As the duty of journalism is to service the people’s so-called right to know, a good way to embarrass a newspaper is to point out something it didn’t get around to telling them. Let’s say a daily paper writes a lot of stories about a hot local debate but doesn’t make it clear the coverage is being paid for by rich men deeply involved in the debate and all on the same side. That’s a no-no.
Perhaps. As it happens, Broad is a champion of charter schools not just in LA but far beyond. Every year, for example, his Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation names the nation’s top public charter school system and awards it $250,000; this year the Broad Foundation chose the Noble Network of Charter Schools, which runs 17 schools in Chicago. Yet if the Broad name rings a bell in Chicago it’s not because he favors charter schools (which the Tribune editorial page does as well). It’s because he’s periodically in our headlines for his lusting to buy the Times from Tribune Publishing. Recently, it was Rupert Murdoch tweeting that the Times was about to go to Broad; three months ago it was Times publisher Austin Beutner trying to midwife a sale to Broad and others until Tribune Publishing fired him.
But full disclosure obliged the Times to identify Roberts as a member of the board of Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, an LA charter network. Alliance made headlines in the Times when it was taken to court by the teachers’ union over the tactics it used to fight teachers attempting to unionize. (It was an ally of those teachers who originally complained to me about the Times‘s conflicts of interest.) Full disclosure further obliged the Times to report that investment banker Frank Baxter, whose Baxter Family Foundation also helps fund Education Matters, chairs the Alliance board. The Washington Post observed that throughout its coverage of the union battle, the Times failed to say so.
Now we come to the Chicago Tribune. Stories about labor conflict at an LA charter won’t interest Chicago, but the Tribune linked to a story Resmovits wrote in October about a couple of teachers who were starting up a political action committee to support “friendlier, softer” education issues, the kind both unions and “education reformers” could get behind. But these reformers, unnamed by the story, would be Broad, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and other heavyweights. The story named Howard Dean, a former Democratic presidential candidate and a former head of the Democratic National Committee, as an ally of the teachers, and quoted him as saying he used to be a “total union person” but lately has had second thoughts.The comment suited the education reformers’ agenda; is that why it was there? “Who knows?” said my source, the union friend. “How can anyone trust the LA Times or the Trib any longer as an honest broker on this issue?”
