Meet The New Chairman of The AP Board of Directors

The Gateway Journalism Review reports that Mary Junck was named the new AP Board Chairman. Apparently, she's been on the board for 10 years and has been the vice chair for 3 years.

Junck is also the CEO of Lee Enterprises, which owns the Post-Dispatch. I happen to think there are a lot of things to like about the Post-Dispatch, but the upper management of Lee Enterprises is certainly not one of them. Bill McClellan, in an especially courageous column, wrote about Lee laying off employees while Junck took in a salary of $833,000. McClellan suggested that Junck must be "too big to fail," and he said he wished he could say the same about some of his colleagues.

But what really convinced me of just how cold-heated Lee is, beyond the typical "management makes a lot of money while firing employees right and left" story, was the way Lee Enterprises explicitly promised health care to employees who agreed to an early retirement deal, and then went back on their promise. This heartless decision led to gut-wrenching stories like this from Show Me Progress:


I admit I don't much about the AP Board. Maybe they were already ruthless. Or maybe they don't have much influence on how cynically newspaper owners act. But I have to say I'm not very encouraged by this news.

h/t ForwardSTL.

The Fox Guarding St. Louis's Henhouse

In the wake of the Post-Dispatch's shameful non-coverage of 4,300 union supporters rallying in Kiener Plaza, I want to return to a story that I meant to discuss in much greater detail a while ago. After Lee Enterprises bought the Post-Dispatch, they tried to persuade a number of employees to retire early. As part of this persuasion, they said, in writing, that they would provide free health care for life to the employees that accepted early retirement. However, despite Lee's continued profits, late last year they sent a letter to retirees informing them that they would no longer be paying for their health care. That, as you might imagine, had devastating effects for many retirees.

One such retiree is Fred Jackson, a man currently undergoing treatment for cancer. Lee Enterprise's greedy decision will quite literally bankrupt Mr. Jackson at a time he needs to pay for his treatment, but they simply do not care. Please take four minutes and watch the excellent video produced by Hotflash at Show Me Progress:

Just think about that for a second. The company managing the "paper of record" for the St. Louis region cares so little about humanity that they are willing to lie to cancer patients and then screw them over for the sake of a couple fractions of a percentage of extra profit. Lee Enterprises directly embodies the picture of corporate greed unburdened by an inkling of conscience. Can we really expect them to give fair coverage to workers fighting for a fair salary? Can we really think that they, when the chips are down, will provide unbiased coverage of a battle between corporate entities that share their exact same philosophy (profit! profit! profit! and screw the collateral damage!) and the middle class?

Increasingly, I think we can't. The Post-Dispatch has an excellent editorial board and many great employees, but their local political reporting has been going down the toilet and is doing so in a way that tips off the owners' allegiances. I really hope the Beacon, the Riverfront Times, and the St. Louis American can increasingly fill the giant gap left by the failure of the Post-Dispatch's political reporting. And I hope even more that citizens of St. Louis who believe in anything other than mindless, heartless, unwavering support for corporate profits will begin to create and distribute their own news, and cease to be dependent for their primary local news on an entity with so little respect for human life.

We will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

-Joseph Pulitzer (though I first heard it from Sylvester Brown)

From Ed Martin's Fingers to Jake Wagman's Mouth: The Utter Collapse of Post-Dispatch Credibility

About a month ago, I wrote that Jake Wagman was a lazy and biased reporter who blatantly pandered to serial-liar Ed Martin and, I might add, backed up my claims with evidence. Well, it's hard to think of better evidence for these claims than the crap-sandwich Wagman served up for Post-Dispatch readers today. All it took was a x < 140 characters belch from Ed Martin:
, and Wagman was off to the races with his latest great story idea. Of course, I'm sure Wagman wouldn't just write about such nonsense just from seeing Martin tweet. Ed probably had to call him up and make him feel special in order for Wagman to flush the standards of decent journalism down the toilet, just like he did many times during the elections.

But it is truly amazing that Wagman gets paid to do things like turning a tweet into a 6 paragraph blog post about a Craigslist advertisement, squeezed in between making casual observations about football. Who knows? Maybe the cold-hearted owners of Lee Enterprises like the world much better when reporters focus on meaningless nonsense rather than actually investigating the use and abuse of power.

I will note that there are good journalists at the Post-Dispatch who still try to hold the paper to the high standards of journalism practiced in the golden days. Unfortunately, the reporter assigned to cover some of the most important political topics of our time is not one of them.

Lee Enterprises Breaks Written Agreement, Screws Over Former Employees

I know people probably don't feel like reading about politics today, but this is an important story and I for one am thankful that I've been lucky enough to never have been in the unfortunate situation of my livelihood depending on the actions of unethical actors who care more about profit margins than the employees who spent their lives working their ass off for the company.

From the St. Louis Newspaper Guild:

Proving once more that the Post-Dispatch’s corporate owner has no heart – or holiday spirit – Lee Enterprises today notified that paper’s former employees who retired under the Guild contract in effect from June ‘04 to March ‘10 that their free medical coverage was being eliminated; those retirees would now have to pay 100% of the premium cost to keep their health care.

Such action flies in the face of contractual language in effect when those members retired and this office will soon file a grievance on their behalf. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Lee has launched an economic attack on former employees living on fixed incomes, so we have a pretty good idea of what their response will be and the likely course of action that will then ensue.

A few years ago Lee announced that they were doing the same thing to Guild members who left under a former (blue) contract that ran from 1994 to 2004. Initially it was for 30% of the cost but last year they raised that amount to 100%.

After that first assault, this office filed a grievance which was denied – based on the fact that retirees are no longer part of the bargaining unit and are no longer represented. Lee also maintained that expired contracts cannot be grieved (note that they waited to do this latest assault until after the yellow contract expired, as well). We countered, asserting that the right to medical care in retirement was a ‘vested’ right and that it vested the day the employee went out the door. All that other stuff about bargaining units and contract expiration – while nominally true – could not trump it.

They refused to participate in the grievance process, so we filed for arbitration. They refused to arbitrate, so we filed a federal lawsuit. They moved to dismiss and we cleared that hurdle. Along the way were other grievances, other filings and a bunch of other stuff (to read it all, check out the rest of our website) and we now find ourselves having won the initial lawsuit and preparing for appeal. After the judge’s decision in our case, I was hopeful that Lee would not attempt the same thing with our later retirees. But no. They did and here we go again.

However, while much of this looks and feels like deja vu, there are some notable differences. For openers, many of those who left during this last contract, left during one of two buyouts offered in 2005 and 2007. Many who took the buyout had not yet reached the age of 55; they were lured into retirement with enhanced credits for pension calculations and cash. And added to those lovely parting gifts was the written promise of free retiree medical. One has to wonder – it’s bad enough trying to circumvent our expired collective bargaining agreement – how do these scrooges plan to weasel out of such affirming letters on company masthead and upon which the ink is barely dry?

It’s terribly disturbing to realize that a lot of former coworkers will soon be without health care and are still more than ten years away from medicare eligibility. What does Lee Enterprises expect them to do? It would seem incredibly callous for corporate to take the position of, “Well, that’s their problem” when it was Lee who enticed them into retiring in the first place! This latest action by our corporate overlords goes beyond mere greed – it is a despicable act by an outfit that has apparently decided that employees who can remember JFK, Viet Nam and the Beatles are too expensive to keep around and are willing to lie to their faces in order to sever that relationship.

As before, the Guild will stand with its retired members and take all appropriate measures to hold Lee Enterprises accountable for this latest attack. Please know that the Guild office will be closed on Thanksgiving and the day after. We will file all necessary paperwork early next week and we will announce a meeting for our affected members sometime in mid-December. Until then, even though this action could be financially devastating, please try to not let this ruin your holidays – believe me, these people aren’t worth it. Growing up, my mother had a big sign in her kitchen. It read: Illegitimi non carborundum. Loosely translated, it means, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ Please hang in there; your Guild has your back and we’re fighting for you. In the meantime, if you can’t afford to pay 100% of Lee’s stated premiums and you have to go out and buy cheaper insurance, please keep good records and all receipts.

We will keep you posted on events as they occur.