.

What’s so surprising is that the Times-News editors were so surprised by the outraged reaction their misconceived series engendered. Had they been more perspicacious, they would not only have anticipated it, but would have crafted and articulated their arguments in its favor in advance and preempted the vociferous outcry, rather than lamely reacting to it after the fact.

Pat Howard, the paper’s managing editor and regular Sunday columnist who suffers from a latent messianic simplex, lapsed into pop psychology in his column Sunday. He attributed the public outrage not to his newspaper’s endemic myopia, but to the “stress of uncertain times.”

Typically, Howard twisted the facts by writing that “A surprising number (of protestors) objected to the coverage without reading it,” implying that they had no right to object if they hadn’t read the offending articles.

What Howard neglected to say is the reason they didn’t read the coverage is because they were so turned off and enraged by the glaring headlines and photography. As Cuneo wrote in his Sunday column: “The headlines – no, the very concept of the series – made them so angry, they couldn’t even bring themselves to read the stories.” Very different from the way Howard spun it. Give Cuneo credit for telling it like it is.

I want to stress here that newspapers, editors and reporters should never back away from a legitimate, hard-hitting and revealing story simply because it happens to offend readers or social mores. As professionals, we aren’t engaged in a popularity contest. There’s an inverse dynamic at work. The more popular we are, the less likely it is we’re doing our job.

But we need to make wiser choices than the Times-News did in this instance. Though we'd like to have it, we don’t need the public’s love. But we do need its trust and respect.