I can tell you first hand that there was a great deal of skepticism on the sale of the San Diego Union-Tribune (now renamed U-T San Diego) by the polarizing and controversial real estate baron Doug Manchester with many business leaders I encounter on a daily basis. Many like me were concerned that it marked the second coming of Citizen Kane, where a wealthy business man bought a struggling, but still very credible and well read, news outlet to use in part to further his own personal agenda. There were talks of cancelling subscriptions from people I would have never expected to consider such a move if indeed their fears became real.
Well, I’m very concerned that they have.
There are two reasons for my sounding the alarm. The first came only days after the December announcement of the impending sale to “Papa Doug” and his partner, recently ousted radio owner John Lynch, when the City Beat posted an internal memo signed by the duo promising to make the U-T the “moral compass of this community.” Six weeks later, they showed how they would implement such a mission by taking the majority of the Sunday A-Section, front page, top fold to promote their own vision for downtown San Diego development that would include a football stadium and sports arena.
Whether one agrees with their opinion or not is irrelevant. What is the issue is in how Manchester and Lynch took an unprecedented move in usurping the hard news coverage that traditionally appears on such a prominent page in their most widely read edition and replace it with an essay that blatantly promotes their own agenda. Objective journalism is already in too short of supply. While I don’t believe newspapers in their current form will have the lion share of such content in the future, I certainly wouldn’t advocate for accelerating their demise and replacing real news with one-sided articles that promote the owner’s perspective.
There are still good reporters and editors at the U-T San Diego; lots of them. They fight for white space every single day to write reports on the goings on of this large and diverse city. My concern is that they will be short-changed even more by their own bosses, and could very well find themselves out of work as subscribers leave and revenue at the paper continue to decline, all because Papa Doug and Mr. Lynch want to use the paper as their own bully pulpit.
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