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Times Ads a Scandal? Oh, Pshaw — Not if You Look Back in the Microfilm

100 Years Ago, Seattle Newspapers Knew How to Get the Job Done – Now That’s What You Call Cheerleading!

Now that’s what you call cheerleading! Back in 1906, the Seattle Times knew how to do it right.

OLYMPIA, Oct. 30. — Maybe you need a long memory to see the humor in the big scandal of this year’s political season – a really, really long memory – but if you know where to look in the newspaper microfilm, the current Seattle Times imbroglio certainly demonstrates it doesn’t take much these days to make people reach for the heart medicine.

A goodly percentage of the state’s progressive political activists seem to be going into convulsions over the fact that the Seattle Times Company is running political ads in its own newspaper. Free of charge! The newspaper’s independent effort promotes Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna and the campaign for Referendum 74, which would uphold the gay-marriage law passed by the Legislature this year. The ads themselves are valued at $76,000; the Times Co. insists it’s simply a test of the effectiveness of political advertising, on a couple of positions endorsed by the newspaper’s editorial page. And yes indeedy, the Times Co. has demonstrated that newspaper advertising gets results.

Ever since the first ad appeared Oct. 17, the campaign has become a rallying point for everyone on the left side of the aisle, proof positive that the state’s largest newspaper is biased beyond belief, and that everything it says must be therefore be untrue. Somehow the newspaper’s support for the gay-marriage measure, a traditionally liberal cause, has been forgotten – it’s all about the governor’s race. The number of outraged press releases that have been issued from Democratic quarters are too many to count. Groups like the Washington Conservation Voters and FUSE Washington have been running Facebook campaigns and thousands of followers have been clicking the “like” button to denounce the Times. There is an active cancel-my-subscription campaign, and if you call, the Times circulation staff has a script aimed at keeping you aboard. It is safe to say that the ad campaign has become the greatest accidental gift to Democratic party-building since the Ford Administration, when Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz offered his modest suggestion on how to appeal to the black vote.

Current Times campaign: Tame by comparison.

Take this fund-raising letter, from former KING-5 anchor Mike James: “The Times crossed a line from journalism to partisan politics. When a newspaper buys political ads for specific candidates, it’s playing the same game as Karl Rove. …I have never before seen something this outrageous from a news organization in all my time in politics.” James, it should be mentioned, parlayed his name familiarity from his many years before the KING-5 cameras to run as a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in 1994. James did take a leave of absence from his news-media job at the time – but it does make you think that line of his is a little fuzzy.

And then there’s the furor in the Times newsroom. More than 100 Times staffers signed a letter of protest to Publisher Frank Blethen, saying the campaign “threatens the two things we value the most, the traits that make the Seattle Times a strong brand – our independence and credibility.” Since then it appears Times reporters have been doing their best to pick the newspaper’s own campaign to death. A “Truth Needle” piece found a few quibbles with factoids. A curious front-page Sunday story seemed to go out of its way to elevate routine travel expenditures by McKenna as attorney general to the level of major scandal. And then you have all the Internet-blog hand-wringing and tut-tutting about serious breaches of journalistic ethics.

Well, here at Washington State Wire we don’t often say much about what other media say and do. That’s their business and not ours. Yet if you know much about newspapers and their history the shock value seems a bit thin. Ads are ads and anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper knows that the newsroom doesn’t have a blamed thing to do with them. Most readers these days probably know the difference between a news story and an advertisement, too.

And here’s the one thing we can add to the debate. If you know where to look in the newspaper microfilm, you can see what actual real-live newspaper electioneering looks like. The Times used to be one of the best in the business.

Take the front page of Sept. 13, 1906. The headline that Thursday afternoon took up a full third of it. “The Times Wins!” it exclaimed. Not even Pearl Harbor got that kind of play.

The issue was a ballot measure that would have had the city take control of the trolley-car system run by the privately-owned Seattle Electric Company. It was defeated in large part because of a steady volley of attacks in the news pages about what a disaster that would have been. For a full month prior to the election you couldn’t pick up the Times without reading about the horrors of public ownership. And it wasn’t the only such campaign the Times had mounted. Turn back the dial on the microfilm reader a few months and you can find similar headlines regarding other municipal-ownership measures the Times opposed: “Times Wins its Fight,” so on and so forth.

Col. Alden Blethen, first of the Times Blethens and never one to spare an exclamation point.

There was a rather curious story behind it all. A piece published Nov. 25, 1905 in the Seattle Union Record presents a rather convincing argument that Seattle streetcar kingpin Jacob Furth put up the money that allowed Col. Alden Blethen to purchase the ailing Times in 1896. The labor paper didn’t quite prove its case, but anyone who has spent any time peering at the microfilm can see the Times was full of glowing profiles of the city’s benevolent and loving traction magnate, and that it faithfully quoted his every public utterance. Whenever Furth’s interests were challenged, Blethen’s delightful editorials, full of boldface type and exclamation points, were the first line of defense. Of course it’s a little hard to determine the truth or falsity of a charge that is more than 100 years old, but Washington State Wire has done considerable spelunking in the historical archives of this state and Oregon, reading old correspondence of Seattle city fathers – and it appears that the general perception around town was that whenever Furth had a cold, Blethen sneezed.

But it wasn’t just the Times. The late, lamented Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the turn of the century was owned by John L. Wilson, a former U.S. senator whom other newspapers described as the leader of Washington state’s “Republican machine.” The state in those days was almost as solidly Republican as the South was Democratic. In the P-I’s news pages every primary election season you could read about the scoundrels, dogs and miscreants who dared to run under the Republican banner – as opposed to the good Republicans the P-I supported. You could read all about the blundering and inept U.S. Sen. Levi Ankeny of Walla Walla, stories that somehow never appeared in any other newspaper, and the wonder wasn’t that he ran for re-election in 1908, it was that he dared to breathe the same oxygen as everyone else. Anyway, that was the end of Ankeny. It was as if Slade Gorton owned his own newspaper.

A few newspaper ads? Oh, piffle. If that’s cheerleading, it’s a pretty weak job of it. A hundred years ago they knew how to get it right. And no one bothered making lame excuses about how it was all just a test. They said it right up front: “The Times Wins!”

You just have to wonder what the great-grandparents of today’s political consultants might have done with a headline like that one. Now that would make for one heckuva Facebook campaign.

— Erik Smith


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