Breaking the News

When Big Brother Isn’t Just Watching, He’s Paying Your Salary

By Steve Watkins

ADVANCE EDITOR

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Years ago, when I was editor of The Florida Flambeau, the independent student newspaper at Florida State University, we published a series of feature articles on gay life in Tallahassee. This was back in the late 1970s, several years after the Stonewall Riots, but “Gay Pride” was still years from being a thing—a reality that hit us hard when Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority flooded our major advertisers with letters of complaint and ripped copies of the “immoral” articles.

In less time that it took to say “Anita Bryant is a vile homophobe,” Publix and Albertson’s grocery stores canceled their weekly full-page ads—10 percent of our annual operating budget—which very nearly put us out of business. It also didn’t help that our business manager embezzled $200,000 not long after. She went to prison for a couple of years, but we never got the money back. I suppose we should have asked more probing questions when she showed up to work one day with a gag bottle of invisible ink.

The relationship between newspapers and advertisers has always been fraught. Write about one bagel shop for a food story in the feature section, and all the other bagel shops in town will freak out on the ad manager, who’ll freak out on the managing editor, who’ll freak out on the food editor, who’ll gently remind the feature writer who wrote the bagel story that in the future could she please, please, please mention ALL the bagel shops in town next time she goes there?

That, of course, was back when there were such things as locally-reported food sections, food editors, and food writers.

We managed to limp along without the grocery-store ads (and the embezzled funds) in The Flambeau, but it was a hard lesson for us young journalists on the cost of speaking truth to power. There have been, of course, a great many others who paid much steeper prices: reporters on the front lines to whom we owe a debt that can never be paid, except by continuing to do our jobs.

Today, with most newspapers on life support—those few that haven’t already expired—dire financial struggles have reporters and editors and publishers looking over their shoulders more than ever any time they write and publish stories about their advertisers or corporate sponsors.

We can talk all we want about the hallowed Wall of Separation that’s supposed to exist between the Business and Editorial sides of a newspaper—a literal wall back in the day. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t flinch a couple of weeks ago when a copy of a local Radiology group’s big honking lawsuit against Mary Washington Healthcare showed up in my inbox.

Write about it and risk pissing off the biggest employer in Fredericksburg. Sit on it, and why the hell was I in the news business in the first place?

Mary Washington Healthcare, as you may have noticed, is one of The Advance’s advertisers. Before I came on board as editor, they occasionally ran “sponsored content” in the news and commentary space. And who knows? They may do it again. Always duly labeled, but still.

The nonprofit Fredericksburg Free Press, for whom the hospital corporation is a major financial donor, has been known to run two and sometimes three sponsored articles from MWHC at a time—beneath, and sometimes sandwiched between, the actual reporting.

I wrote the story about the lawsuit—with comments from the radiology group, comments from hospital administrators, etc. It ran ten days ago and drew several thousand readers and a number of new subscribers. Judging from reader comments, folks in Fredericksburg are none too happy with the hospital corporation and haven’t been for awhile. More than a few mentioned MWHC’s role in forcing the Moss Free Clinic to shut down a few years ago, leaving the area’s medically underserved population even more underserved.

When the Fredericksburg Free Press got around to reporting on the lawsuit—four days after The Advance—they did an excellent job, with more details, a deeper dive into events that led up to the action, hell, even better quotes. It was about what I expected from Adele Uphaus in her first Free Press assignment after she jumped ship last month from The Advance. Adele’s story got even more readers, more likes on social media, more shares, more angry comments about MWHC.

More angry comments about MWHC, that is, until a notice appeared at the end of the Facebook reader thread saying, “Comments have been turned off for this post.”

Not long after that, most if not all of the vitriolic comments disappeared—replaced by a new, tamer, much shorter thread that included an admin caveat, which I wrote down:

“Most relevant is selected, so some comments may have been filtered out.”

That, too, was later deleted. No further comments were subsequently added.

I contacted the Free Press editor a few days later to ask what was up. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, and didn’t appreciate my implication that there had been any “shady business” going on. Only being a good, profane journalist, he didn’t say “business.”

“No one manipulated the Facebook comments below the MWHC story post, in any way,” he wrote in a short email. “The story was not deleted—or edited—in any way after publication on Saturday afternoon.”

I don’t for a minute think that the editor himself, who I’ve long counted as a friend, did something shady. And I don’t care terribly much if somebody else at The Free Press did anything, but doesn’t want to own up to it. I know what I saw, and I also know that stories in newspapers, and comments on social media, come and go: here today, eclipsed by the next day’s news and comments tomorrow.

What I do care about—what we should all care about—are the ways corporations are positioning themselves to exert more and more pressure on journalists. Direct interference with content, or comments, is bad if it happens, but not as bad as the broader, pervasive chilling effect—the self-censorship—that can come from knowing that big brother is not only watching, but paying your salary. Or deciding not to.

Jeff Bezos.

Maybe you flinch, as I did, when a controversial story comes across your desk, and maybe you cover it and maybe you don’t. The Advance did in this case. The Free Press did. The other newspaper in town, The Free Lance-Star, still hasn’t touched it.

The MWHC vice president of marketing and corporate communications gave The Advance publisher an earful the day after our story ran. My understand is she didn’t like the headline, which was a three-decker:

Radiology Group Sues Mary Washington Healthcare for $2.65 Million+

Plaintiffs Allege ‘Blatant Attempt to Destroy Radiologists’ Business,’ Warn Ongoing Conflict Could Cause ‘Elimination of Mammography Services within a 50-Mile Radius of Fredericksburg.’

Hospital Officials Dismiss ‘financially motivated lawsuit that has nothing to do with patient care.’

The VP sent me an email, too, congratulating me on my new position as editor, and saying she hoped she could meet with me soon. “I had a good working relationship with [your predecessor],” she wrote, “and would like to have the same with you.”

I looked up her LinkedIn profile and found out we’d once worked at the same county hospital— New Hanover Memorial, in Wilmington, NC—though decades apart: me a college student pulling evening shifts on the psych ward as a nurses’ aide; her a small-town newspaper reporter making a career jump, in salary at least, into corporate PR.

We should have plenty to talk about.

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Steve Watkins is editor of The FXBG Advance. You can find his author Substack page, HERE. You can find Pie & Chai Magazine, which Steve also edits, HERE. And you can contact him HERE.