Grazergate, the epilogue

We find ourselves in a world continually threatened by disasters poltical, economic and environmental, yet the L.A. Times, already publishing two or three Calendar sections a day, feels that it is acceptable to turn over the opinion section to a Hollywood guest editor. I think that potential conflict of interest due to a romantic relationship is the least of our worries here. However, I wonder if the real reason for not printing the section is that the Hollywood guy turned out to be better at making movies than journalism, and that the product did not meet even the low standards of the current L.A. Times. Alas, we will never know.

I am dissappointed with this news for a few reasons. First of all, because I am a fan of Mr. Martinez -- enjoying the opinion page he edits more than I used to several years ago. I have learned quite a bit from it and appreciated his efforts to make it thoughtful and not predictable. I am a lifetime fan of his predecessor Michael Kinsley so my loyalty to Mr. Martinez didn't come easily but was more than earned.

I also have had the good fortune to see Mr. Martinez in person a few times and found him both impressive and having the ideal disposition for one in the position he held. Best-selling author James Collins calls the ideal leader one who has "willfull humility" -- a person who is ambitious for his venture (the opinion page in this case) but who pushes his own ego aside as much as possible in the betterment of that venture. I saw Mr. Martinez run a Zocalo panel discussing whether immigrants were the cause of lost jobs to Angelenos and was struck by how didn't feel the need to display his own thoughts and show off his insights (which is unusual and makes an ideal moderator). I was further struck at this event by his generosity of spirit -- a rare ability to rephrase a questioner's unfortunate wording or speechifying and turn it into a representative point of view that could be reflected on and responded to.

In terms of the specific opinion page editorship it seems to me much ado about nothing. Putting aside whatever one's views of Mr. Grazer, he has been enormously successful in the entertainment business so the fact that someone who works for / with him has a personal relationship with Mr. Martinez isn't particularly relevant to me. Perhaps if Ms. Mullens had been asked to edit the Sunday section I might understand. However, whatever relationship Mr. Martinez had indirectly or directly with Mr. Grazer is not especially relevant to me given that Mr. Grazer's bona fides are rock solid even if he's not a professional journalist (which is partly what would have made this effort interesting).

What a shame for LA and the LA Times that we are losing Mr. Martinez.

I wrote this article in 2002 for the late, great business satire site The Walnut. Pretty amazing how well it's held up:

Tribune Co. Imposes Employee Celibacy

Chicago -- Responding to a long-ago sexual episode involving a star columnist for the Chicago Tribune, that newspaper’s parent company has imposed a blanket policy of celibacy on its 4,500 print and electronic media employees.

The Chicago-based Tribune Co. -- which in addition to that city’s largest newspaper owns 11 other metropolitan dailies and 24 television stations -- imposed the zero-tolerance policy on sexual relations to quash the risk its editorial employees could enter into a conflict of interest.

“There’s a distinct possibility that someone who has sex with one of our reporters or editors could later wind up reading that employee’s newspaper or watching their news broadcast,” said John W. Madigan, the Tribune Co.’s chairman and chief executive officer. “That’s simply unacceptable.We have our ethics to maintain.”

Mr. Madigan added that the enterprise of news-gathering should take precedence over anything else in a journalist’s life. “A hard-working reporter has no business having or even thinking about sex,” he said. “Does it look like I would do something like that?”

Mr. Madigan indicated the new policy was instituted after an episode involving longtime Tribune columnist Bob Greene. Mr. Greene resigned earlier this month after his editors received an anonymous e-mail chronicling a sexual encounter in the late 1980s between him and a woman in her late teens who was the subject of one of his columns at that time. The episode ended Mr. Greene’s 24-year career at the newspaper.

“It doesn’t matter that what Bob Greene did was legal. It doesn’t matter if it was on his own time. It doesn’t matter if the column he wrote was completely accurate and of interest to its readers,” said Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski. “What does matter is that we fully control the lives of all our employees, even the ones whose writing actually attracts an audience.”

Ms. Lipinski said the removal of Mr. Greene was far more clear-cut than how the paper dealt with legendary columnist Mike Royko. Mr. Royko, who died in 1997, had been arrested for drunken driving in 1994 and at the time made remarks virulently disparaging minorities and gays. His columns of that period were riddled with sexist remarks and contained numerous factual errors. Mr. Royko kept his job even after the Wall Street Journal chronicled his behavior in a front-page feature in July 1995.

“Mike Royko had a right to cause accidents driving drunk and libel anyone he wanted, so long as he didn’t sleep with them,” Ms. Lipinski said. “Having a chronic drinking problem and a big mouth has always been okay in our business – everyone just needs to know where that mouth has been.”

The Tribune Co’s move was applauded by a variety of journalism scholars. “Reporters must be completely perfect at all times,” said M. Richard Mabry, executive director of the Point-A-Finger Institute, a Cleveland-based think-tank that closely monitors the personal lives of the nation’s more than 20,000 working journalists. “Otherwise, they risk losing their credibility. As a result, the American public will hate and distrust them even more than they already do.”

However, financial analysts who cover the Tribune Co. were less sure how the new policy would affect future earnings. They noted that companies instituting similar celibacy policies in the past have met with mixed success. “An enterprise seething with sexual tension is going to have its eyes locked on just about anything except the bottom line.” said Allen Hagel, chief economist for Haymarket Securities, a Chicago investment banking firm. “In fact, the only organization that’s had any success with celibacy in the long run is the Catholic Church, and they’ve been a not-for-profit for years now.”

The no-sex policy was met with grumbling by Tribune Co. personnel, but not a single one has resigned as of yet, according to Mr. Madigan, who added that the company would assist them by installing banks of cold water-only showers in its employee fitness centers.

Indeed, Tribune employees interviewed by The Walnut indicated they would tough it out.

“I worked for more than a decade making less than $500 a week, lived in six different cities and cover public meetings that last well into the morning hours,” said a reporter for Newsday, a Long Island, N.Y. daily owned by Tribune. “Believe me, giving up sex is no big deal. It’s one less thing to worry about.”

However, an editor with the Los Angeles Times, another Tribune newspaper, expressed mild disappointment. “My husband and I were going to try and begin starting a family later this year,” she said. “I guess we’ll have to look into adoption, but even then I’m worried that I might be breaking a company rule.”

Another Times employee, a reporter, believed the policy violated his civil rights, but felt there was little he could do about it.

“I wanted to write a letter to the editor to complain, but I’m worried that expressing an opinion may compromise my journalistic objectivity,”he said. “You could lose your job doing that.”

I hate your commie-lib newspaper and especially the opinion section, but I have to rise to your defense in this particular case. Even though Brian Grazer is probably even worse of a leftist that you people, it would still have been fascinating to read OpEd pieces written by him and the people in his circle of friends. The kinds of criticisms that have been leveled at you are absurd, and likewise the supposed conflict of interest sounds pretty flimsy to me. To anyone outside the MoveOn crowd, the LA Times is hopelessly dishonest anyway, so your minor (or non-existant in my view) transgression pales to insignificance against the Times's pattern of openly lying in persuit of advocacy politics.

At least I could have had my views insulted by someone who is genuinely entertaining (like Grazer et al), instead of the buch of whiny pantywaists who now control your festering newspaper (until the blogosphere and Craigslist finishes putting it out of business, anyway).

Warm personal regards,
Gary Watson
Calabasas CA

Character doesn't matter...nah.

What a mess. As soon as I saw the first ad bragging about Grazer as a guest editor, I thought what BS is this? I don't want a celebrity guest editor. I want to read interesting opinion pieces by the likes of people like Patt Morrison and Joel Stein, not some crap by pseudo writers. Even though I think the paper leans too far left and has been on a downward spiral, it's the only paper in town. Please do not spoil it even more by pandering to people under 30 with the new Image section which stinks and the grazergate fiasco.

I can't say that I approved of Mr. Martinez' ill-considered guest editor scheme, or his management of the editorial pages overall. And I certainly don't approve of Mr. Hiller's lax management skills that gave the go ahead to Martinez and then pulled the rug out from under him. But the kernal of truth that may make the whole affair worthwhile is this:

"I will not be lectured on ethics by some ostensibly objective news reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects, or who have suggested that our editorial page coordinate more closely with the newsroom's agenda."

Martinez' observation about the Times' reporters and his revelation regarding the incestuous relationship between the news division and the opinion pages. is a more scandalous affair than the one between Martinez and Mullins.

Visit News Corpse, the Internet's Chronicle of Media Decay.

Gary Watson,You are living in the wrong country. Immediately move to the first dictatorship that will have you, and start your own Fox news/Pravda paper to enjoy.You are what is destroying our great democracy which is based on LIBERAL precepts that you are too dimwitted to comprehend.
As this op-Ed scandal unfolds,I beg the great Ron Burkle,Eli Broad and David Geffen to acquire this once great paper and restore it to the journalistic integrity that we readers deserve. Give me back my OP-Ed and Book Review!
Bar Rachel

Still LMAO!

I am an L.A. Times subscriber who has been on the edge of dropping the paper. The gradual movement of the Editorial page to a more balanced view from leftist is the only thing keeping me aboard. I have a tentative developing trust that the paper might look at both sides of an issue fairly.

That there may or may not have been a conflict of interest in this matter is important, but not the major point.

It is ridiculous that Mr. Grazier, a Hollywood producer, would be given control of the Editorial page and influence it's direction. He is an entertainer not a journalist and has no established credibility to frame and direct opinion for the citizens of Los Angeles.

Hey Martinez! When you go work for your girlfriend's company next month, take Joel Stein with you. With both of you gone I might start reading the opinion section again.

Martinez always struck me as one of those annoying, elitist Ivy League types (you know what I mean), but as an LA journalist myself, I find this episode laughable. There's no actual reason to disbelieve him when he says that his adulterous affair played no role in the Grazer decision — especially since it also appears that he disclosed this relationship repeatedly, to Hiller and others. (To kill the section now, Hiller, is just slimy, because you knew about it all along.) The comparison to the Staples Center debacle is a joke that is ridiculous on its face. I'm all too familiar with self-righteous journalists who prefer to go on witch hunts rather than pursue actual news stories (because I am occasionally one of them; hey — no one's perfect, a byline is a byline is an laobserved link), and it's hard to believe that Martinez has actually fallen victim to this idiocy. The reporters just see it as another scalp. There is a clear distinction between provocative, uncompromising journalism and eating one's own, and the LA Times has allowed that line to blur beyond recognition. Hey, Times newsroom, think about it: Journalism is one the most oversexed professions there is, so if you start peeking into bedrooms ....

Anyhow, you've got to ask yourself, considering the many stories that have appeared in the paper over the past several months: Why are they writing about themselves so much, anyway? Like when the whole Baquet thing was going down? Talk about a conflict of interest! Jim Rainey and his editors should work some leather off their shoes and cover a story that's not happening down the hall. In the end, Martinez will end up back at the NY Times, or whatever, and the torch-shakers will remain on Spring St. publicly wringing their hands over Tribune and praying for Eli Broad's bid to be accepted. Like that would solve anything. Sad.