KEISLING: The moral and ethical decline of the Philadelphia Inquirer

Part 1: The incredible shrinking newspapers: From ‘Tower of Truth,’ to ‘Grotto of Horseshit’

For Part 2 visit here. For Part 3 visit here.

by Bill Keisling

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane would have done well to read a memo sent by union officials to employees of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News in 2013.

“BE VERY CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY in email correspondence, tweets, Facebook posts, etc.,” wrote Howard Gensler and Bill Ross of the newspaper guild in the leaked memo to employees, “especially with regard to comments about the present in-fighting and management/ownership personnel and your colleagues” at the Inquirer and Daily News.

That the Inquirer and Daily News’ own employees these days don’t trust communications with, or about, their own newspaper is telling.

AG Kane apparently never got that cautionary memo.

Though lots has been made of Kathleen Kane’s inexperience, it was AG Kane’s ignorance of the ethical cesspool at the Inquirer and Daily News that proved catastrophic for her, as it has for the public.

It was just such a correspondence sent by Attorney General Kane to the Philadelphia Daily News that not only now threatens her public career, but amazingly holds a criminal charge over her head.

AG Kane not only made the grave mistake of trusting the Inquirer and Daily News; she made the mistake few in the writing and publishing professions do these days: she took the newspapers seriously.

The incident with Kane demonstrates just how far behind the times state officials in Harrisburg can be. These days, Pennsylvania officials seem to be the only ones taking the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News seriously.

As Kathleen Kane now knows, you deal with the Inquirer or Daily News at your peril.

Lots has been said and written about the Inquirer and Daily News’ physical decline. Its shedding of hundreds of jobs. The precipitous fall of the papers’ market value from over $515 million in 2006, to $55 million in 2012, and less today. Its incredible shrinking base of readers and ad revenue. Its financial bankruptcy filings. Its oversight by courts, judges, and lawyers, and its screwing over of talented editors and writers.

Its move from its fabled 17-story office building on Broad Street, once known as The Tower of Truth, to a single floor in the former Strawbridge & Clothier department store building on Market Street, now called “The Grotto of Horseshit.”

The Inquirer and Daily News not only have seen a decline in the number of employees, but the quality and experience of those employees.

The New York Times, no less, in 2013, went so far as to complain that one of the papers’ new owners “installed his 25-year-old daughter … to run the Web site, Philly.com, even though she had no experience as a media executive.” The owner’s daughter, the Times reports, then proceeded to work at cross-purposes with — read stab in the back — her own supposed “colleagues” at the Inquirer and Daily News.

The Inquirer, led just three short decades ago to near the pinnacle of the American newspaper business by celebrated editor Gene Roberts, is now being run by what amounts to spoiled and vindictive kids out of dad’s basement.

Those facts alone are staggering.

Next to nothing has been said about the Inquirer’s moral and ethical decline, its loss of way, and loss of its once-authoritative voice, and its long-missing sense of fair play.

But that decline, like its financial decline, has been years and decades in the making.

The Inquirer, once the gold standard in Pennsylvania, has been in decline and a death spiral of irrelevance since the 1970s.

To best understand the Inquirer’s decline it helps to look at how the Inquirer covered three important stories over the years: what’s known as the CTA scandal, involving state Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, in the mid-1980s; the impeachment of Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Rolf Larsen in the 1990s; and now the Kane controversy.

In the CTA case, Treasurer Dwyer was the last person to fall into a widespread bribery scandal involving just about every other state row officer. The Inquirer’s reporters played a leading role in goading Dwyer into a dramatic public suicide at a 1987 press conference. Before killing himself, Dwyer read a statement complaining that he had been unfairly singled out by the press when other officials (including Gov. Dick Thornburgh and AG Roy Zimmerman) were protected, and got off scot-free.

In his death statement, Dwyer mentioned the book The News At Any Cost, and a particular chapter, “Journalists for the prosecution.” This sums up the Inquirer and Daily News today, in the Kane affair.

After Dwyer shot himself to death, the Inquirer infamously ran a large photo on its front page showing the suicidal state treasurer at the moment he shoved a .357 Magnum in to his mouth. The inhumane heartlessness didn’t stop there.

The Inquirer’s reporter covering the story said he thought Dwyer deserved to die. “All Dwyer was was guilty, that’s all,” the reporter told me. But likeable Budd Dwyer was unfairly singled out, without context, and certainly didn’t deserve to die in a public bloodbath.

But the bloodlust at the Inquirer only grew worse.

In the 1990s impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Rolf Larsen, the Inquirer again unfairly sided with threatened insiders, judges and special prosecutors. The Inquirer underhandedly protected political opponents of Larsen’s — Pennsylvania judges implicated in wrongdoing — to get rid of Larsen after he accused them of case fixing and political chicanery.

In the Larsen case, as with Dwyer, the Inquirer seemed to revel in its ability to cover-up and destroy.

Larsen’s political opponents in the courts and legislature will “bounce him like a basketball,” the Inquirer’s reporter wrote months before Larsen’s impeachment. With the steadfast help of the Inquirer, that’s exactly what they did. The same Inky reporter later was hired as a PR flak by the scandal-plagued Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

The Inquirer’s blindfolded protection of Larsen’s enemies set the stage for the overwhelming court corruption under which Pennsylvanians suffer today, and planted the seeds for the infamous Cash for Kids scandal.

It also set the stage for the Inquirer’s present reckless and self-manufactured case against Ms. Kane. No doubt they also plan to “bounce her like a basketball.”

In the Kane case, the Inquirer has again turned its pages over to political opponents of one official — Kathleen Kane — to one-sidedly hurt and silence a perceived enemy.

In the Dwyer and Larsen cases, the Inquirer contributed to a history of Pennsylvania that is woefully incorrect, recklessly and deliberately incomplete, and a dangerous lie.

The Big Lie is that all was well in Pennsylvania after the fall guys were eliminated.

Just the opposite is true.

Let’s be clear about the Inquirer’s not-too-secret alliances with corrupt forces in government: Like their sources who are using the Inquirer, these reporters are the worst sorts of people doing the worst sorts of things.

By trusting them, Kane and Pennsylvania officials are living three decades in the past; they don’t see the Inquirer’s journalistic and human decline — only its much-diminished reach and readership in Philadelphia.

In the next several articles, I’ll review some of the misdeeds of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and its sister publication, the Daily News, in the Dwyer, Larsen, and Kane cases.

In each case the Philadelphia newspaper company knowingly ignored growing systemic corruption in Pennsylvania. The papers became a tool of threatened insiders to unfairly, and out of context, bully and go after an out-of-favor patsy, and make a fall guy.

This smug high-handedness at the Inquirer, its callous and careless disregarded for basic human traits of fairness, honesty and decency, and serious lapses of accuracy and professional ethics, no doubt over the years helped to alienate many readers from the 186-year-old newspaper, and planted the seeds of its own decline, and perhaps ultimate destruction and demise.

Truth is, with the rise of the Internet, readers have little sympathy or need for a monopoly newspaper company that shows contempt for the public, its institutions, the unvarnished truth, and instead caters to corrupt and protected insiders.