Something alarming is happening at the Post-Dispatch and unfortunately has been happening for some time. Some would say we have belabored the Post’s sycophantic advocacy for Mayor Francis G. Slay, though the shameful racial disparities on the paper’s editorial and advisory boards and its apparent willingness to let Slay’s lobbyists try to drum up money for the Post from the state Legislature should give pause even to readers who long ago quit worrying about how a respected leader like Fire Chief Sherman George was handled by Slay and the Post.
Especially in light of the mayor’s stated financial advocacy for the daily paper covering his reelection campaign, the Post’s heavy-handed treatment of Sylvester Brown’s alleged ethics violation is dubious. Brown was dismissed for an alleged violation of the paper’s ethics policy that has not been discussed or defended in detail in the Post. Brown’s argument that he had never written about the organization that subsidized his travel to Washington, D.C. and had no plans to write about it for the Post certainly deserved a better hearing from his editors than locking him out of the building. When one considers that Brown is the paper’s only African-American Metro columnist or reporter and a stern, unrelenting critic of Slay, his dismissal becomes a major embarrassment for the only daily paper reporting on a majority-black city.
The mindset of the hard-pressed Post leadership is best glimpsed in its latest mailer from the Circulation Department that has been appearing in mailboxes in West County and South County ZIP codes. “Our Coverage is Right on the Money (in more ways than one),” screams the headline. A list of six bulleted points includes one boasting of publishing “conservative columnists” and another of providing “conservative, relevant view points.” We get the message: in a lunge for desperately needed circulation revenue, the Post wants to be seen by a targeted demographic group as moving to the conservative right.
There is an even more troubling message in this mailer for the black community and, in fact, the majority community of this metropolitan area, which voted for Barack Obama by a large margin. This circulation mailer reprints excerpts of a half-dozen opinion pieces and cartoons that slam the new president – who is, of course, the nation’s first African-American chief executive. A paper whose editors can find little wrong with Francis Slay is whispering to conservative white readers in the outlying suburbs that they also don’t see much good in Barack Obama.
We take this as evidence that the Post is abandoning not only its noble editorial mission, defined long ago by Joseph Pulitzer, but its black readers – and its non-black readers who value fairness and trust the direction of the new president. To say that these decisions are grave errors for the Post-Dispatch is to state a fact observed in its disappearing newsroom staff and diminished newspaper. St. Louis deserves and needs a major daily newspaper, but the present course of the Post will see more people looking elsewhere to find news and perspectives it trusts.