ACTION ALERT: News-Slanting Union Buster Is Candidate for Journalism Ethics Post
July 17, 2000
Robert Giles, former editor and publisher of the Detroit News, is a leading candidate for the position of curator at Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism. The prospect of Giles overseeing a center that teaches media ethics has alarmed many of those familiar with his role in the long-running labor dispute at the News and the Detroit Free Press, which has been jointly operated with the News since 1989.
More than 2,000 reporters, mailers, printers and circulation workers, represented by six unions, walked out in July 1995, citing management demands for givebacks on healthcare and the attempt to impose a "merit pay" system after a six-year wage freeze. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) upheld the unions' charges of unfair labor practices and called for strikers to be re-hired, but management refused to fire the "permanent replacement" workers they had brought in. The NLRB's ruling was recently overturned by the conservative D.C. Court of Appeals.
Skewed Coverage
Much of the controversy around Giles' Nieman appointment focuses on the
question of whether he oversaw slanted coverage of the strike during his
tenure. (Giles left the News/Free Press in 1997.) It's clear that the papers
did print some laughably skewed stories, like "Newspaper Strikers Urged to
Bring Kids to Picket Lines" (Detroit News, 5/5/96), which detailed the
psychological damage picketers were inflicting on their children.
One former News reporter says that that story wasn't just slanted, it was false. Now at the Washington Post, Allan Lengel says strikers never planned to take their children out of school, and the author of the story knew it. Other reporters removed their byline from stories, or asked to be taken off the strike beat, after having stories changed by editors to reflect a more pro-management line (Harvard Crimson, 7/7/00).
Columbia Journalism Review (11-12/95) called the News and Free Press coverage of their own labor dispute "strikingly tilted," a charge Giles didn't deny, claiming he felt that the newspapers had "to balance the story" since "the unions, in our judgment, really have had a sort of platform to present their positions without any meaningful challenge." (Editor & Publisher, 3/96)
"I Wanted It to Occur on My Watch"
Some of Giles' defenders seem to suggest that breaking a union is just part
of a publisher's job, making Giles just an unlucky victim of what Oregonian
editor Sandra Mims Rowe called "the known difficulties of labor and
management" (Boston Globe, 7/6/00). "In Detroit he happened to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time," concurs Newsweek's Ellis Cose (Harvard
Crimson, 6/30/00). "It becomes a question of whether you hold that against
him or not."
Giles himself now pronounces the Detroit strike "a very difficult thing for me...very tough, very hostile." (Boston Globe, 7/6/00) But he appeared to relish his role while in the thick of it, issuing hardline statements like, "We're going to hire a whole new workforce and go on without unions, or they can surrender unconditionally and salvage what they can." (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 9/2/95) Far from feeling he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Giles told the Society of Professional Journalists, "I wanted it to occur on my watch. I believe deeply in what we're doing." (South Bend Tribune, 5/16/96)
And Giles had no qualms about using his own paper to express those deep beliefs, penning a bizarre commentary (Detroit News, 3/10/96) in which he called religious community protests in support of the strike "a parody that mocked the ideals of civil disobedience," because "the civil rights movement sought to create change and reform. The newspaper strike seeks to resist change and reform." Giles went on to claim that it was management who, by permanently replacing striking workers, was truly following the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau, by performing "civil disobedience in the face of the established order."
Problems Pre-Date Strike
Giles' dissenters aren't merely concerned by his record of skewing strike
coverage. Many believe his management deliberately provoked the strike in
the first place, demanding further healthcare givebacks from staffers who
had just endured a six-year wage freeze, cutting union jobs and attempting
to impose a "merit pay" system in which bosses would determine who deserved
a raise and avoid bargaining with the union. Employees had been asked to
help the company "get back on its feet" after the protracted battle to win a
Joint Operating Agreement, explained striking News reporter Kate DeSmet
(Extra!, 7-8/96). But when the companies continued to demand sacrifices
after recording profits of $56 million for 1994, workers had had enough.
Giles and others in the press have said that the company "won" the strike because they never stopped publication. But a newspaper's value is not paper and ink. It's the quality and integrity of its news. There can be no question these have suffered tremendously under Giles' leadership. Since the JOA, circulation for the News and Free Press has dropped from 1.3 million a day to some 600,000 (Rocky Mountain News, 6/11/00). Thousands of readers say they will never buy the papers again, no matter what court rulings say. A publisher who calls such a devastating experience a success seems patently unfit for a post meant to symbolize what is best in U.S. journalism.
ACTION: Please let Harvard University know whether you think Robert Giles is an appropriate candidate for the Nieman Foundation job. You can contact Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, who will make the final decision, through his assistant's e-mail:
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.