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10 The Media
We have allowed two traditional institutions, both intended as our protectors, to develop forms of social and thought control that would have terrified the men who wrote the Constitution. My greatest frustration as mayor of Cleveland came through my futile attempts to reform the Police Department; but that failure cannot be fully understood apart from an understanding of the press. As these two institutions hardened into permanent adversaries, I was forced into a defensive position and was not able to fully exercise the authority I had been elected to wield. When I left office after four years, The Cleveland Police Department was as politically corrupt, as Byzantine in its organization, as brutal in its understanding of the sources of crime, as it was before I came. And, in my opinion, the newspapers were still as reckless, as arrogant and as profane. I mean that literally. To present daily to the public a simplistic, often racist and socially thoughtless interpretation of human events is profanity. Newspapers enjoy an exclusivity of protection and privilege comparable only to that enjoyed by the police. Policemen are taken from our society of men and given the extraordinary privilege of being able to take the freedom and liberty of their fellow men. Like their fellow men, policemen can be wrong. But there is little recourse for the victims when this happens.
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And we give them guns. The police are allowed to carry and use weapons that are not available to other citizens. They are given the right by law to take life when in their judgement it is necessary. And we provide them with so little social education that we have no reason to suppose that their judgement will be sound. We have in the police an exclusive class, protected by law in their exclusivity and their privilege, and a class created out of the last promising segment of the lower middle class of white America. The news media are antagonists of another sort. They are more than a random collection of individuals. They are a business institution operated to make money from people who have money. They are a white institution which reflects white racism in its employment and operational functions. Equally important, their responses, their social values, their world outlook coincides with their class position in the economic structure of this society. Their influence is pervasive and they are aware of it. They are often giddy and reckless in wielding their power because they are free from counter institutional assault. It is not so much that they rally to opposition, but that they confuse and neutralize potential allies. To that extent the news media are a constant abrasive. It was only natural that they would attack a black mayor attempting reform. The point of saying that the pen is mightier than the sword is not that the sword is a less efficient solution to human conflicts but that the pen is in fact a sword. It cuts and it can kill. Several of the writers who covered my administration indulged themselves in a form of steady, slow assassination. The newspapers are protected by our most cherished social contract, the Constitution. They have virtually no limitations. The men who wrote the Constitution never intended that the newspapers would develop into such ultra-powerful institutions. And as more and more cities find themselves with only one newspaper, or perhaps two newspapers owned by the same man, who also sometimes owns a radio and/or television station, they find themselves in fact under a form of shadow government, an unelected, unaccountable rule.
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The federal government at least recognized that there is something wrong when the firm that owns the newspaper also owns the television station. The law recognizes that the airways are public and must be protected from abuse by the special interests. Why should newspapers be exempt? Many newspapers have what amounts to a monopoly as shapers of opinions. Wouldn't it be reasonable to demand of those opinion-makers that the public know what special interest they have a stake in? In 1970 I introduced legislation that would have forced public disclosure of financial interests not only of elected officials such as myself and councilmen, but also of newspaper reporters, executives, and editors. You can guess the response of the newspapers. The level of scorn and abuse in the editorial columns reached new highs. They reduced the proposal to an absurdity. But what is absurd about it? Doesn't the public have the right to know, for instance, when it is reading an article in the Plain Dealer about some action of the Cleveland Trust Company that the Plain Dealer is up to its neck in financial ties to that bank? Newspapers hold a public trust because they influence the course of government. Public trusts should be accountable to the public. Cleveland is, or was, the most dramatic example of government by newspaper. Louis Seltzer, the editor of the Cleveland Press, determined every mayor from 1941 through 1965. The result was that Cleveland limped into the second half of the century with no one to attribute failures to those actually making the decisions. The watchdog wasn't just asleep, he was working the other side. When I came into office I didn't underestimate the value of newspaper support, but I also understood that the papers had been as much a part of the failures of Cleveland as had the politicians. Seltzer had grown up with the Press, and had turned it into his personal voice. Cleveland had large groups of Eastern European immigrants. He focused his paper on their point of view. As they grew, the Press grew, consolidating Seltzer's power no only over the Press as an institution, but over the political structure of the city, undermining the normal, and legally constituted, power of the parties. He ran the Press personally.
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When Seltzer went on a campaign, he determined exactly how everything was going to be played and he gave great editorial support, even putting his editorials on the first page. He had personal contact not just with the men directly under him, but with the reporters. Those men did what was expected of them. The condition of Cleveland in 1967 reflects Seltzer's lack of understanding of what a city needs to stay alive. But that it was his understanding that in large part got it that way is indisputable. The politicians were all forced to court him. Nobody made a move without consulting Seltzer. If Seltzer didn't approve it, most of the politicians didn't do it. The two best things that happened to Cleveland in 1967 were my election as mayor and Louis Seltzer's retirement from the Press. However, Seltzer's influence did not die with his retirement. The power of the press is shared by its representatives, and in the case of the Press, this mean that the top reporters under Seltzer had learned over the years that politicians were as afraid of them as they were of Seltzer. The reporters came to regard public officials as submissive and even subservient to their power. Of course the power of the newspapers is always awesome to public officials, but the power of the Cleveland Press went beyond the normal state of affairs. Cleveland's mayors learned a tradition of deference to the Press because they were creatures of the Press. Clevelanders don't even smile when they describe how former mayors trekked to Seltzer's office before making any major decision. It's not funny. This was one of the traditions I was determined to change. It was a difficult time for some of the Press reporters to adjust to. Paul Lilley was the top investigative reporter at the Press and he was always close to City Hall; he knew most of the dirt. He had always been able to walk into the mayor's office when he felt like it and get inside information in those "off the record," conversations that so often compromise the integrity of both the politician and the reporter. He would tell those mayors things they didn't know, and the mayors would reciprocate. He had visited me early. He started to tell me how he expected to be treated, and I told him I wasn't going to say anything
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to him off the record.I told him he wasn't going to hear anything from me in that office that I wouldn't say in a press conference. He looked at me and said, "Well Carl, it just looks bad in the newspaper when the story says, 'When confronted with the accusation that a certain thing happened, the mayor had no response.' I don't want you to be in that position." "You do what you want to do, Paul," I said, "but when they have read sufficiently that I don't have any comment, they'll know from all that I am doing otherwise that I must have sufficient reason that I'm not going to comment. But if I have to choose between this subtle blackmail of yours --" "I'm not trying to blackmail you," he interjected. "All right, I'll take that back. Let's just say the subtle suggestion that you are making that I should confide in you at the risk of some negative comments in your paper is a risk I'll take. I'm not going to talk to you off the record, and when I tell you I don't have anything more to say, then your asking the question a different way isn't going to get a different response." Lilley wasn't the only one. But I am proud to say I never pandered to the news media. I never curried their favor by slipping a reporter and exclusive to win favor with him or his paper or his broadcasting station. I respected the hard-working reporter who dug out the facts on my administration -- no matter how negative these might be. I despised the lazy and personally hostile reporter who took gossip and/or half truths and made feature stories of them. This is not to complain about the initial coverage my administration received. One habit the media people have, and it is a good one, is to give any new administration -- and this is true at all levels of government -- time to get its house in order. The reporters know where the weak spots are, where the trouble lies, but they don't parade them to the public. At first. This is called the honeymoon. The ending of this honeymoon is gradual, just as it is with most marriages. But with us it was different. Glenville came like the cutting of a leash. In the next three and
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a half years there was almost no time that one or both newspapers did not have some kind of investigation going that concerned me or my administration. They never touched me, but it wasn't because they didn't try. Their desperate desire to get something on Stokes reached ridiculous levels. All through the fall of 1970, Toni Tucci of the Press was turning up penny-ante scandals. One time he found that one of the receptionists in my office was on the wrong payroll. We had brought her over from the Utilities Department and never changed her classification. But the Press played it on page one with banner headlines as though we were cheating the taxpayers. More troubling than these sensationalized miniscandals was the tone of the reporting after Glenville. No matter what the story, if I could be at all connected to it in any way, and if it was at all controversial or had any negative implications, there were some reporters who would manage to connect it with me. There was no way to fight against this sort of thing, and it is almost impossible to fully document. When I complained, the reporters involved quickly responded that I was shining over personal criticism. They couldn't understand that I didn't mind personal criticism in a story that was about me as a person, for something I had done, but that a story about a tax issue that attacked the validity of a tax by associating it with me was harmful journalism. In 1970, when I saw that the city was headed for financial disaster, I set up one of those "blue-ribbon" committees you need when you have to have the substantiation of impartial and expert testimony supporting what you already know has to be done. I had businessmen and bankers study the city's financial position and they came up with certain recommendations. They called for an increase of eighth tenths of one percent in the income tax. I tried my best to get the newspapers and television stations to report on the subsequent campaign for that tax fairly, without associating it with me. Sure enough, by the time the issue was through the Council, the papers had made it "Stokes's tax." They made it so that the vote on the tax was a referendum on me. The
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merits of the tax and the city's need for it were buried under the paper's personalizing its passage. Through all of this I found that I couldn't have found a better man for my press secretary than Richard Murway. He had been a prize-winning housing and urban-affairs writer of the Press, and then for more than ten years a public-relations counsel for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, which is headquartered in Cleveland. His cool collected, informal way of handling reporters was precisely what I needed, given my own flamboyance and occasionally impetuous angers. Those first months were amazing. I had set a policy right away that we wouldn't have daily formal news conferences as mayors before me had. I could see how the TV reporters had badgered Locher, making him look foolish day after day. I had no intention of allowing them to jam a microphone into my face every day and ask me what I was going to do about this terrible urban-renewal mess today that had been there for fifteen years. But, as it happened, there was so much going on for those first eight months, so many appointments, new programs and the like, that I ended up having what amounted to daily formal news conferences. We almost always had something to announce. We were working from eight in the morning until midnight or later, seven days a week. As my own pace slowed into a regular schedule I began to see how valuable Murway was, and he turned out to be one of those few people with whom I became truly close. He had the kind of loyalty that can't be bought, an essentially nonpolitical human commitment to me and what I was fighting for. Before he joined my administration, Murway would never have been picked out as a white liberal -- no marches, no sit-ins, no picketing. He was never part of any Movement. And when you compare that with his real and deep commitment, you realize that to use the label "white-liberal" on Murway would be to underestimate him. He just happens to be a fully human being. When I had a complicated story, I took it to the Plain Dealer. I don't mean there is any difference in intellect between the
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people who work for the two papers, but the Plain Dealer, as the morning paper, is geared to more in-depth reporting. They have more time. The afternoon paper is always short of time and is geared to getting the news out quickly. When we came out with Cleveland: NOW, although we told the Press it was coming, we insisted that the story go to the Plain Dealer. Budget and tax stories were better handled in the Plain Dealer. But if we had something we wanted to make sure hit hardest with the actual Cleveland resident, we took it to the Press, because it has more actual home readership within Cleveland proper. City Hall is always the source of sensational stories, but it was also true that I came along in a difficult time for the Press, a time that resulted in, I think, less accurate stories than had been the rule in the past. The city was losing population, and the Press was trying to compete with the Plain Dealer for the suburban circulation, which meant getting editions out sooner in the afternoon for home delivery in outlying districts. That meant earlier deadlines for the reporters, and consequently less time for checking facts. One thing I leaned through my dealings with the newspapers, and with the television stations, is that they squabble among themselves as much as those who are in government. Their internal politics are worse than professional politics because they are not practiced in public. They are shielded by the corporate veil. Their petty rivalries are always causing friction between officials and editors. The latter keep count on how many stories their opposition gets from an administration, and if the balance shifts slightly they come whining. Over the four years I was in office, the relative positions of the two papers changed. The Press lost circulation, advertising and its political dominance. The Plain Dealer became the largest paper in the state. Although the Plain Dealer is the largest paper, it has never been able to insert itself into a truly powerful position in the city. The man who is at the top of the Plain Dealer, Tom Vail, is a patrician who doesn't really care about running the newspaper in a personal way -- at least not beyond having his own picture in
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it. He has little contact with the people under him and no contact with the average citizenry. While the Plain Dealer, like any large newspaper, has the power to arouse people, mostly in a negative way, and while it can further the careers of certain persons through favorable and certainly less than objective news coverage, the paper still lacks the punch needed to impress or bully politicians and institutions in the way the Press once did. I had to deal with editors Thomas Boardman at the Press and Vail at the Plain Dealer -- the men at the top. Just as they had to come to me, not to my commissioners, I had to go to them. At times, negative times, this was efficient enough. The man at the top can get his operatives to stop doing what they are doing much easier than he can get them to do something new or against their grain. The actual control of the coverage of events was in the hands of middle-management people, men like city editor Ted Princiotto at the Plain Dealer and Dick Campbell at the Press. They operated almost without interference. The men at the top can set policy and determine overall operation, but the men who sits at the city desk and selects the news, the reporter who comes in with what he thinks is news, the way he writes the news, how it is rewritten, what headlines goes on the story, what stories are assigned and to whom, the reasons they are or are not assigned -- this is how the day-to-day management of the news occurs. Newspapers tent to think of themselves as special. They think they are different from and better than other institutions. They're not. They can be as internally corrupt as any police force. As in any other institution, the operation can fall into the hands of persons who know how to grab and hold. If those persons lack a certain understanding of life outside the newsroom, if they are bigoted or just dumb, then it will be reflected in the newspaper, just as control of a police department by brutal, insensitive and bigoted minds results in a certain kind of police department. The individual reporter can be just as undisciplined and corrupt as the individual cop on the beat. Each has been known to take a bribe and give a knee in the groin. Although I, as an elected official, was often unable to make a specific police chief or a
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particular policeman perform properly, Tom Vail, and Tom Boardman could make individual reporters or managing editors perform according to their policy. The men at the top can fire reporters, provided they can outmaneuver the Newspaper Guild. Unless the reporter is willing to cooperate they cannot tell him what to write and how to write it. But they can certainly determine whether what the reporter writes will be printed or not. To understand my feeling about some of the media you have to understand the case of Doris O'Donnell, who in 1967 was a reporter for the Plain Dealer. If she had been merely an exceptionally biased reporter, understood by the editors over her, she would have been no problem. Any editor in his right mind would have kept her from stores that involved the police and/or the black community, let alone the more sophisticated problems. But her sympathy for the police view of the world was rewarded at the Plain Dealer. Miss O'Donnell regards herself as a friend of the Negro, and to defend her case she will point to stories she has written. I would point to the same stories in attacking her racism. She was generally regarded as the Plain Dealer's chief investigative reporter, mainly because she was given the juiciest assignments by the managing editor, Ted Princiotto, who, I have to believe, shared her views. In 1967 I learned that she had compiled a dossier on me and, after being unable to convince the Plain Dealer to run it as a news story, had taken it to my opponent, Seth Taft. Taft refused to use her material. Two nights later the issue came to a head. Each night the Plain Dealer assigned a reporter to each candidate. On this night, Doris O'Donnell was assigned to Seth Taft. We were to appear together at one point in the evening at a neighborhood center. Taft made his remarks and left. However, Miss O'Donnell did not leave with Taft, as she was assigned to do. She waited until the end of my remarks. After the question-and-answer period, as I came off the stage and walked down the aisle, shaking hands and singing autographs, a group formed. Miss O'Donnell moved to the front of the group and said, "Mr. Stokes. I am Doris O'Donnell from the Plain Dealer." "Yes, Miss O'Donnell?"
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"You know me -- you can call me Doris." "No, Miss O'Donnell, I do not know you. I am quite familiar with your articles, but to my knowledge this is the first time I've seen you. I'll call you Miss O'Donnell." Then she said, as best I can recall, "Well, that doesn't make any difference, but I do want to ask you a question. Isn't it true that you have been married three times?" As she asked the question, her voice rose. Most of the crowd around us heard her clearly. One man said, "What the hell do we care if he has been married three times. Why don't you leave the man alone?" "Yes, Miss O'Donnell, I have been married three times," I said, "but twice to the same girl." You may recall that the first Shirley and I were married first secretly, then later in a big ceremony. At that, we moved on out of the building. But as we reached the sidewalk, she came up again and in a loud voice said, "Mr. Stokes, isn't it true that the man buried in Highland View Cemetery under the name Charles Stokes is not really your father? That, in fact, Charles Stokes was married to your mother but she had you by another man?" "Well, Miss O'Donnell, you have now gone far enough to demonstrate to me that you have a purpose in these questions and remarks other than news reporting. When you have proceeded to literally calling me a bastard child and defamed my mother's name, it is time for me to take that kind of behavior up with your editor, and I will do that the first thing in the morning." "That is your privilege," she said, and walked off. I didn't see her again that night. The next morning I called Tom Vail and asked to see him that afternoon. When we met, he had with him Tom Guthrie, his assistant, and William Ware, the executive editor. They told me Miss O'Donnell had reported essentially the conversation we had had the night before. They said she was unable to give them any explanation of why she had asked me those questions, nor was she able to account for
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staying to question me rather than leaving with Seth Taft, as she had been assigned to do. They assured me she would be taken off the campaign and given other assignments. And she was. "But why did she do it?" I asked Vail. "Why does she have it in for me?" Vail said he didn't know, but "perhaps she is going through the change." I then turned to Ware and asked approximately the same thing, wanting to know why, even if she was going through 'the change,' as they called it, I was the target. "When a woman is going through the change," he said, "anyone is subject to her wrath." He said it in a light tone -- clearly he did not want to deal with the real issues of his own responsibilities. The important things to note is that none of them even tried to deny that she was out to get me. When the issues was raised again later with these men, as unfortunately it had to be, they gave similar answers, never once denying the fact that it was a personal vendetta. By March of 1968, Vail and I had established a relationship that included regular almost weekly meetings. Sometimes the meetings would be just the two of us, sometimes the meetings would include my directors or some of the Plain Dealer's editors. This gradually became more elaborate, and my summer it had developed to the point of having regular lunches in a dining room off Vail's office. The point was to keep the top brass at the Plain Dealer apprised of our programs and problems to see how the paper could help. Police Chief Michael J. Blackwell and Safety Director Joseph McManamon were beginning to have conflicts. McManamon was trying to get started on a reorganization of his department along the lines of the Little Hoover Commission recommendations of 1966 (some of which had been suppressed by the news media when pressure was brought by former Police Chief Richard B. Wagner; more on this later). Then, after Glenville, the problems became more acute and unavoidable. Vail at one point asked if there was anything his paper could do to help with the police problems. I told him yes -- if he could get someone
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to really write about the malingering, the continued protection of numbers and policy operators, the nearly complete work stoppage the police were engaged in after the Glenville shoot-out. I confessed to them that this was the toughest part of city government to handle and that I wanted to try some reforms but couldn't do anything without public support. They all expressed understanding and agreement. Vail suggested that they run a series of articles in which reporters would go out and really talk with people in the community about the problems they had with police and also talk with people in the administration. I said fine, I'd have Frank Moss, a black assistant to the safety director and a veteran policeman, available, because the reporters ought to talk with him and to the people at the Afro Set, a nationalist group. And they ought to talk to the street club leaders in Mount Pleasant and Glenville and to Louise Craig and Appalachian white leaders over on the West Side and some other Spanish-speaking persons in the projects on the near West Side. They agreed to these suggestions and said they'd put a number of reporters on the story. "We'll get this police thing out on the table," Vail said. The articles were done by a group of reporters, but the group was headed by Doris O'Donnell. It proved to me damaging and vicious. And this came from the top. You had to believe the man at the top okayed this series before it ran. Now, I have no problem taking personal criticism. But when they consciously went to the men whom I knew to be the most blatantly anti-Stokes police in the department, permitted them to spew out their hostilities toward me on the front page, they did a great injustice to the city. It was the most damnable single act I've known the Plain Dealer to participate in. Tom Vail knew Doris O'Donnell's personal hostility. The articles had one purpose -- to show the hatred and animosity the Police Department had for Carl Stokes and for what he was trying to do. I called Vail when the first article appeared, and I asked him why he was permitting this kind of article to be written. He said, "Carl, this is the series we talked about."
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"No," I said, "it's not the series we talked about. We talked about your reporters going to sources in the community and getting from them information about the police, what they are and are not doing. There's not one word in the stories from the people in the community. All this is is a sheer late piece, a forum for the police. This doesn't have any similarity to what we talked about. And as I look at the list of reporters who are supposed to be working on it, I know it is not true. I don't see anything in the article that reflects what Bob McGruder knows, for instance." "Well, that's going to be in the articles yet to come." "Tom, let me tell you this. This is not what we agreed upon. You are doing a terrible disservice to the city. When you put Doris O'Donnell in charge, you knew her own hostility to me, you knew her close working relationship with the police. I have to believe the person giving direction to this mess is Doris O'Donnell." "I think it is a good series," he said. The community, white and black, did not think it was good. The Plain Dealer was picketed and angry delegations of neighborhood people descended on Vail's office. Western Reserve University Civil Violence Center described the articles as "effectively keeping the vendetta going between the races." That was the end of my talks with Vail. I began to realize something. When you have sat with people for some hours, as I had done, and then they come out with this, and you think back to other incidents, you realize you aren't going to prevail over their own personal attitudes and the institutional failures of the newspaper. You stand in the position of compromising yourself if you continue trying to work with them. At that point I began to withdraw. My relations with the media became only what were formally necessary. This is, unfortunately, not yet the end of the Doris O'Donnell story. Even though she had been taken off covering me personally, she resurrected her campaign in the city room when she learned I was going to run for reelection in 1969. I don't know
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whose idea it was, whether hers or theirs, but she left the Plain Dealer in September 1969 and went on the staff of the small Willoughby News-Herald, in a suburb in an adjoining county. Within three months, she and he husband, Howard Beaufait, who was then a News-Herald copy editor, were in the Bahamas, trying to trace me to some shady land deal or tie me in with some rackets figures. Now, the paper she worked for has no more interest in Cleveland coverage than it does in Pittsburgh -- certainly not enough to dispatch two staff members on an expensive fishing expedition fifteen hundred miles away. If either of the Cleveland dailies wanted to spend that kind of money on that kind of snooping, it would be at least plausible, and in face one of them did, and at the same time. The Plain Dealer sent its City Hall reporter, Bob McGruder, and its then chief investigative reporter, Donald Bartlett, to the Bahamas at the same time that Mr. and Mrs. Beaufait were there. When the Plain Dealer reporters returned, they wrote a long memo explaining that they hadn't been able to tie me to anything, and there was not basis for a story. That was true, and subsequent events proved that their investigation had been more intensive than Miss O'Donnell's. On one occasion the two teams crossed paths, although Miss O'Donnell later denied knowing that the Plain Dealer was there. The absence of any evidence tying me to anything in the Bahamas did not stop Miss O'Donnell. The News-Herald published a four part series, bannered across the top of page one. The story exploited as it legitimate basis a rewriting of what had already appeared in several national publications, that rackets money was involved in expanding the casino and hotel industry on the resort islands. But then the articles were given a veneer of references to me, insinuating without ever saying so that I had ties to these people and, therefore, shady investments. It was the yellowest piece of nonreporting I ever saw. The articles would repeat rumors about me and then go on to say that the rumors, although they couldn't be proved, certainly could be true because there was an "avalanche of well concealed real estate
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transactions" on Grand Bahama. The articles were full of unattributed remarks and 'whispers' none of which went so far as to tie me specifically to anyone or any deal. The sole basis of my association with the Bahamas that they could point to were my two trips there, each for no more than three days, and one trip to Miami in the three years I had been in office. Miss O'Donnell confused my Miami trip with the others and without investigation further assumed it had been to the Bahamas. Without revealing in the articles exactly how many times I had been there, she referred to the resort areas as my "home away from home." I promptly filed a libel suit for two million dollars. Here are some of the sadder passages from Miss O'Donnell's deposition. She is being questioned by my lawyer, Kenneth Weinberg.
Q. Did you find any evidence that you included in your story that Stokes owns and interest in any business in Grand Bahama Island? A. Not that I could determine... Q. Did you find any evidence that you included in your story that Carl Stokes was connected with the Mafia threat that you said runs through the island? A. No, sir. Q. Well, then, why was Carl Stokes included in this story at all? I don't understand. If you found no evidence connecting him with the subject matter of the story, why was he put in the story at all? A. My assignment was to go down and look around, to see where the public officials spend some of their time. He was one of the public officials from this area who spent time down there. Q. He was the only one? A. No. There are other people. I could name hundreds of people who were there. Q. He is the only one you mention in your story. A. He is a public figure. The other people would not be significant.
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Q. As a matter of fact, that was really your assignment, wasn't it, to go down and write a story about Carl Stokes? A. No. It was to go down and look around the island. Q. And see how you could involve Carl Stokes in the Grand Bahama? A. No, that is not true. Q. That was mentioned, wasn't it? A. Among other things. Q. Yes. A. Because he is a public official. Q. Right. As a matter of fact, what you set out to do in this story was to get something on Carl Stokes, is that right? A. No, sir. Q. Do you like Carl Stokes? A. I have no strong about the man. He is just another politician. Q. Have you ever written any derogatory stories about Carl Stokes? A. I have written news stories about the Mayor as a public official, about his public acts. Q. If they came out derogatorily, that is not your fault, is that right? A. The matters and the news incidents fall where they are. Q. The truth speaks for itself, right? A. The reporting speaks for itself.
At another point in her deposition she had this to say: Q. Was there any particular reason for having Carl Stokes's name prominently featured in the first article and virtually ignored in the balance? A. Well, I think the first paragraph explains it, that this information had been given from many Negroes about his investment in a condominium.
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Q. Well, it doesn't say that. It says there were whispers. A. Well, I am telling you, if you want to call them whispers, you can call them whispers. If you think telephone voices and so forth sound like whispers, I will grant you that these people whispered to me. Q. Were these anonymous calls? A. No, sir. I know who the people are. Q. They are all black? A. Ninety percent of them. Q. Were they friends of Carl Strokes? A. I have no idea. Q. Were they enemies of Carl Stokes? A. I would think they know the mayor very well. Q. Were they people who called you and told you they would help you get Carl Stokes? A. No sir. They are not that melodramatic. Q. Would you characterize your articles as melodramatic? A. No, sir. Q. Would you characterize them as truthful? A. Yes, sir. Q. Would you characterize them as innuendo? A. I characterize them as writing. Q. Fiction or nonfiction? A. Writing. Reporting. Writing. Q. But you don't care to characterize it as fiction or nonfiction? A. No, sir.
In March 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court broadened the rule protecting a newspaper from damages for the libeling of a public official. It made our case very difficult to sustain. But the News-Herald publisher, Harry Horvitz, did not want to gamble what the court might do. He offered to publish and apology if I would withdraw the suit. On May 25, 1971, the News-Herald published an apology that said: "The articles did not state, nor were they intended to convey the impression, that Mayor Stokes had any interest in any real estate or business in the Bahamas
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nor that he had any connection with any illegal activities. The News-Herald regrets if there were any interpretations to the contrary." They also had to pay the court costs, and the suit was dismissed. Within a few months thereafter, Ms. O'Donnell and her husband left the employ of the News-Herald and entered the private practice of selling real estate. In 1967, after I had been elected mayor, my press secretary Richard Murway said to me, "Newspaper men are cynical, skeptical, but they are less prejudiced than the average white Clevelander. They are going to show their lack of prejudice by covering you and your administration the same way they covered your predecessors." I remember telling him, "They shouldn't do that." The newspapers and their reporters were part of the problem. They had no understanding of how I, as a black man, had gotten elected. They had no understanding of the things I must do as a black man in power. Most of them lived in the suburbs and internally were no more free of racial prejudice and hostility toward the central city than any other white suburbanite. Neither paper had had black reporters covering their beats other than police court. Blacks in the television and radio stations were almost nonexistent prior to my election. No black person was anywhere in the policy-making, supervisory or editorial level of either paper. They had no capacity or experience with which to deal on a peer level with a black mayor. Most newspapermen are incapable of believing that they are something less than perfectly fair. They are so thin-skinned that they will not allow criticism from anyone outside their own ranks. At the slightest suggestion that they are biased, they start shouting that you are challenging their cherished right of freedom of the press. The power of a newspaper is not only awesome, it pulls itself beyond criticism. Every day in Cleveland, the daily newspapers go into the hands of three quarters of a million people at the very least. The reporters who covered, say, City Hall, sold their point of view, their stance toward Carl Stokes, to hundreds of thousands of people. But when I stood up to criticize something said about me in the newspaper, or criticized the reporter publicly
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for making wrongheaded criticism of me, I faced an immediate and unbridled rebuttal, written by that same reporter, maybe on the editorial page. He had access to the weapons. I had only my own news conference, still at the mercy of how it would be reported. You can't fight a power like that. That is, you can, but one hand is tied behind your back. Reporters know the awesome power that is in their hands. And they know, too, that they are practically immune from effective response on the part of persons they aggrieve. I think this is a dangerous condition for a society to be in. Of course, it would be more dangerous not to have newspapers, and there is the dilemma. I don't have a ready solution to the problems; I only know it is always wrong in a free society for any one institution to be totally free of control. I recall one day when I was at the Plain Dealer to see someone about something and ran into Ray Dorsey, then the paper's chief editorial writer. This was in 1970, when I had begun to fight back against the daily attack by the papers. He wanted to know why I was criticizing the Plain Dealer. I said, "I'm not here to talk about that." "You know," he said, "we've been with you, and we don't understand why you're criticizing us." "Listen," I said, "who are you that you can't be criticized, Ray? Now, don't give me a hard time. I think you were wrong in what you did on that last story. When I'm wrong you criticize me, why can't I criticize you when you're wrong?" "We're trying to do a job," he said. "I don't want to talk about it," I said. "If we start talking about it, I'm going to tell you what I think about your active soliciting of votes for Tony Calabrese to become minority leader of the Senate." Boy, did he get red. I had, as we used to say in the streets, pulled the covers off him. It took me a long time to decide to take the news media on, but once I decided, I never wavered from it and it worked. It worked for me personally, but I knew it wasn't good for the community.
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There are natural forces already there, structural inequities that militate against any substantive change under the best of circumstances. Once you take on the media too, it's all over. But when I took the media on, it was a great educational process for people. Once I was able to get my own weekly televised news conference, I was able to run those reporters out there for the public to see. They saw firsthand how most reporters ignored the substantive news and cast about for the trivia, the sensational, and that comment from which they could create a conflict with me and someone else. The black audience could also see that, other than Bob McGruder of the Plain Dealer, all the regular City Hall reporters for the papers, television and radio were white. In getting those televised weekly news conferences I took a page from the book of Mayor Henry Maier of Milwaukee, who got the educational television station to broadcast his weekly news conference. He had despaired of dealing with the press. I went Maier one better. I persuaded the news director of the Cleveland NBC affiliate, WKYC, to give me a half hour. As Murway and I kept watching the news coverage, we could see that we were constantly being covered as personalities, and that the substantive activities of the administration were being ignored. We knew we had to get direct access to the people. Our half hour followed Meet the Press on Sunday and was taped every Friday morning. The impact was great. The ministers in the black community would say from the pulpit that they were finishing early so that everyone could get home and watch the Stokes news conference. It gave us a chance to publicly question reporters like Tony Tucci from the Press, and it underlined the personal hostility in many of their stories. Bill Barrett, the television writer for the Press, was always depreciating my listen audience, saying the polka program in the same time slot was outdrawing me. Hell, I wasn't having the program for the polka dancers. I went to the television press conference not just to wage war with the press. In a half hour on television, I could get out
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what I wanted in my own words. Tell them about the substantive things we were doing. And if there was enough time, the media people could get their shots. Another aspect of my counterattack on the media was to have the Community Relations Board investigate both dailies to see what their hiring practices were. I showed the community what I charged to be the racist hiring practices of both papers. American newspapers are white owned, white run, and operated for white advertisers and white consumption. They talk to, not with, the black community. When my Community Relations Board investigated the Cleveland dailies, it found that both had less than five percent total black employment, and less than one percent at any capacity above the level of unskilled labor or clerk. If they are not doing anything about providing more jobs for qualified blacks with in their own structure, how can they be expected to be doing anything about employment practices in the community at large? How sincere can their crusades be? The most dramatic example of their attitudes came in their coverage of the riots in the late 1960s. The Kerner Commission report established that the media often contributed to the turmoil, tension and conflict of the riots themselves. Television crews even set up shots of kids throwing bricks. They overplayed, enlarged and often inflamed those tense situations. There was a great ignorance, especially among the broadcast media, about how to handle the reporting of a riot. Interestingly, the reporters who came into a city during a riot after having seen other riots were much more objective, less inflammatory, than the home-town reporters. I think this goes beyond the fact that the reporters from outside were probably the star reporters from their own newspapers and magazines and that the local reporters were merely whoever happened to be on duty. I believe it is the product of the complicated conspiracy within the local reporter's own mind-his own natural prejudices and his sympathy for the local police. I believe that one of the least understood sources of racism in the daily coverage of newspapers lies in the way newspapermen are trained to believe in
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and rely on the police. A reporter's first job at the newspaper is almost always on the police beat. On that job he learns to accept the police version of any incident. More often than not he relies on the policeman's written report. He will occasionally make phone calls to the person who was directly involved, but then only if the crime was sensational, and only if he is not close to deadline. More than that, he develops a camaraderie with some of the police, who are very good at using off-the-record conversations to compromise reporters into not using information that might cast a fishy light on their own activities. If the reporter goes on to cover the courts, he is again usually taking the police and the prosecution view of the world, a view that happens to leave out a huge and rather important chunk of reality. Keeping that chunk of reality in mind, let us look at how the politics of the police conspire with the politics of the media to keep the people from learning what crime really is and how law enforcement really isn't. As I mentioned earlier, Cleveland's civic leaders in 1966 established a Little Hoover Commission to investigate every phase of city government. The reports issued by that committee gave a relentlessly dismal picture of waste and inefficiency. With one exception, the failures of the city were laid out in the newspapers, with extended summary accounts of the findings and recommendations. There were twenty-nine reports of all phases of the government. But one, Report No. 6, on the Police Department, appeared publicly in a curious form. The first chapter laid the ground rules and the terms of the study. The rest of the chapters dealt with recommendations for a reorganization of the department. Strangely missing was the chapter that detailed the current status of the department. Even more strange, one might think, was the fact that no one found this strange. The report was done by Public Administrative Service, a private consulting, research, and publishing firm in Chicago. The Cleveland study was headed by Dr. George D. Eastman, a senior staff member of the firm and a former police chief of Seattle. As
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originally done, the report included as its second chapter a fifteen-page indictment of the department as it was being run. It is worth mentioning here that the chapter said Cleveland's crime-reporting procedures were so sloppy and inadequate that it would be impossible to know how bad the city's crime problem was. "The result is that literally thousands of complaints are not formally recorded and many received are not properly classified," according to the report. Even so, while the city lost 5.8 percent of its population in five years, the rate of major crimes rose more than eighty percent. "This is, of course, an almost unbelievable change," the report said. Worse, the rate of clearing up cases through arrests were "so far below national averages that they are cause for serious concern." Vice repression activities, it said, "are not aggressive, consistent, nor effective." Of traffic control, the report said that the city in 1965 "had the worst traffic accident record of many years and apparently, enforcement-wise, did the least about it." It is said the management of the department was a shambles.
It added that some of the commanding officers "could not fully define their own responsibilities, let alone those of subordinates." The problems of community relations, the report said,
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The report found that beat patterns had not changed over the years "in spite of drastically changed conditions." It said the patrols provided no real support to the city traffic enforcement needs. Patrol officers on the average took only one enforcement action every two months. "Bureau offices this consistently ignore violations committed in their presence; the natural result is non-compliance and disrespect by the motoring public." The report stated that "lack of morale and discipline are evidenced by the wearing of untidy, unkempt, and non-standard apparel, officers sleeping on duty in two-man cars and in building offices, particularly in the jail, and drinking in public places while on duty; and improper 'punishment assignments' to certain activities aggravate the situation." It went on to score the promotion procedures, which were based mainly on seniority and marksmanship. I remember that Chief Wagner's reputation at the time as a great administrator came from the fact that he was known as the best shot in the department. The report also showed that the intelligence range of recruits just barely hit the national average, and each recruit class for the preceding two years had included appointees with intelligence quotients at ninety or below. It is policy, unfortunate enough in this case, to circulate advance copies of such reports to the top people -- the commission, the mayor and his cabinet. Chief Richard Wagner violently objected to the findings of chapter two and reportedly demanded that Mayor Locher and the Little Hoover Commission persuade the editors of the daily newspapers not to print that chapter. I don't know who did what. All I know is that chapter two was not published by either paper.
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