
          The Press as Company Store, Atlanta Style
          By Guthey, EricEric Guthey
          Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 8-10
          
          To
doubt the current charming presentations of Southern growth and
prosperity is to bring anathema on one's head. What! The South not
prosperous. Impossible, they cry, and the individual who questions is
an idiot.--Lewis Harvie Blair, The Prosperity of the
South Dependent on the Elevation of the Negro (1889)
          Although Harvie Blair, native Virginian and former Confederate
soldier, wrote his description of such defensive, pro-Southern
attitudes a hundred years ago, his words apply just as well to the
South today. The survival of this mixture of the New South creed,
corporate-expansive boosterism, and belligerent local patriotism is
not breaking news. But when Bill Kovach abruptly resigned as editor of
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in November, the
papers' corporate managers who accepted his resignation and the
community members opposed to it lined up on both sides of the myth and
pushed it into the national headlines.
          Atlantans who supported Kovach and liked what he had done with the
papers during his two-year tenure claimed the corporate elite-who
traditionally have promoted New South posturing and urban boosterism
to bolster their own power-had forced out the former New York Times Washington bureau chief because of his
tough coverage of the Atlanta business community. Publisher Jay Smith
and David Easterly, president of the papers' parent company, Cox
Enterprises, denied that business pressure had anything to do with
their acceptance of Kovach's resignation. He had resigned and they had
accepted because of a lack of "mutual trust," they said.
          But Smith and Easterly defended their actions against a barrage of
national criticism by doing what all good New South boosters
do-retreating to a stance of intense regionalism and denying any
problem existed. In an article in The Wall Street
Journal, Easterly responded to a comment from Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee by telling him to
"stuff it." Meanwhile, good ol' boys like Journal-Constitution sportswriter Furman Bisher and columnist Lewis Grizzard, both of whom had been at the papers long
before Kovach, gloated as the crowd they saw as "Northern
invaders" from the New York Times lost
the battle for the control of the papers. Said Bisher: "Maybe now
we can get back to covering Dixie like the dew."
          To many, though, that meant the papers would return to the previous
state of mediocrity which had chased serious Southern journalists away
and allowed local talents like Bisher and Grizzard to
thrive. "These papers have never attempted to excel," said
Dudley Clendinen, a former Timesman who had joined the papers in 1986
as Kovach's assistant in charge of local news and who resigned two
weeks after Kovach's departure. "They've always been content to
have to find their reputation in a single editor of conscience and
great writing ability. But those editors always felt threatened: Ralph
McGill spent every day afraid that he was going to be fired. Gene
Patterson was forced out."(In 1967, Constitution editor Eugene Patterson lost his job for
running a column criticizing Georgia Power's request for a rate
hike).
          "The [Cox] family takes the profits," Clendinen said. "It
doesn't involve itself in the conduct of the paper, to see to it that
they produce are cord of quality. That's always been the case here in
Atlanta, and because it has, people don't know better. They've always
lived here, always read these papers. If they've lived elsewhere
they'd know better." According to a recent ranking in Advertising Age, Cox Enterprises, an empire
originally built around newspaper money from Dayton, Ohio, is the
thirteenth largest media company in the world, and pulls in the ninth
largest revenues from newspaper operations (over $710 million in
1987). According to the Forbes 400 listing, the
sisters who control the family business, Anne Cox Chambers and Barbara
Cox Anthony, together share the distinction of being the eighth
richest people in the United States. Each is worth $2.25 billion.
          Kovach joined the Journal-Constitition in
1986, reportedly after being passed over for the position of editor at
the New York Times. The local community and the
national media heralded his hiring as a signal the Cox sisters had
decided to convert the Journal-Constitution from
the haven for mediocrity and soft business coverage it had become into
an institution that commanded national respect. Kovach himself
declared that he intended to turn the Journal-Constitution
 into a world-class news
organization.
          As business institutions, large U.S. city newspapers at their best
are never more than instruments of liberal reform, criticizing their
business communities within certain "acceptable"
limits. Bill Kovach tried to expand those limits at the Journal-Constitution, and his improvements were
encouraging compared to the papers' dismal record. Under Kovach, the
papers ran lengthy investigative pieces exposing the Atlanta banking
community's discriminatory lending practices in black neighborhoods,
the alleged bribing of Russian officials by Coca-Cola representatives,
and Georgia Power management's coercion of employees to make political
contributions to the campaign of Public Service Commission candidate
Bobby Rowan.

          The papers' coverage of the Democratic National Convention in
Atlanta last summer also drew national attention. In fact, even the
papers' senior management publicly praised Kovach as the man who had
turned around the Journal-Constitution and
likened him to the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Constitution editor Ralph McGill, under whom the
papers were said to have had their best years.  At a party in the
newsroom on the convention's last night, Smith stood atop a desk and
declared: "These are no longer the newspapers of Ralph
McGill. These are the newspapers of Bill Kovach."
          But five months later, Smith was explaining that he and Kovach had
never been able to establish a relationship of "mutual trust."
In a November 12 editorial, Smith instated that the company had let
Kovach go because he was impossible to work with. This very well may
be the immediate reason why the papers' management got rid of
Kovach. Kovach himself conceded that direct pressure from the business
community had nothing to do with his leaving. Some of Kovach's own
hirees admitted he had a hot temper, and may have threatened to quit
one time too many.
          Yet, it doesn't matter if a corporate conspiracy to Iynch Kovach
didn't exist. New South boosterism does not work that way. Rather, it
is a pervasive consciousness, a framework of attitudes within which
serious analysis and criticism-especially of the New South's booming
capital-are just not welcome. Complaints from Atlanta business leaders
over what they saw as Kovach's unfair coverage merely reflected and
contributed to that ethos. So did Kovach's protracted arguments with
Smith and Easterly, who wanted the papers to look more like USA 
Today, the shallow but highly successful paper
replete with short stories, bright graphics, and a decidedly
"up-beat" approach to the news. The Cox chain's
desire to emulate USA Today indicates that it
places a higher premium on marketing strategies and revenue than on
solid news coverage. All of these factors add up to a situation in
which the Cox corporate managers find themselves predisposed to think
that someone like Kovach would be difficult to work with.
          "I no longer respect or believe in the ownership of the paper,
or the corporate managers more particularly," Clendinen said,
adding he lamented Kovach's departure in part because it signaled the
end of an important experiment for the region. "There's never been
a great regional newspaper in the South," he
explained. "Serious editors and reporters have had to go North
because there's been nothing to aspire to. What we had here with Bill
Kovach was an effort to create a paper that would report on and
examine and reflect the culture of the South."
          Clendinen still bristles over the way he, Kovach and city editor
Wendell "Sonny" Rawls, who also joined the papers in 1986, have been
portrayed as an intrusive "New York Times Mafia"
Kovach and Rawls are both from Tennessee and both worked at the
Nashville Tennesseean before going to the
Times. Clendinen is from Tampa, Fla., went to Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, and his family's roots are in Georgia, where his
great-grandfather was surgeon general during the Civil War. "The
foreign implant, if you will, are the five people from Dayton, Ohio,
who now run the Cox corporation," Clendinen said.
          "This is representative of a tradition that has existed in the
South since the Civil War: that is, much of the choices that have been
made in the South have been given over to Northern, Midwestern
industrial money," Clendinen said. "The Dayton ownership, the
Cox family ownership, has been happy to play to and to patronize
Southern impulses, a set of impulses which has been true also since
the War-this defensiveness, resistance to outside influence, 'We're
just fine, thank you, just as we are.' You know, the Lewis
Grizzard line-if you don't like it, Delta is ready when you are-that
whole business...This was not an affectation, this was part of that
dug-in Southernness. And the papers, owned by Ohio money, played on
that fact."
          The real issue, though, Clendinen insisted, is the quality of the
public record. "These papers, this ownership-we thought-had made
that commitment, had joined the circle of the few who re really
committed to the quality of the record as opposed to the size of their
profits first. In retrospect, it most certainly seems a mistaken
impression."
          At a protest rally held outside the papers' downtown offices on
November 12, one week after Kovach resigned, journalist Hodding Carter
interpreted the incident in much the same way-as the latest battle in
a war for the soul of American journalism. "Is it going to be
packaging or the product? Is it going to be reality or is it going to
be happy times? Is it going to be speaking truth to power or speaking
power's truth? And each time that question is asked today too often
the answer comes back: packaging not product, happy time, not reality,
power's truth, not truth to power."
          Carter also stressed that the issue was important not just for
Atlanta, but for the South and for the nation as well. "In a fight
like this, in an issue like this, there aren't really any outsiders at
all. Because in the most basic way all of us, whether we're in
journalism or outside it, are being treated as outsiders by the fewer
and fewer who own the more and more in this life called
journalism."
          Also at the rally, novelist Pat Conroy attacked Lewis Grizzard,
whom he saw as the premier representative of the insular Southern
attitudes that had contributed to Kovach's downfall. He read to the
crowd of about 250 concerned community members and Journal
 and Constitution staffers the contents of an
ad that Grizzard had considered taking out in the Constitution in
which Grizzard said, "In fact, we might even benefit from

[Kovach's] departure, with apologies to those who enjoy exhaustive
series on what's doing in Africa." Grizzard was referring to a
series on the devastating famine in the Sudan.
          Conroy responded to Grizzard, "Because I too am a redneck, I
want to translate for all your readers and for the Cox chain what you
meant... You wrote it in code but the translation is this: Atlanta
doesn't care if niggers starve."
          However accurate might be Conroy's emotional indictment of the
racism undergirding Grizzard's attitude towards investigative
journalism, it does not change the fact that the papers' corporate
management-not Grizzard and not its readers or its staff-retain the
final say over what news in Atlanta will be like. In which direction
they will lead the papers now that Kovach is gone is not clear. But
there have been indications in recent weeks that the changes bode ill
for the public's need for more responsible coverage in Atlanta and
throughout the region.
          "The publisher and the corporate managers will now get the kind
of paper that they want" says Dudley Clendinen. "It's all a
question of direction, emphasis, and aspiration. Look at the front
page in the last three weeks-Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, warm,
optimistic business stories and tender family stories. What you see is
a reflection of the wishes of the corporate management. They want a
marketing tool, as opposed to a record of quality."
          "USA Today has become the symbol of how you
compete with people who are drawn to the images of television. You
create a package, an information package, which is not so much a
newspaper as it is a packaged digest of information bytes, like sound
bytes. And that is the paper that Easterly likes to cite-I don't think
anyone would argue that it is a record of quality."
          Perhaps an even stronger indication of the Cox chain's intentions
is its choice of a successor for Kovach. Arnold Rosenfeld has been in
the Cox chain since 1969. He will take over the papers for the next
six months, search for another editor, and then move further up in the
corporation. Rosenfeld most recently has served as the editor of the
Cox chain's Austin American-Statesman in
Texas.
          "He's just another guy from Dayton," says Clendinen. "So he
knows what they want, which is not very much."
          Even though Rosenfeld will be directly in charge of the papers for
only six months, his hiring sends out a definite signal. In the past
few years, community members in Austin have complained about that
paper's blatant boosterism as well. And last spring, Rosenfeld's Statesman fired reporter Kathleen Sullivan because,
according to accounts in Texas Monthly and The Columbia Journalism Review, Sullivan had
aggressively pursued stories on worker safety in high-tech industry
while the city itself was trying to woo just such companies to the
area. In other words, many believed that Sullivan was fired because
she was "a skeptic, not a booster."
          The paper also offered Sullivan over $8,000 to sign a severance
agreement which would have prevented her from criticizing the paper or
running the story anywhere else. She refused.
          Committed reporters and editors remain at the Atlanta papers who
would refuse to bow to such pressure as well. But many say they no
longer have any incentive to initiate potentially controversial
articles or major investigative projects. If the papers' management
can get serious and find an editor equally as committed to the quality
of the public record as Kovach was, then perhaps those staffers will
stay on and continue to improve the papers. Otherwise, Harvie Blair's
characterization of defensive, New South boosterism will still to
apply to the Coxes' Journal-Constitution and to
Atlanta another hundred years from now. 
          
            Eric Guthey is a student in the Graduate Institute of
Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta.
          
        