Sending Journalists to Break a Strike   

Was this just to protect the flow of information?

A sign of the times?

When unions struck San Francisco's two major dailies in early November, the Tribune Co. of Chicago asked for volunteers from its six newspapers to go to San Francisco to help the management there. A few did before the strike was over.

So now we have journalists as strikebreakers: replacements for editors and reporters engaged in a critical struggle with their owners (the Hearst Corp. in the case of the Examiner and the de Young family in the case of the Chronicle).

This was a violent strike, and some of the unions ought to pay for that if it can be pinned on them. But that's another story. The Tribune Co.'s rush to enlist journalists against other journalists was simply a nastily aggressive offensive against unionism.

In the midst of it, a company spokesman, Joseph Hays, had the nerve to say the Tribune's interest was in defending "the flow of information." Sure. His company is ready to fling reporters almost anywhere to assure that the public is informed and the Republic is not endangered.

Was this double-think in the name of journalism inspired by the company's executives or its attack-dog labor law firm, King and Ballow? With a few more defenders like this we might as well abandon the defense of the First Amendment to Snoop Doggy Dogg.

All of this seems to have been accepted as unobjectionable by some good people.

Maybe it's the '90s. The corporatization of newspapers proceeds apace, like the corporatization of the world.

Sending reporters to do management's antilabor work does, at least, underscore how weak the world of the newsroom is becoming in relation to the counting office. There is, of course, the knee-jerk response to readership surveys that we see at many papers. Now we have a truly extraordinary example of how "corpthink" can displace the necesssary pride and independence that professionals need to maintain.

You might understand if the Tribune Co. owned one of those San Francisco papers. It sent people to buttress the New York Daily News when it was struck, but it then owned the Daily News. Having flying squadrons drop in on somebody else's fight is not unheard of, but when journalists are among the troopers it makes you think.

For one thing: Do many young reporters now see nothing wrong with being used this way? I don't know. Only a few volunteers – between five and 10 production and editorial employees – got to San Francisco as volunteers encouraged by the company, a spokesman said. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reported that managers offered newsroom employees extra pay, with all hotel and meals expenses paid. The Tribune would not comment on this.

I do know that some people I respect seem puzzled by the thought that there is something outrageous here: something anti-professional, a product of the joining of corporate lawyers and newspapers' business offices to make journalists "part of the team," without decent respect for their uniqueness.

If they are just part of a management team, they have no more claim to any special constitutional status than the managers of a MacDonald's. The First Amendment says nothing about defending management against unions and other Unsavory Elements: not yet, anyway. l