Murdoch will no doubt push the Journal further to the Right , leaving the New York Times to hold the center. Yet let's not forget that while the Times might publish opinion pieces that come from across the spectrum, we don't need to cite Judy Miller and Gina Kolata to demonstrate how its reporting has already been far more conservative than might be claimed.
Nowhere is that more apparent than when it comes to the Times' coverage of worker rights issues. TheTimes used to have a labor beat reporter, in fact, a position that disappeared years ago. Ever since, the perspective of workers, unions, and worker advocates has regularly given short shrift.
I was reminded of this by an article published last Thursday about a federal investigation into an ongoing investigation into Chiquita's operations in Colombia, where the company made "protection payments" to the United Self-Defense Forces (aka the A.U.C.), a (paramilitary) "group considered a terrorist organization by the United States."
The company's story is that it continued to make the payments even after top executives revealed them to the Department of Justice in order to protect its own workers -- i.e. it claims that the A.U.C. threatened that it would kill many of the company's workers if it stopped making the payments.
The story was interesting to the Times because Chiquita board member Roderick Hills, the former SEC chair who sits on Chiquita's board, is now caught in the middle of this mess as a result of his own due diligence. Hills brought the issue to the Department of Justice in anticipation that it would provide the company with lenient treatment for doing so. Instead, DoJ cracked down on the company, especially as it continued to make the payments. As a result, this March the company pled guilty to engaging in transactions with a terrorist group and agreed to pay $25 million in fines.
Hills and other Chiquita officials may still be charged as individuals for their actions.
Hills' defenders say he's being unjustly threatened for being more proactive than most directors.
And that may be true.
Yet the Times reporter, Neil Lewis, left readers with the impression that Hills is being unjustifiably pilloried by ending with some quotes from former SEC enforcement chief Stanley Sporkin, who described Hills as "both sophisticated and honorable and said that any advice Mr. Hills gave Chiquita to continue the payments until something was worked out to protect workers' lives was "hardly off the wall -- there was a legitimate question here, a real issue of lives."
As a former judge and former CIA general counsel (currently a consultant with the Gavel Consulting Group, and ombudsman for BP), it's unlikely Sporkin would comment on the record unless he was intimately familiar with the facts in this case.
And he's entitled to his views.
But why Lewis should have allowed him to put that kind of a spin on the issue without quoting someone with a close understanding of the case and a much different view is beyond me.
The fact is that the A.U.C. have long been known for controlling the largest share of the country's cocaine export business, using gruesome methods to kill those who stand in their way. Chiquita presumably knew that when it started making the payments. Chiquita also continued to make payments to the group after September 10, 2001 when the US State Department included the Colombian paramilitaries and guerrillas in its list of terrorist organizations. You'd think that the next day they would have begun to think twice about that.
Moreover, the payments themselves were used by the AUC to buy guns. Guns that were used to kill Chiquita workers and their friends.
In other words, it's well known among labor rights groups that the A.U.C. was not hired by the company to protect workers, as Sporkin suggests. Just the opposite: the terrorists were apparently paid off at the same time that they targeted anyone who seemed to want to organize a union to represent workers at the company's Columbian operations.
Thus, the Times might have balanced Sporkin's spin with a statement from attorneys from International Rights Advocates (a project of the International Labor Rights Fund), which is helping relatives of the 173 people slain by the AUC sue Chiquita.
(Chiquita is not the only US corporation in trouble for coordinating with the paramilitaries. Both Coca-Cola and Drummond, an Alabama based coal corporation, have come under fire for hiring paramilitaries to kill union leaders.)
Ironically, the Journal at least did a little better than the Times in its August 2nd coverage of the story. The Journal not only reported that Chiquita continued to make payments because it was "concerned that its employees could be harmed if it cut the payments immediately," but quoted a DoJ official who said, "If the only way for a company to conduct business in a particular location is to do so illegally, then the company probably shouldn't be doing business there."
Perhaps we shouldn't expect either the Times or the Journal to give two shits about the views of poor Colombians or their advocates. But to suggest that Chiquita itself was giving money to the paramilitary terrorists because it cared for its workers is an unbelievable twist on this story that's worthy of a Garcia Marquez novella.
Correction:
The New York Times does have one labor reporter, Steve Greenhouse. The Times' story quoted the same DoJ official who said that if Chiquita could not operate legally in Columbia, then it "probably shouldn't do business there."
He writes:
"The Journal not only reported that Chiquita continued to make payments because it was "concerned that its employees could be harmed if it cut the payments immediately," but quoted a DoJ official who said, "If the only way for a company to conduct business in a particular location is to do so illegally, then the company probably shouldn't be doing business there."
This is the most baffling and troubling of Mr. Cray's errors; The Times article included almost the exact same quote from the same official, in both the web and print versions.
what is one to make of this? did he not read the article, or read it with such little care that he missed a whole paragraph? did tendentiousness about his workers-rights agenda cloud his ability to see the words?
as to a balancing point to the chiquita argument that it continued payments to the guerrilla group to save lives, i also wrote (in my own voice, ie not attributing this to someone else) that the payments also allowed chiquta to continue to operate its most profitable subsidiary. i am not now trying to compete with mr. cray in slamming the company. but the above sentence demonstrated an effort to provide some perspective about the company's claims.
lastly, the ny times still has a labor correspondent, contrary to mr. cray's flat-out and flat-wrong assertion. it is steven greenhouse.
while the explosion of web commentary has produced admirable changes in the information world, blogs also have the unfortunate reputation as a home of many uninformed rants. mr. cray's work does little to dispute that.
will there be some rectification or correction, at least insofar as the two tangible and indisputable errors made by mr. cray? arianna?
--neil lewis/ ny times
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The Times does retain ONE reporter -- Steve Greenhouse -- to cover the gamut of labor issues -- workplace safety, union politics, etc. By comparison it devotes three times that number to reporting on the dead. (Three Times obituary reporters are listed in the News Media Yellow Book, along with an obit editor).
My second correction leads me to concede that the Times and the Journal wrote comparable stories, both quoting the DoJ official's remark that the if the company could not operate legally in Columbia, then it "probably shouldn't do business there." "
But that hardly obviates the main point of my post, which Lewis so feebly addresses -- that both the Times and the Journal failed to debunk the obvious fallacy of the company's argument that it paid off the notorious Columbian paramilitaries in order to "protect workers' lives" or "provide intelligence to the government."
Perhaps it's unfair to ask Mr. Lewis or the Journal to explore these issues in a story about Mr. Hills' unfortunate quandary. Yet both papers chose to leave that assertion hanging without any rebuttal. By not doing so, the Times provides some validity for the claim.
Perhaps Mr. Lewis and his editors will deign to cover the ongoing lawsuit brought by the assassinated workers' families against the company. If not, the Times' readers will be left with the impression that it and Mr. Lewis believe Mr. Hills' reputation is more important than the lives of dozens of Columbian citizens.
Beyond the abuse of basic human rights by a fruit importer, why is this story not being seen as a nation, the US in this case, that harbors those who support terrorists? Up until now I thought the US only harbored terrorists with proBatiste connections. It turns out that we harbor all kinds of terrorist supporters.
The entire history of organized labor in America has been erased in union-hating big media. The Times is the least of it. You'll never see a show about labor unions on the History Channel; PBS hasn't produced a documentary about the labor movement in years and years. No one has.
It's disgraceful that such an important thread of our history is so willfully ignored. It's a story loaded with dramatic incidents and colorful characters like Debs, Lewis, Bridges, Ford, Pinkerton and Carnegie, plus anarchists, gangsters, communists, and legions of regular Joes (like my grandfather, and possibly yours) who organized to make a better life for their families. It certainly doesn't lack entertainment value or relevance to today.
The story isn't told, I guess, because the big business–big media combine is dedicated to making organized labor, even its history, disappear.
And 'gunboat diplomacy' in Central America and elsewhere certainly kept inexpensive products on American tables.
Business as usual has always gone on atop the back of poor people in Other Places. Nothing changes.