By Roldo Bartimole
My former colleague Mark Naymik opened what should be a serious discussion on sports funding. We both worked at the Free Times.
At least I hope it opened the debate. It’s long overdue.
He casts Council President Martin Sweeney as the heavy in the failure of the city to pursue some of the football stadium naming rights money – put at $100 million – for the city.
After all the stadium was built by the city, on city land, is financed by the city and its upkeep cost are borne by the city. And it pays no property taxes. So profits go to the team owner, not the city. Does that make sense? To anyone?
Why Naymik didn’t mention Mayor Frank Jackson I don’t know. Mayor Jackson has the bully pulpit to put some pressure on Browns owner Jimmy Haslam. Naymik says Haslam has Sweeney under a spell. Jackson too apparently. Jackson is still the mayor, isn’t he?
Actually, he has everybody under a spell. Especially the community’s watchdog, the Plain Dealer.
He follows Al Lerner in that occupation.
Lerner, by the way, didn’t have naming rights. But really, he did. He had two giant electronic boards placed at each end of the stadium. Very visible from the lakeside drive. And clearly noticeable from City Hall. Especially the City Council hearing room. A direct sighting.
Lerner cleverly had the stadium electronic board promoting MNBA, the old credit card company that made the Lerner family billionaires. He had free name rights.
He never paid the city a dime for his advertising gimmick.
You have to know your past to know the present. And the future.
Mayor “it is what it is” Jackson never thinks about “this is what it should be.”
Naymik, unfortunately, let him continue that charade on this issue.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the mess created by former Mayor Michael White and his lawyer, now conveniently a Browns executive, Fred Nance. City Council at the time had nine lawyers among its 21 members. Jim Rokakis would boast of the high caliber Council. Didn’t make much of a difference from today’s lack luster bunch.
I wrote in the Free Times then that “Council seems to have forgotten that it’s a political body as well as a legislative one.”
And plenty of the blame lies at the door of the Plain Dealer. Lots and lots.
In February 1996 I wrote the following in Point of View, a newsletter I published, under a one-word headline about the PD: “PANDER!” It was was the height of the Browns move to Baltimore.
The greatest calamity Cleveland ever faced was the loss of the Browns. What tragedy. At least according to the news headlines.
The paper exhaustively pumped up the bereavement. So did the broadcast media echo.
Nothing was spared. The headlines were massive: “Browns move in the works.”
“Gloom, anger fill the stands.”
“Mayor fights Browns move.”
“Browns bolt.”
All headlines dominated the front page with huge photos, including one of a dismayed Big Dawg. The town wore black.
Even the day following Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, the PD front page headline went to the Browns. Who is Rabin to our football team?
They’ve been the salesmen of all this shit. Cleveland resident are mere collateral damage.
Therefore, I wrote:
“Possibly the Plain Dealer should change its name to the Pandering Dealer, given the coverage of the past half year when sports and rock and roll appear to be the daily menu at Ohio’s largest.
“It’s a mind-fucking perpetrated by those supposed objective informers of a community who are really so tightly connected to the powers that be that any agenda offered by so-called ‘civic and business leaders’ a catch-all description for those who set community agendas in all cities, that they become the public relations apparatus for private interests.”
I went on to chronicle “pounds of newsprint, huge front page headlines with enormous color sports photos, entire sections within the paper which crowd out real news, and column after column of adulation…” I counted the inches of space given to the dirge. It was massive.
What was the PD saying to the politicians? Give them everything they want. And Mayor White did just that.
Frank Jackson was a “No” vote on the stadium. I remember going up to him the night of the vote. White needed ONE more vote to make the deal immediately effective. Without a two-thirds vote of Council the legislation would need two weeks to take effect. Jackson, a White ally, was pressed for his vote. Would Jackson buckle? After all, the legislation would pass with or without his vote. Jackson said, “No.” He would not relent. Where is that Jackson now?
I noted: “It would take too much space to detail the content inside the paper – the editorials, columns, cartoons, not to mention the sports pages themselves, devoted to coverage of this issue.
“For days and weeks after, and then months…came an outpouring of passion about the perfidy of Modell, the fuming, ditched fans and a newspaper promoted campaign, led by May that really was propaganda. Pandering.
I concluded that “The news pandering has spread into the consciousness of the community. This back-slapping, feel good, servile toadying is infectious, as is the victimization of the Browns issue… and helps form a sickening atmosphere of accepting the status quo and not looking at our problems… It allows those who seize and control the resources of the community to go unexamined.”
I ended: “How successful has the Pee Dee been in its promotion of the city and its present agenda can be attested by the fact that there is not one single voice of any significance in the community, and only echoes in the rest of the media, that speaks in opposition to the corporate agenda as championed by Ohio’s largest.”
“The final vote (on the Browns deal) came about 10 p.m. on Friday’s NFL deadline with inhabitants of the political biosphere essentially worn out by the prolonged process. Council gulped the deal, which according to a Pee Dee editorial weeks ago, “Council will have to swallow.”
Get ready to swallow again.
Next stop: A sin tax extension at a cost of more than $100 million. Watch where the Pee Dee stands. Or rolls over.
Not with Naymik. But with Sweeney and Jackson.
That’s why I wonder if the paper really will be missed four days a week.
It might be a blessing.
Roldo Bartimole has been reporting since 1959. He came to Cleveland in 1965 to report for the Plain Dealer where he worked twice in the 1960s, left for the Wall Street Journal in 1967. He started publishing his newsletter Point of View in 1968 and ended it in 2000.In 1991 he was awarded the Second Annual Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in Washington, D.C. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, Cleveland chapter, in 2002, and was named to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, 2004. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]
8 Responses to “ROLDO: Failure of Politicians, the Media & the Public”
snarky
Roldo,
You my old pal , have forgotten that every sports team needs cheerleaders.
The local , ” in name only “professional sports rackets , are run with the audacious greasy spirits of the goose scat in print plain dealer civic cheerleading spirit corps that have turned our soon to be less than daily newspaper into a series of fairy tales about how warm and fuzzy every last damn event that occurs here is.
Rah , rah , uhggg!
The plain dealers policy of cheerleading instead of reporting the local news has left me out as a daily reader sometime ago.
The real story that the plain dealer forgets to report are the daily demise of a once stable city on it’s rapid descent into becoming a smaller version of Detroit , Michigan.
By ignoring the class divison that is widening here , the crumbing ruins that litter the city , and are enchroaching the inner ring suburbs , the editors at est 18th and Superior have their collective heads planted in the sand.
So , it comes as no great surprise that in the tradition of previous pols , more corporate welfare and giveaways are occuring under the present pols.
Local sports teams are the largest welfare recipients in the region , and a real drag on any social progress.
I for one was happy in 1999 , when Modell left town in the middle of the night taking his football team with him!
Larry
Hate to tell you this, but more people in this town care about the Browns than the Israeli PM. That’s sports in America. It is a priority for people whether you like it or not. The Browns sell newspapers and garner website hits. Netanyahu doesn’t. Sad but its the truth. Just take a look at the most popular stories on Cleveland.com. It’s virtually always sports. Take a look at the Browns TV ratings. I’m not even a Browns fan but if you can’t figure out why the PD would put them on a front page and not want them to leave, then you are oblivious to what people want to read about.
Roldo Bartimole
Thank you all for the comments. The lack of an organized effort to
oppose the next push for extending the sin tax another 10 years to
help Haslam, Gilbert & Dolan could result in another $100 million
or more of sales taxes from Cuyahoga County taxpayers. Fitzgerald
and the County Council should be put on the spot now to see that it
doesn’t happen. And organized labor should also be challenged to
represent the workers on this issue, not the owners.
We know where things are going in Cleveland when the mayor is
too lazy to even write a phony state of the city speech with a 1,000
people showing up for his phony presentation at the City Club,
where the civic elite will eat that garbage at lunch.
Roldo Bartimole
Larry: Since when is news about most about what’s popular.
News judgment isn’t about what’s most popular. That’s not
wha ta free press and the First Amendment are about.
Too many people who have never worked in a real city room
– and some who do – don’t understand their responsibilities.
By supporting a view, which you apparently do, that popularity
determines news you don’t serve yourself well.
Larry
News is about what’s most popular when you’re trying to make money. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the news biz isn’t exactly a profitable one these days especially on a local level. If it were, the PD, Scene and every local TV and radio station wouldn’t be cutting to the bone.
Like it or lump it, the Browns are a huge draw. They certainly have an unfair advantage over this town but as long as Clevelanders respond by buying tickets to their games and being interested in following every move, nothing will change. Unless Haslam announces he’s moving the team, he will be treated well. The only problems people had with Lerner was the on field performance. Sadly, that’s what people most care about and they respond by reading about it. Anything else isn’t nearly as interesting when it comes to the bulk of Clevelanders and frankly, you could say the same in 90% of major American cities. Sports trumps all. Cleveland isn’t much different than any other place when it comes to how it treats its sports teams.
Roldo Bartimole
Larry: I’m glad you’re not my editor or boss. But you’d apparently
be very comfortable with the Newhouses and Murdocks. The buck
is, as you say, their sole aim and your approach says, give them
all the bucks they want. Not my game thankfully.
Allen Freeman
Roldo, you may not like it but Larry is right. Newspaper publishing is a business first, a civic watchdog entity second. Expectations that the PD will act otherwise are unrealistic.
Look at the types of stories that get the most comments on Cleveland.com — it’s always the sports stories (unless there is some major union conflict going on; that lathers up everyone, too). So it’s no surprise the PD cheerleaders “root” for the Browns: it sells papers and creates page views for their business.
As a business, the content produced has to match public interest: the average American has far more interest in sport than social or governmental issues.
The news/online publishing company that can figure out how to make real money AND focus on hard news / social issues will really have created something…
Roldo Bartimole
Allen: I’d never accept the concept of what the public wants as a guide nor would I
allow either journalists or the public that escape.
Mencken said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste
of the American public.” But he wasn’t saying that to praise the banality
of the newspapers of his day. And his criticism stands.