It probably wont get the man his job back, but Sylvester Brown Jr. staged a compelling and effective piece of community political theater Monday evening in response to his dismissal by the Post-Dispatch.
He stood and read prepared remarks in the auditorium at the Gateway Classic, having been rained out of the intended location on the street across from the Post offices. The community – literally – had his back, as a diverse group of some 40 people stood behind him as he spoke.
Glimpsed in his crowd of supporters: Percy Green II, Jamala Rogers, state Rep. Jamilah Nasheed, the Rev. Tommie Pierson, John Chasnoff, Eric E. Vickers, Dawn Fuller, Bill Ramsey, Zaki Baruti and state Rep. Maria Chappelle-Nadal.
Justin Meehan stood, front and center, holding a sign that read, “Cancel my Post-Dispatch subscription now.” His hand-lettered sign also identified the Post as a paper “where no news is good news.”
When Sylvester had concluded his powerful speech and hugged his two daughters (one of whom quietly wept throughout), he turned to his supporters. Fittingly, the first person he embraced was former Fire Chief Sherman George.
Brown has said he fought often with his editors over what he saw as the paper’s limited and one-sided coverage of George’s struggles against the administration of Mayor Francis G. Slay. Chief George has said that Sylvester’s columns about the controversy provided the only fair coverage he received in the Post.
Brown’s speech – posted in full on his new blog at www.sylvesterbrownjr.blogspot.com – provided a detailed account of his demise at the Post and a passionate rejection of the Post’s stated version of why he was dismissed.
“Last week, I learned through my union, the St. Louis Newspaper Guild, that upper management at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had decided to discharge me for violating the company’s ethics policy,” Brown said.
“On March 27, I was told by upper management to leave the building, pending an investigation. I have not been allowed access since – not even to gather my personal belongings or to shake hands with the colleagues and friends I’ve made over the past nearly six years.”
Post Editor Arnie Robbins and Managing Editor Pam Maples gave management’s side of the story briefly in Tuesday’s paper in a brief note to readers.
“Brown accepted the offer of a free trip to Washington D.C. from supporters of a group that he had written about in a column the day before. The column, ‘Metro East leaders head to D.C. to tout E-Macrosystem,’ ran on March 26. Brown also had not notified his editors of his trip or the offer.”
That column describes a renewable energy project that East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks Jr. and Brooklyn Mayor Nathaniel O’Bannon were traveling to Washington to put before President Barack Obama. Brown told the American that when Post editors first confronted him about his own trip to the nation’s capital they asked if either Parks or O’Bannon had funded it. “It was hard for them to get past the ‘black columnist, black mayor’ thing,” Brown told us.
In fact, the group that offered to pay his way to Washington is the Summit Council for World Peace, which is not mentioned in his column. Brown said he paid his own way and had receipts to prove it when his editors confronted him, though he did have at that time an (uncashed) reimbursement check for his travel expenses.
A former editor at the Post, who didn’t wish to be named, confirmed that the Post does strictly forbid its journalists to accept subsidized travel. “Post reporters can’t even go on junkets, though we would print wire copy written by writers who went on those same junkets,” this editor said.
The editor said there was one prior exception: “Jerry Berger sort of got grandfathered in. Wherever Jerry went, it was expected he wasn’t paying for anything. It was a gossip column, and I guess it was accepted that that was the price for having that particular column.”
Brown admits that he accepted the reimbursement check from the Summit Council for World Peace, but he insists that the ethics policy forbidding subsidized travel does not apply to this case. He had not written about the Summit Council for World Peace and claims he had no intention of writing about their efforts for the Post. He said the trip was intended as research for a book, not a newspaper column.
Part of Brown’s anger and frustration stems from a sense that his editors did not give him a fair hearing but instead seized an opportunity to drive him out of the paper.
“That supposed trained management would insinuate that a one day plane trip, where I spent more time in layovers than I did in Washington, was some sort of pay-off for covering an already written story is beyond logic,” Brown said in his speech.
Integrity and credibility
Much of the crowd erupted when Brown finally got around to what most of the activists assembled expected was the real reason for the Post dismissing the paper’s lone black Metro reporter or columnist, who dared to criticize Mayor Slay in harsh terms.
Brown said, “Perhaps it has something to do with the hasty meeting called after certain folks aligned with Mayor Francis Slay, a member of your community advisory board, issued threats to the newspaper after I wrote about his campaign and administration’s thug-like behavior.”
Brown did not elaborate, but a friend of his who saw an editor from the American at his press conference said, “I’ve got something for you,” then later forwarded an email Sylvester had sent her at the time of that meeting.
“Rainford and Slay demanded a public apology. They’re so desperate, they accused me of comparing Slay to a ‘murderer (Tupac)’ and slamming the Catholic Church,” Brown wrote her in the email.
“We’re actually supposed to have a meeting today to discuss future coverage of Slay (can you believe that?). I told my bosses that they need to grow a spine and stop letting the Slay thugs intimidate them. I suspect today’s meeting will be quite contentious because I plan to keep hitting Slay. I’m not drinking his Kool-AID like some folks at the PD. If they want to play hard ball, I for one, say ‘bring it on!’”
Slay’s spokesman Ed Rhode did not respond to a request for comment. A message left on Slay’s chief of staff Jeff Rainford’s cell phone was not returned.
Post-Dispatch editor Arnie Robbins called the American after being emailed and asked to comment on this claim. “His dismissal was about one thing only: a violation of our ethics policy,” Robbins said of Brown. “The mayor had nothing to do with this. Nothing.”
The EYE has detailed countless instances when the Post – the city’s only daily – rushed to the defense of the mayor or his political allies. The reader’s note by Robbins and Maples about Brown’s dismissal claims, “Our integrity and our credibility with readers is (sic) of utmost importance to us,” but the people who turned out in support of Sylvester would argue that the paper’s coverage of city politics long ago abandoned “integrity” and in so doing damaged the paper’s “credibility.”
In a letter that will run in full next week, a reader of the American and the Post named Grady Brown expressed a commonly held view in the local black community. “Mr. Brown would not be silent to the corruption coming out of the Slay administration,” Grady Brown wrote of Sylvester. “And why should he stand silent and allow this inadequate mayor continue to run this city into the ground?”
In his recently concluded campaign for reelection, surrounded by scandals that burgeoned on his watch and announced development deals that fell through, Slay enjoyed consistent promotion and endorsement from every space in the Post except, on occasion, Sylvester’s column.
Interestingly, Brown’s editors claim he hurt the paper’s “integrity” and “credibility” by accepting a reimbursement check for travel expenses from a non-governmental body he has never written about in the paper. Yet the Post, which covers Slay in every edition, stands to benefit from Slay’s announced lobbying efforts on its behalf in Jefferson City. The mayor’s campaign website lists support for daily newspapers among his legislative priorities for this session. We are not aware of the Post declining assistance from the mayor’s lobbyists to protect its “integrity” and “credibility.”
The Post’s maintenance of these journalistic goals also is called into doubt by a promotional mailer sent to West County ZIP codes last week. The mailer boasts, “We are Right on the Money (in more ways than one)” and takes pride in the paper’s “conservative, relevant view points.” More than half of the featured headlines from recent Post coverage trash Obama. Example: “The end of Obama’s magical mystery tour” and “A study in amateurism.”
‘Seriously lacking in diversity’
As the EYE pointed out long ago, the Post’s Community Advisory Board includes Slay and Rainford but not their African-American counterparts in St. Louis County government, County Executive Charlie Dooley or his core executive staffer Mike Jones. It also includes former Police Chief Joe Mokwa and the man who demoted Sherman George (Slay’s lackey Charles Bryson, a rare black person on the board), but not former Fire Chief Sherman George.
Brown raised the Post’s worsening diversity issues in his speech on Monday, when he said, “Maybe this action is a result of the Oct. 2008 letter I sent to management warning that a newsroom, already seriously lacking in diversity at the bottom and top, could ill afford to continuously mute the most visible and consistent black voice in its employ in response to his questioning of rules and policies drafted or enforced specifically for him.”
This raises a question we asked Arnie Robbins.
“A lot of readers are left wondering what African-American reporters, columnists and editors remain at the Post. Sylvester was certainly the best known. A list of who is left on staff and what is their position would be appreciated. Also, are there plans to recruit a new African-American columnist?”
He did not reply.
We asked Sylvester if he knew of any African-American reporters or columnists left at the Post. He could only think of one sports columnist, Bryan Burwell.
Sylvester Brown is not entirely blameless in this turn of events. Even though accepting a travel reimbursement check from an organization he had never written about and did not intend to write about in the Post may not be covered in the paper’s ethics guidelines, it is close enough to count as a bad idea for an embattled columnist who had good reason to expect his bosses would like to see him gone – not to mention the people who often seem to be his bosses’ bosses in City Hall. If not a breach of journalistic ethics, it certainly was a lapse in judgment that gave his editors anxious to silence him enough cover to do so.
In the end, though, Sylvester Brown Jr.’s career at the Post and the way it was terminated raises far more questions about the “integrity” and “credibility” of the only daily newspaper in this majority-black city then it does the integrity and credibility of the last black Metro columnist or reporter at that fast-fading paper.
