The scale of local news destruction in Gannett’s markets is astonishing. (Nieman Lab, Harvard University)

The scale of local news destruction in Gannett’s markets is astonishing. (Nieman Lab, Harvard University) 

They've ruined our local newspaper here in St. Johns County, which once encouraged debate and published our letters and column.  

Those unjust stewards at USA TODAY CO. INC., which recently changed its name from GANNETT are destroying local news.  

I grew up reading a GANNETT newspaper in South Jersey (Courier Post, and it was mediocre, but they occasionally did worthy work. 

My later mentor Nat Caldwell, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter in Nashville told me that we would rue the day when GANNETT took over his beloved Tennesseean.    

He was right,

From Nieman Lab:

The scale of local news destruction in Gannett’s markets is astonishing

It might not be as mustache-twirling a villain as Alden Global Capital, but its enormous scale has meant enormous losses for local journalism.

By JOSHUA BENTON @jbenton March 9, 2023, 2:43 p.m. 

Gannett, America’s largest newspaper chain, should wake up each morning thankful for the existence of No. 2 Alden Global Capital.

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After all, who could ask for a better point of comparison? Alden is the perfect industry villain, a faceless private equity fund dedicated to nothing but cost-cutting and cashflow-draining. Its corporate website contains a total of 21 words, nine of which are “Alden,” “Global,” or “Capital.” It’s run by a secretive billionaire who last gave an interview in the 1980s — the sort of person who can own 15 mansions in Palm Beach and still think: I could really use a 16th. 

It’s the type of company that inspires debates over whether “vulturous” is too kind of an adjective. If you’re writing an Atlantic cover story on “Who Killed America’s Newspapers?” Alden Global Capital will hand you the murder weapon, already dusted for prints.

Gannett, meanwhile, is at least a newspaper company, one more than a century old. It’s rarely been considered a particularly good one, mind you — its reputation for cheapness and cookie-cutter products go back decades. (As The New York Times described it in 1986: “a chain of mostly small and undistinguished, though highly profitable, newspapers.”) But it was at least a familiar name, run by news people and with at least some dedication to its civil role in hundreds of communities. 

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May 16, 2019

When Alden attempted a hostile takeover in 2019, anyone who cared about local news was put in the unfamiliar position of rooting for Gannett. Heck, if you squinted hard enough, Gannett could almost feel like the good guy. (If only because people like to believe there is a good guy in their industry, somewhere or another.)

But “we’re better than Alden!” has its limits as a brand promise, and Gannett’s most recent annual report drives home the fact that no company has done more to shrink local journalism than it has in recent years. Let’s total up the damage — in raw numbers, if not in stories unbroken and facts not uncovered.

Vaporizing a newspaper chain in four years

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The Newsonomics of roll-up

March 3, 2011

While Alden failed in its bid for Gannett in 2019, it sparked a wave of newspaper industry consolidation that some had foreseen for years. Within a few months, the two largest newspaper companies in the United States — No. 1 Gannett and No. 2 GateHouse — announced they were merging. The name would remain Gannett, but GateHouse execs were mostly left in charge. 

At the end of 2018 — the last full pre-merger year — the two companies had roughly 24,338 employees in the United States and 27,600 worldwide. (Gannett also owns a small group of newspapers in the U.K.) The merger closed in mid-November 2019, by which time it had about 25,000worldwide and was diving headlong into a hunt for “inefficiencies.” 

By December 31, 2019, the combined company was down to 21,255employees in the U.S. By the end of 2020, that had dropped to 18,141. A year later: 13,800. And its most recent SEC filing reports that, as of the end of 2022, Gannett had just 11,200 U.S. employees remaining (plus another roughly 3,000 overseas). 

In other words, Gannett has eliminated more than half of its jobs in the United States in four years. It’s as if, instead of merging America’s two largest newspaper chains, one of them was simply wiped off the face of the earth. 

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August 9, 2019

That’s a cut substantially deeper than the rate of newspaper revenue decline. Why? Well, one reason is that to get the merger done, Gannett had to take out a giant loan at high interest rates, meaning hundreds of millions in revenues have had to be redirected to debt payments. To put it in perspective: In Q4 2022, digital subscriptions at Gannett newspapers — all of them — brought in a total of $35.5 million. But the company spent more than that, $47.3 million, just on debt payments. (This may remind you of Elon Musk’s ongoing evisceration of Twitter, driven by the same sort of M&A debt.)

You can also see the shrinkage in the number of newspapers Gannett publishes. In 2019, post-merger, it owned 261 daily and 302 weekly newspapers. By the end of 2022, those totals were 217 daily and 175 weekly newspapers. Some of that decline is Gannett selling a few newspapers to local buyers, but a lot of it is straight-up closures. Last spring, Gannett shuttered 24 weekly newspapers here in the Boston area alone.

Circulation has evaporated

Per capita newspaper circulation has been declining in the United States since World War II, so it’s hardly shocking that it’s still dropping. If you’re The New York Times, you’ve been able to more than make up for the loss in print subscribers with digital ones. But for most local newspapers, digital gains are nowhere big enough to stop the print bleeding.

Still, Gannett’s newspapers stand out for the steep angle of their decline. 

An important caveat up front: Different newspaper companies use different standards and make different choices in the numbers they report. And those choices can change over time. Gannett has stopped reporting some of its digital subscribers to the Alliance for Audited Media, for example. And some papers still count many more non-paying readers than others. Comparisons across papers and years are always going to be imprecise — but these are the numbers they’re reporting to the industry body.

Here are Sunday circulation numbers for (pre-merger) Gannett’s largest local newspapers, according to the company’s own filings with AAM. 

Let’s compare Q3 2018 to Q3 2022:

Every Gannett paper here saw a circulation decline of at least 52%. The average drop across these papers is an incredible 67%. [See update below.]They’ve lost two-thirds of their reported circulation in four years’ time.1

How bad is that? To find out, I assembled a comparison set of non-Gannett papers in other metro areas to see how their declines compared. These aren’t outlier successes like The New York Times — they’re metro dailies, most with chain or hedge fund owners, facing the same problems as everyone else in the business.

It’s a much better showing. Take The Seattle Times: It lost 62,000 print readers over this period — but it also gained 52,000 digital subscribers, making the overall trend lines tolerable. 

There are plenty of explanations for the gap — but it’s hard not to believe that Gannett’s gutting of their editorial products hasn’t been a driving factor.

And I haven’t yet mentioned the most important Gannett paper: USA Today. In Q3 2018, USA Today reported a total daily circulation of 2,632,392. In its most recent filing, Q3 2022, that was down to 180,381. (For what it’s worth, that 2018 number was artificially inflated in a few ways, including counting the subscribers of some Gannett local newspapers. A fairer comparison might be just paid print circulation: 579,692 in 2018, 134,629 in 2022.)

I asked Gannett for comment on this decline, and a spokesperson sent this statement: “Gannett continues to make tremendous progress on our strategic priorities which include a focus on increasing digital growth. We have an increasingly engaged digital audience with digital-only subscription revenue growing nearly 30% year-over-year. Digital-only subscriptions grew to over 2 million during the fourth quarter of 2022. Since the second quarter of 2022, paid digital-only subscriptions have outnumbered full access or print subscriptions.”

Death by a thousand cuts

Let me finish by looking at a single Gannett paper — the one I grew up reading, The Daily Advertiser of Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s far from the company’s most important paper — No. 109 in circulation among Gannett’s dailies — but it’s important to me; I read it nearly every day. Lafayette is a city of 121,000 and the hub of a region of half a million people. 

Here’s what’s happened to the Advertiser’s Sunday circulation since 2015. (Data is from Q3 of each year and as Gannett reported it to the Alliance for Audited Media.)

2015: 26,885
2016: 23,773
2017: 20,177
2018: 14,670
2019: 10,389
2020: 8,592
2021: 6,528
2022: 3,996 (plus a few hundred more)2

That’s an 85% decline since 2015. Those numbers include both print and digital — but maybe the digital trend is better? Let’s see:

2015: 1,421 digital subscribers
2016: 1,054
2017: 1,247
2018: 1,473
2019: 1,283
2020: 1,146
2021: 928
2022: 468 (plus a few hundred more)3

Yikes. All that decline has come amid round after round of Gannett budget cuts. You can debate the direction of causation: how much the cuts were driven by declining revenues, versus how much the declining revenues were driven by the cuts. But the end result is the same either way — a newspaper that is, today, an embarrassing product.

The Advertiser reported having 17 newsroom employees in 2020 and it still had a handful of people covering hard news as recently as last year. But a combination of cuts, buyouts, and escapes left it with exactly one local news reporter by January. Its staff directory is stuffed with reporters who left months ago. There are now days when zero news stories out of Lafayette are published. The copy hole is filled by stories from wires, Gannett’s one-reporter state capitol bureau, or other Gannett Louisiana papers (all of which look like thinly reskinned versions of each other). It misses obviousstories and runs press releases and error-filled copy. Its morning email is stuffed to overflowing with stories about LSU basketball, simply because Gannett actually has someone outside the Advertiser who covers LSU basketball.

The local college team in Lafayette is the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns, and they had a big weekend. On Monday, they won the Sun Belt men’s basketball tournament, meaning they will go on to March Madness and the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2014. 

Was this mentioned in Tuesday’s newspaper? No. Was the fact they were even playing in the conference final mentioned in Monday’s newspaper? No. Probably the single biggest local sports story in the past year, and you wouldn’t know about it reading The Advertiser. (They eventually published a story online Tuesday morning — written by a sports reporter for the Gannett-owned Pensacola News-Journal, three states away.)

Speaking as a reader (and a grudging longtime digital subscriber), it’s just an abomination of a newspaper. Lafayette residents are lucky to have a few other options. The local TV stations, while nothing special, keep up with the usual TV news basics. A local nonprofit outlet named The Current does good work, but its small size means it has to pick its spots. Most importantly, the Baton Rouge paper, The Advocate, has invested in a Lafayette edition that does more Lafayette reporting than the actual Lafayette daily paper. In the five core Lafayette ZIP codes, The Advocate actually has more print subscribers than The Advertiser does (2,598 to 1,869).

But not every community is so lucky. When the local paper stops reporting, there’s often no one else to take its place. Everyone gets a little less informed about the world around them. And Gannett has increased local ignorance at a scale no other company can match. Maybe Alden Global Capital should be giving thanks for Gannett too, not just the other way around.

—

Update, March 10: A mea culpa. I originally referred in this section to “paying readers” and “paid readership” when quoting the circulation numbers Gannett (and other companies) file with the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM; formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations, or ABC). I meant it to be an umbrella term bigger than “subscribers,” since the numbers also included single-copy readers who don’t subscribe. But the vagaries of circulation reporting mean that the totals publishers report both exclude some paying readers and include some non-paying readers. (More about that later.) That’s my mistake.

I’ve also updated the 2018 circulation number for the Detroit Free Press. The paper reported a “total combined average circulation” that year of 933,926, which is the number I’d used before. But to get to that outsized total, the Freep counted not just the regular newspaper but also something called Yes! Your Essential Shopper, a weekly free shopperthrown on porches around the region. (Some consider this genre of publication more litter than newspaper, but advertisers appreciate their larger reach versus a paid daily. Many metro newspapers have similar products — though in my experience most list them as separate publications for circulation-counting purposes, rather than lump them together with the main paper.) But between 2018 and 2022, the Free Press stopped counting Your Essential Shopper as part of its circulation, which increased the scale of the decline between those years. In order to make the comparison more parallel with the others, I’ve removed the shopper’s 716,455 copies from the Free Press total, bringing it down to 217,471. That change reduces the overall Gannett circulation carnage from 77% to 67%.

1. One nerd note: During this period, AAM tweaked how it counts digital subscriptions in such a way that it could reduce their numbers. (The less generous framing would be it made overcounting harder.) But this change affected all newspapers, not just Gannett’s, and the impact was not drastic. ↩︎
2. Update, March 10: Note that this 2022 number does not include a certain type of digital sub known as a digital nonreplica edition. Gannett stopped reporting those publicly in 2022. In 2021, The Advertiser reported a digital nonreplica circulation of 348, so you can probably mentally add a similar number to the 3,996 number they reported for 2022. ↩︎
3. Update, March 10: The same as above: You can probably add in another 350 or so to that 2022 number to make up for the digital subscriptions that Gannett has stopped reporting publicly. ↩︎

"County, city should pass the seven-generation test." (Ed Slavin, Sunday, September 8, 2019 St. Augustine Record column on 454th anniversary of our City's founding)

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Here's my 454th anniversary column in the Sunday, September 8, 2019 St. Augustine Record,
"County, city should pass the seven-generation test:"

Opinion
County, city should pass the seven-generation test
By Ed Slavin / St. Augustine
Posted at 9:42 PM
St. Augustine Record

On our City’s 454th anniversary, Sept. 8, let’s take stock of our past and future. There is much to be thankful for here:

• We saved 32 Grenada Street, 1880 Victorian by City Hall — preserved and protected as a local landmark.

• We saved 7 Bridge Street. There’s a conservation easement indoors/outdoors, and HP-1 zoning survives as a bulwark.

• We saved Fish Island. Vice-Mayor Leanna Freeman called it a “miracle.” The burial place of orange plantation and real estate buccaneer Jesse Fish and his slaves will now be a park, preserved forever. As playwright Tony Kushner wrote in “Angels in America,” miracles occur through politics.

What’s next?

Let’s preserve our 1955 Florida East Coast Railway station. Let’s save our 3,000- to 4,000-year-old Native American site north of SAHS.

Hurricanes are bigger. The ocean level is rising. Flooding of our neighborhoods and streets is becoming the “new normal.” We will survive, but we must act.

There are 31-plus St. Johns County neighborhoods with bad drainage due to poor planning — officials granting approval to destroy wetlands and clear-cut trees.

Before World War II, Sir Winston Churchill spoke against “appeasement,” stating that “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”

St. Augustine just survived another hurricane, our third since 2016.

Optimists founded our town Sept. 8, 1565 — 454 years ago. Some 22 generations of St. Augustine residents survived hurricanes, European religious wars fought on our shores, pirates, wars against Native Americans — having our town repeatedly burned to the ground, more hurricanes, the Civil War, tourists, scammers, monopolists, Henry Flagler, slavery, exploitation, racism, segregation, lynchings, corruption, and organized “crimes against nature” by developers (which former St. Johns County Commission Chair Ben Rich Sr. once called “worse than any carpetbagger”).

Minorcans and Africans in generations before us endured oppression and bondage, surviving slavery and indentured slavery-by-contract, mosquito-borne diseases and starvation.

Our Nation’s Oldest City has the Nation’s oldest town plan (1573). It was drawn for the generations, and still guides us today.

Let’s apply the “seven-generation test” to all who would modify this magical place. How would each proposal affect our quality of life, our precious historic, cultural and environmental heritage in seven generations?

Let’s finally enact the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore, first proposed 80 years ago by Mayor Walter Fraser, Sens. Charles Andrews and Claude Pepper and Rep. Joseph Hendricks. Let’s protect 130,000 acres of land our governments already own, in two counties, preventing it from being bulldozed, polluted or hornswoggled away from us.

Let’s enact stronger state and local laws protecting the environment. Let’s plant trees, including mangroves as part of natural shorelines. Let’s restore wetlands and oyster beds to protect us from hurricanes.


Let’s enact a legal moratorium on big developments and comprehensive plan changes.

Let’s stop secretive developers’ devastating destruction of forests and wetlands, flora and fauna. As John Muir wrote, “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”

Let’s adopt countywide lobbying registration and ethics ordinances.

Mayor Nancy Shaver refused to meet with zoning applicants, except on one occasion. Too many officials meet secretly “ex parte” with developers. Enough. Let’s require officials to videotape their conversations with developers. If they don’t, who can ever trust them?

Let’s eject money-changers from the temple of our democracy. Let’s show “temple destroyers” the door — they won’t destroy our town and God’s country.

ANNALS OF CORPORATE CRIME: The Powell Memorandum (Wikipedia)

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an anti-labor organization founded by President William Howard Taft in the White House, was angsty and angry about Ralph Nader and public interest law.   An uncritical corporate cat's paw, PHILLIP MORRIS tobacco company director LEWIS FRANKLIN POWELL, Jr. wrote a secret memorandum proposing to fight the public interest.  Two months later, President RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON nominated Virginia corporate lawyer LEWIS POWELL to the United States Supreme Court.  POWELL was a passionate defender of tobacco companies, who claimed tobacco did not kill people. Our courts and legislatures are haunted by the mean spirit of this memorandum.  Be not afraid.  Ask questions, demand answers, expect democracy.  Reject Big Business power grabs and grifts, and all their works and pomps. Yes we can! From Wikipedia:

....

Powell Memorandum, 1971[edit]

On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum for the chamber entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America.^[16][17] It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and a step toward socialism.^[16] His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths.^[16] He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry.^[16]

The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US. It inspired wealthy heirs of earlier American industrialists, the Earhart Foundation (whose money came from an oil fortune), and the Smith Richardson Foundation (from the cough medicine dynasty)^[16] to use their private charitable foundations−which did not have to report their political activities−to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Richard Mellon Scaife in 1964.^[16] The Carthage Foundation pursued Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimally government-regulated America based on what he thought America had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Powell Memorandum ultimately came to be a blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and inspired the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.^[18][19][20] CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.^[21][22] Historian Gary Gerstle refers to the memo as "a neoliberal call to arms."^[18] Political scientist Aaron Good describes it as an "inverted totalitarian manifesto" designed to identify threats to the established economic order following the democratic upsurge of the 1960s.^[23]

Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to undertake a sustained media-outreach program, including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books, papers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals, and influencing public opinion.^[24][25]

This memo foreshadowed a number of Powell's court opinions, especially First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections by independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commissionrelied on the same arguments raised in Bellotti.

Although written confidentially for Sydnor at the Chamber of Commerce, it was discovered by Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson, who reported on its content a year later (after Powell had joined the Supreme Court). Anderson alleged that Powell was trying to undermine the democratic system; however, in terms of business's view of itself in relation to government and public interest groups, the memo could be alternatively read to simply convey conventional thinking among businessmen at the time. The explicit goal of the memo was not to destroy democracy, though its emphasis on political institution-building as a concentration of big business power, particularly updating the Chamber's efforts to influence federal policy, has had that effect.^[26] Here, it was a major force in motivating the Chamber and other groups to modernize their efforts to lobby the federal government. Following the memo's directives, conservative foundations greatly increased, pouring money into think-tanks. This rise of conservative lobbying led to the conservative intellectual movement and its increasing influence over mainstream political discourse, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, and due chiefly to the works of the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.^[27]

From Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:

05.27.21

THE SCHEME 1: THE POWELL MEMO

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, there is a scheme afoot, a scheme I will be talking about in weeks ahead – a long-running, right-wing scheme to capture the Supreme Court.

Special interests are behind the scheme. They control it through dark money – hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending. We will dwell in later speeches on how the scheme operates. This first speech seeks its origins. The scheme is secret, and because of its secrecy, it is hard to know exactly where the story should begin.

The one place you could begin is with a corporate lawyer – the Virginian Lewis Powell. An authorized biography of Lewis Powell by his fellow Virginian, renowned UVA law professor John Jeffries, reveals Powell to be a tough and incisive lawyer, willing and able to make sharp, even harsh, decisions, but a man of courtly and decent matters, well-settled in the White male social and corporate elite of Richmond, VA. There he developed his legal and business career through the 1950s and 1960s.

A successful corporate law practice often entailed joining corporate boards. Richmond was a home to Big Tobacco, and Powell's legal career led him on to Richmond's tobacco and other corporate boards. Richmond was Virginia's sibling rival to Charlottesville, which could boast of Thomas Jefferson's nearby Monticello, his renowned University of Virginia, and all the cultural and academic vibrancy bubbling around that great university. Richmond was the working sibling, hosting the State's capitol and its political offices and serving as its corporate center.

Powell was an ambitious Richmond corporate lawyer, and the turbulence of the 1960s was broadly distressing to America's corporate elite. The civil rights movement disrupted Jim Crow across the South, drawing out and exposing to the Nation the racist violence that had long enforced the social and legal norm of segregation and upsetting America's all- White corporate suites and boardrooms.

Anti-war protesters derided Dow Chemical Company's manufacture of napalm and scorned the entire military-industrial complex. Women's rights protesters challenged all-male corporate management structures. The environmental movement protested chemical leaks, toxic products, and the poisons belching from corporate smokestacks. Public health groups began linking the tobacco industry to deadly illnesses, and lead paint companies to brain damage in children.

Ralph Nader criticized America's car companies for making automobiles that were “Unsafe at Any Speed” and causing carnage on America's highways. America's anxious corporate elite saw Congress respond with new and unwelcome laws and saw courts respond with big and unwelcome verdicts. Something had to be done.

Powell's prominence in Virginia's civic, legal, social, and corporate circles had brought him attention in Washington, DC. A new client of his, the Washington, DC-based U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asked Powell for his help. The Chamber commissioned from Powell a secret report, a strategic plan for reasserting corporate authority over the political arena.

The secret Powell report, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was telling. It was telling, first, for the apocalyptic certainty of its tone. Powell's opening sentence was: “No thoughtful person can question that the American system is under broad attack.” By that, he meant the American economic system, but that assertion was footnoted with the parallel assertion that – and I am quoting him again – “The American political system of democracy under the rule of law is also under attack.”

This was, Powell asserted, “quite new in [American history].” “Business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble,” he wrote, “and the hour is late.”

The secret Powell report was an alarm.

The report is populated with liberal bogeymen: the bombastic lawyer William Kunstler; the popular author of “The Greening of America,” Charles Reich; the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whom Powell said there should be, and I am quoting here, “no hesitation to attack.” Against them, Powell set establishment defenders like columnist Stewart Alsop and conservative economist Milton Friedman. Powell cloaked the concerns of corporate America as concerns of “individual freedom,” a rhetorical framework for corporate political power that persists to this day.

The battle lines were drawn. Indeed, the language in the Powell report is the language of battle: “attack,” “frontal assault,” “rifle shots,” “warfare.” The recommendations are to end compromise and appeasement – his words: “compromise” and “appeasement”— to understand that, as he said, “the ultimate issue may be survival”— and he underlined the word “survival” in his report – and to call for “the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.''

Well, for this, you had to have a plan, and the Powell plan was to go big. Here is what he said:

“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

Powell recommended a propaganda effort staffed with scholars and speakers, a propaganda effort to which American business should devote “10 percent of its total advertising budget,'” including an effort to review and critique textbooks, especially in economics, political science, and sociology.

“National television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance,” he said. Corporate America should aggressively insist on the right to be heard, on “equal time,” and corporate America should be ready to deploy, and I am quoting him here, “whatever degree of pressure — publicly and privately — may be necessary.” This would be “a long road,” Powell warned, “and not for the fainthearted.”

In his section entitled “The Neglected Political Arena,” Powell recommended using political influence to stem “the stampedes by politicians to support any legislation related to `consumerism' or to the `environment.'” And, yes, Powell put the word “environment” in derogatory quote marks in the original.

“Political power,” Powell wrote, “is necessary; … [it] must be assiduously cultivated; and … when necessary … must be used aggressively and with determination.” He concluded that “it is essential [to] be far more aggressive than in the past,” with “no hesitation to attack,” “not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas,” and no “reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose” the corporate effort. In a nutshell, no holds barred.

And then came the section of the secret report that may have launched the scheme to capture the court. It is called “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts.” This section focused on what Powell called “exploiting judicial action.” He called it an “area of vast opportunity.”

He wrote: “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court” – I will intervene to say, of course, we have today, as a result of the scheme, the most activist-minded Supreme Court in American history, but back to his quote – “especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”

Powell urged that the Chamber of Commerce become the voice of American business in the courts, with a “highly competent staff of lawyers,” if “business is willing to provide the funds.'” He concludes: “The opportunity merits the necessary effort.” The secret report may well have been the single most consequential piece of writing that Lewis Powell ever did in a long career of consequential writings. The tone and content of the report actually explain a lot of decisions in his future career. Yet this secret report received no attention – not even a passing mention – in Professor Jeffries' detailed, authoritative, and authorized Powell biography.

The secret Chamber report was not disclosed to the U.S. Senate in Senate confirmation proceedings when, shortly after delivering his secret report to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon.

The secret report was dated August 23, 1971. Two months later, on October 22, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. Lewis Powell was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on January 7, 1972, less than 6 months after this secret report was delivered to the Chamber.

To be continued. I yield the floor.

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Full text of Powell memo here, sent on August 23, 1971 two months before angry corrupt President RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON nominated its author, LEWIS FRANKLIN POWELL, JR., a partner in HUNTON & WILLIAMS, to the United States Supreme Court.