March 28, 2024

Open Season on the Record Eagle

May 31, 2006
Muckraking stories prompt local power brokers to target the Record-Eagle

(Editor’s note: in the interest of full disclosure, Anne Stanton reported for the Record-Eagle in the 1990s.)

Here’s the issue.
Is the Traverse City Record-Eagle a loose cannon that makes “over the top” and sensational attacks on community leaders? 
Or is the newspaper the best thing that’s ever happened to the taxpayers who are finally getting a clear view of how taxpayer money is spent?
It depends on who you ask. 
The Record-Eagle’s last few years of hard-hitting stories have pushed some local citizens to the edge and they have decided to push back. 
A former top Grand Traverse County official is trying to gain signatures from 500 community leaders protesting what he claims is the slanted news reporting of the Traverse City Record-Eagle.  And he’s going to the very top with his complaints.
K. Ross Childs, a former county administrator, plans to give the petitions and written testimony to the chairman of Dow Jones & Company board this week.  Dow is based in Princeton, New Jersey, and owns Ottaway Newspapers, which owns the Traverse City Record-Eagle.
In his undated letter, Childs writes: “The editor, Bill Thomas, and his staff of reporters and writers continue to fill their pages with non-news and slanted or biased stories. Objectivity often suffers in their reporting and reportorial pieces are inappropriately filled with opinion. I, for one, have had enough of this nonsense and am ready to address the situation. I hope you share my feelings.”

CONCERNED FOR THE COMMUNITY
Acting as a private citizen, Childs invited people to share their opinion, preferably on letterhead, because it “will obviously carry more significance, especially if you are a Record-Eagle advertiser.”
Childs said that he and others have written letters, but the editors respond with editor’s notes that simply repeat the original inaccuracies. Thomas countered that the editorial responses are strictly factual.
Childs served as Grand Traverse County administrator for 25 years (he’s about to leave a contractual position as interim director of the county’s Department of Public Works). Childs himself has felt the heat of the paper and is closely connected to those in recent headlines, ranging from State Senator Jason Allen, Tim Nelson, president of Northwestern Michigan College, and county board members.
Childs used his strong networking skills to get the attention of Peter Kann, the board chairman of Dow Jones & Company. He first contacted two Dow Jones board members—former Governor John Engler and Peter McPherson, former MSU president, who was sent to Iraq to handle finances during the war’s early years. 
It is very likely that Childs found a sympathetic ear with Engler, who has no love for Bill Thomas. While at the Oakland Press, Thomas wrote editorials that blasted Governor Engler for trying to weaken the Open Meetings Act and the Freedom of Information Act.
In a short interview, Childs stated that he is compiling this report for the good of the community.
“I’m very frustrated and very concerned for the whole community. The Record Eagle has been a very good paper over the years and I’m concerned because it’s hurting the whole community. Not because of the negative publicity about me. “

MUM’S THE WORD
Childs sits on the NMC board of trustees, rode herd on the septage plant after it failed, and was also the subject of an editorial that said he scorned the Open Meetings Act in the selection of Dave Amon for Acme Township.
Ross said he didn’t want to comment further because his conversation with Peter  Kann was confidential. Kann, McPherson, and Engler all declined interviews. NMC’s president Tim Nelson commented through a spokesman that he is not involved in Childs’ effort and that the college is working to give the paper “as much information as possible to help tell our story.”
Record Eagle Editor Bill Thomas flatly rejected Childs’ assertions that the paper has hurt the community, saying the public needs open and accountable government.
“People who have had secretive controls for years are unaccustomed to people paying attention to what they’re doing. If they were doing their job a little better, maybe an $8 million (septage processing tank) building wouldn’t have fallen down 30 days after it was built. We are reporting about the abuses of public office,” Thomas said.
“From what I understand from you, they are using political pressure to get a corporate board of directors to muzzle me. In my experience, it is unprecedented.  I think he’s trying to bully this newspaper into shutting up.”

A LITTLE HISTORY
In fact, the Traverse City Record-Eagle was a kinder, gentler newspaper while Childs was county administrator (1976-2001). Gil Bogley was publisher and would gather informally with community leaders. It was a congenial group. There were investigative articles, to be sure, but nothing like now. 
Ken Hall, hired in early 1996, was the first of the aggressive editors. He was followed by Bill Thomas, with 40 years of experience under his belt, in 2002. And then  Mike Tyree, formerly with the Associated Press and Kalamazoo Gazette, joined the staff in 2003.
Both Tyree and Thomas came with records of strong, investigative journalism. During Thomas’ 16 year-stint at the Oakland Press, the paper won the Michigan Press Association award as best paper for the first time in its history and several times afterward. Tyree was described as a “tremendous journalist” by his former boss, Rebecca Pierce, still the paper’s editor.
One of the biggest stories to break, after Bill Thomas arrived, was the 2002 story of District Judge Thomas Gilbert smoking marijuana at a Rolling Stones concert in Detroit. The story gained national momentum, and the Record-Eagle editorials chastised Gilbert for refusing to resign.

BITCH SESSION
That coverage along with other reports on political shenanigans, perhaps, caused the Traverse Area Chamber of Commerce to invite publisher Zeke Fleet, other media, and community leaders to a retreat at the Homestead resort in early December of 2003. Fleet later described it as a 2 1/2 hour bitch session and seethed that he was set up by Doug Luciani, the chamber president. 
After the meeting, Pete Strom, a Grand Traverse County commissioner, approached Fleet and asked,  “Don’t you have the cajones to control your newsroom?” (Strom said he was asked later by the edit board what he meant by that statement, and he said, “By control, I meant making sure there was fair and unbiased reporting, which doesn’t often happen.”)
A week later, Fleet responded to the Chamber of Commerce: “It took me a few days to recover from the ‘shell shock’” of the retreat he wrote in a memo.  “Although I tried to explain the Record-Eagle’s responsibilities in the community, this vile barrage drowned my words.”
Fleet went on to write that the silver-lining of the meeting inspired him to have a heart-to-heart talk with the Record-Eagle’s news editors and that they were more “dedicated than ever to take a tougher editorial stance on local issues, dig deeper and expand their local news coverage, and do more investigative news stories.
ANGER BUILDS
Strom, among others, did not hide his anger. In May of 2004, reporter Bill O’Brien was interviewing a woman at the Grand Traverse Resort.  Strom walked up and said, “It doesn’t matter what you say. He’ll write what he wants anyway.” Ross Childs, NMC board’s vice chair, recently publicly challenged reporter Tom Carr about his facts on Tim Nelson’s salary.
Childs’ complaints to Dow Jones Chairman Peter Kann have not affected the paper’s news approach, although editor Thomas did hear from Ottaway’s top brass and then invited Childs to come in and talk about his concerns. The meeting did not go well. When Childs arrived, he had expected to meet with Thomas alone and was dismayed that other editorial staff were also there. 
Thomas explained to Childs that all three were interested in what he had to say; Strom said that Childs felt like they were ganging up on him. Childs told the men that conversations between he and Kann were confidential, and refused to discuss his concerns. The meeting quickly folded.
For now, it appears that Dow Jones is standing firm in its support of the Record-Eagle, which received the state’s most prestigious journalism award in 2005, enjoy robust advertising revenue, and maintain a strong circulation.
Just recently, Fleet was promoted to Ottaway’s vice president of operations and advertising and will leave soon for its headquarters in Campbell Hall, New York.   Ann Reed, who was promoted from within the Record-Eagle, is viewed as a good sign — Ottaway didn’t choose to send in someone from the outside to clean house. And Reed gave no indication in the paper’s announcement that the Record-Eagle would change its approach.
“In terms of our newspaper product, I feel we’re doing an excellent job,” Reed said. “I think we serve as a voice for people who don’t have a voice. I’m sure we can always improve. But speaking philosophically, have we put the emphasis in the right places? I think we have.”

NOT ILLEGAL
Although Childs’ effort to go straight to the board chairman of Dow Jones is unusual, it is not illegal and, in fact, he is exercising his right of free speech, said Paul Bare, a board member of the ACLU’s local branch.
“The right to petition or to start a boycott has always been there,” Bare said. “If local business owners want to try to intimidate the Record-Eagle through the power of the pocket book, there is nothing illegal about that. 
Even if Childs was still a public employee, he has the legal right as a private citizen to express his unhappiness with a newspaper, Bare said.
“I think it’s funny that a small town newspaper can report these articles so thoroughly. Usually local papers are, who’s the latest queen of the fair pageant and who got elected to what sewer board. It has done a good job.
“What we need to do, what the public needs to do is to let the Record-Eagle know they appreciate the hard-hitting reporting they’ve been doing. Any time you make people this angry, and no one is disputing the accuracy of your stories, it means you’re doing your job. What they’re mad about isn’t bad reporting, but that they’ve disclosed things they’d just as soon not be disclosed. I thought that’s what reporters are supposed to do.”

GOOD PEOPLE SLAMMED
Yet Wayne Schmidt, chair of the Grand Traverse County Commission, believes that there are people who have given countless hours on public boards—such as college trustees—who have the genuine interest of the board and community at heart. They are good people who were slammed repeatedly, he said.
“When people get raked over the coals by the Record-Eagle, it discourages other people from stepping up. I think it hurts our community in that some good quality candidates are choosing not to run for office. There’s a perception that they’ll get the third degree from the paper.”
Derith Smith, supervisor of Elmwood Township, is perhaps a poster child of a public official in the middle of messy and public politics. She just survived a recall attempt. When people decide to take public office, most understand “public scrutiny is the name of the game,” she said.
“That’s the government we have,” Smith said.  “You do the best job you can, and hopefully both the newspapers and the residents are able to see that.”
Residents need all the facts when they read about a particular issue, and she said no single media gets it all right. That’s why she reads a wide range of media, including the increasing number of online publications, she said.
“There is no government police. You can break the law. Elmwood Township has done it repeatedly. The only thing we have is that citizens hold the government to the letter of the law and the media. I think it’s a good thing to have public participation; our form of government doesn’t function without it. If you don’t have public participation, you don’t have a democracy.”


Hit List: The Stories tell the Story
After the Chamber of Commerce debacle in 2003, the Record-Eagle made good on its promise to “dig deeper” and cracked open one story after another. Here are the stories that bothered critics the most. First the complaint and then the response from the Record-Eagle.

Failed to put a “positive light” on the story
Former District Judge Thomas Gilbert, who will soon complete a master’s degree at the Hazelden Graduate School of Addiction Studies, talked by phone on the story about him that grabbed headlines in 2002.
Gilbert was given a six-month suspension from his judgeship for smoking pot at a Rolling Stones concert in Detroit. 
“I did prepare a public statement right at the beginning and they did publish it in its entirety. …What was most frustrating was that every time there was an opportunity to put this in a positive light, to do some good for the community regarding addiction,  that was ignored.
What I had always hoped to get across was that the disease of addiction of alcoholism is an equal opportunity disease. My frustration with the Record Eagle was that it maintained people who break the law shouldn’t be judges. I had no quarrel with that, but people who are sick and who have the courage to admit their problem and make changes in their lives would make better judges. It was 1 1/2 years of total public humiliation, trying to get me out of office.”
Response from editor Bill Thomas: “He committed a crime. Until the issue of his addiction came to the forefront, our issue with the judge was that he committed a crime. Judges should be held to the very, very highest standard. While he was on the bench, he sentenced people to jail and to a variety of other punishments for doing the same thing he did. Now you’ll recall the local bar association even recommended that he step down from his position.
“Let me put it another way, if Judge Gilbert would have been straightforward in acknowledging an addiction at the outset and said, I’m stepping down, but I’ll be back—and I have told him this—there would have been no stronger supporter than this newspaper. The issue was that he broke the law, he misled/lied about it (first saying it was just a one-time thing), and he tried everything he could do to stay on the bench and that was wrong. He damaged the local judiciary, the Record-Eagle didn’t.

Jason Allen and the Parking Deck
Republican State Sen. Jason Allen, who has aspirations to become Michigan’s governor some day, declined to comment for this story, but word is that he is angry about the Record-Eagle’s stories and editorials. To briefly summarize the story, the Traverse City Commission never heard of a competing proposal to build a parking deck that may have saved taxpayers millions of dollars until first reading about it in the Record-Eagle. In part, it was because of Sen. Allen’s influence to get the proposal retracted.
Here is Wayne Schmidt, chair of the Grand Traverse County Commission, who has been frustrated with the coverage:  “The Record-Eagle’s editorials and stories are mean-spirited and they assume there’s a good ole’ boy network and everyone has this evil intent. That is simply not true. They questioned why Jason Allen was involved. He is our state senator, this is his district, he has brought in millions of brownfield dollars to this city. One of the reasons he got involved was that (developer Mike) Uzelac went through the process, while Jerry Snowden was a Johnny come lately. Mr. Snowden had two years to come up with a plan, and the night the City Commission was going to vote, he had a single sheet of paper—no plans, no drawings, no costs. 
“With the parking deck issue, inasmuch as they keep writing stories about who called Jason Allen, they should have a paragraph on how the financing works, how TIF (tax incremental financing) works, those kind of educational components... It’s amazing they can know that the developer and his friend contributed $32,000 to Jason Allen, but they never say how much the school is going to get (in tax revenues) when the project is completed. That’s where the more balanced reporting comes in.”
Bill Thomas: “The bottom line in this whole thing is that a lot of the maneuvering was done in secret, and we believe as a newspaper that this kind of process should be an open process. The root question is, who gave a state senator the municipal authority to have a competing project withdrawn? He’s not a city official, he’s a state senator. You can argue all you want about the timing of Snowden’s project, but why wasn’t the city commission told of another developer’s proposal. Look, when Snowden submitted a letter or proposal the competing developer found out about it, but the city council didn’t. Now why?!  The people of the city need to know what happened. Yet at the same time, this word was passed to a state senator who in turn asked that the secondary proposal be withdrawn. If you want to add the barnacles, the state senator received $32,000 from the developer who he was arguing on behalf of. Apparently. You can talk about TIF money and all this kind of stuff, but there are root questions that still need to be answered.”

Ignores the Good News
Pete Strom, a Grand Traverse County commissioner: “I’m the chairman of the Brownfield Redevelopment Authority and the Economic Development Corporation for Grand Traverse County and in the last three years we have brought in over $50 million into the community -- for the Hardy parking deck, the Radio Centre building, the Front Street project, and the Grand Traverse Commons, and 14 other projects that are going right now. The money doesn’t go into the developer’s pocket, no matter what the paper says. This money went to pay to the get the pollution cleaned up and to do the infrastructure.  There was no big splash about that.
The septage plant fails, which is a major problem, and it gets a front page for weeks. If Mr. Uzelac burps, it makes at least page 3, above the fold. And all we’ve gotten is a news brief.”

Bill Thomas: “We’ve written about all those projects. He has no idea what he’s talking about… These investigative articles he is talking about make up 15% of what this newspaper does. Fifteen percent. Of these stories, why these particular public officials are upset, is that we are telling people of the community what’s going on. We are giving them information that they never had the opportunity to get before. And it all boils down to that.”

A Combo Concern:
This is from Mel Larimer, a retired music director who spent 25 years at Albion and Olivet College, on the paper’s report that Northwestern Michigan College board members and NMC President Tim Nelson spent $50,000 on travel over five years:
“I was a college educator myself for 25 years and the travel the (NMC board members) did was a normal requirement for all colleges and universities to stay accredited by the national accrediting associations. You must attend the conferences to keep up in the field.
“I was really incensed after this one Sunday; they wrote a page and a half assailing the trustees who were doing their jobs. I knew both men and their approach with respect to their conduct and they’re really devoted to the community. I wrote this letter and I don’t type; it was very readable and I sent it in. I kept waiting and waiting for a response and it didn’t show up in the paper.
“Finally, I called (publisher) Zeke Fleet and he was wonderful about it all. He told me he’d definitely look into this and get an answer for me. And 10 days after I talked to Zeke, I got this letter from the Record-Eagle, saying the letters to the editor must be typewritten or printed, and I had also assaulted (reporter) Tom Carr and that the letter was too vehement. But what I was doing was giving it back to him because he had assaulted these two men with wonderful reputations and I just felt it was completely unwarranted. He also said I couldn’t use a reporter’ name and it was too long. By then it was too late, no one was talking about it any longer so I just didn’t send it in again.”

Dave Miller, editorial page editor, responds: “A hand-written letter is no problem, we get them all the time. The reason we don’t want a reporter called out by name is that it’s not a single reporter’s product. They get assigned a story, they talk to the editor, the story gets edited. And if somebody is making a personal attack on a reporter, we won’t print that. If the story is factually wrong, it’s fair game and we’ll run it.”
Miller also said it is “extremely unusual” for the paper to take that long to run a letter. “We try to get them out in a timely way, but I don’t recall this letter.”
Bill Thomas: Even if the travel was only $50,000 over five years, when we talked to people who went on these trips, nobody, nobody could tell us what came of it. What the students, what the school, what the taxpayers got for the trips. It’s at a time when student tuitions are rising, when people are having a hard time economically. And these people are eating crab cakes and charging an umbrella to the college. (Board member) Ross Childs and (NMC President) Tim Nelson were in different towns in Florida and Nelson wanted Ross to join him at a ceremony. That alone cost the college $850. NMC is important to the community, to the taxpayers, and the people who attend. NMC gets more coverage than they ever have and the stories they object to are 1/10 of 1% of the NMC stories we have in the newspaper.
“Were it not for the newspaper, the taxpayers would have never known that their M-TEC program was subsidized to the tune of $1 million a year. That the aviation program is heavily subsidized. That the person who was running M-TEC, who resigned or was let go, was on the NMC payroll for another nine months. That’s what this is all about. What we do is far, far broader than what people who would muzzle us would like us to do.”

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