Some soreheads can't stand a free press. In East Tennessee, I was honored to be editor of the Appalachian Observer, which comforted the afflicted and afflicted the powerful, earning us a recommendation for a Pulitzer Prize by District Attorney General James Nelson Ramsey. Our small weekly tabloid newspaper was surrounded by media oligopolies and their coverups of political corruption and mismanaged nuclear powerplants and nuclear weapons plants. When Knoxville newspaper reporters did their jobs too tell, the imperious Tennessee Valley Authority TVA would sometimes have to gas up its private Aero Commander airplane and fly its chairmen to Cincinnati for meetings with Scripps-Howard newspaper chain executives, resulting in repeated demotions of TVA beat reporters at the Knoxville News Sentinel for doing their jobs too well. Twice the demotion was to education reporter. Wonder why? From The Washington Post:
How much abuse can a local newspaper reporter take?
Republicans claim Tom Lisi’s reporting is lies to promote a liberal agenda. How should he respond?
After settling into his seat, Lisi received some not-so-routine attention from a deputy sheriff, who yanked the journalist from the courtroom and inquired about the topic of his reporting.
Totally uncool.
In a letter to the court, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called the incident “an appalling and chilling First Amendment violation.” LNP Executive Editor Tom Murse, in his own letter, wrote that Lisi had been subject to harassment and threats “in the course of doing his job,” though the missive didn’t specify the harassers.
Flare-ups of this sort go down in courthouses across the country from time to time. Though troubling, they’re not national news. What happened next has broader implications.
Lancaster County Board of Commissioners Chairman Joshua G. Parsons, a Republican with a long history of service in the county, took an interest in the ruckus. He wanted details about the alleged threats that Lisi had faced, on the reasoning that if a county employee was mistreating a reporter, action should be taken. An executive with LNP’s parent company later wrote a letter to Parsons clarifying that Lisi has faced such behavior over the course of his career.
At a county board meeting nearly a week after the incident, Parsons attempted to pluck Lisi from his spot in the public seating area. “I would like for you to come up today and tell us who is harassing and threatening you,” Parsons told Lisi. “We can sit here and wait, Tom. This question is for Tom Lisi, LNP. … Please come up and state who that is that’s harassing and threatening you.”
Layering actual harassment on top of alleged harassment, Parsons kept going: “Please come up and state who is harassing and threatening you,” he said. As the commissioner continued his ambush, no one in the room cut him off — not his fellow commissioners, not any member of the public. The scene was pure municipal cringe, as Parsons progressed from entreaty to accusation. “You are refusing to answer, which tells me it’s not true,” he said.
Lisi’s previous way stations in journalism hadn’t quite prepared him for this brand of public treatment. “Nothing remotely comparable,” he notes. Smack in the middle of the Trump presidency, he worked as a reporter for the Herald & Review, a newspaper in Macon County, Illinois. Covering politics in a red redoubt of central Illinois yielded some cultural frictions. Mild ones, mostly. “We were still kind of thought of as the liberal rag,” says Lisi.
“The Republican lawmakers, the state senators, the state reps, even the Trumpy ones, like the insurgent ones, talked to me. And they had no problem with me,” continues Lisi, who recalls that one of them favorably cited one of his stories in stump speeches.
Official nastiness doesn’t align with the feel of Lancaster County, which is welcoming in almost every respect: photos of its lush and rolling farmland need no digital enhancement; boutiques in Lancaster can out-cute their counterparts in any trendy coastal redoubt; the county’s parks are pastoral gems, where clean and open restrooms stand alongside roofed bocce venues. Lancaster also serves as a national model for how civic organizations and good-government politicians can revitalize their surroundings, at least according to a 2018 piece by New York Times opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman. This civic paradise, furthermore, fulfilled a 665-page public records request for me in just over a month — no legal appeals necessary!
Lisi, however, has landed on one of the county’s harder edges: its Republican-controlled board of commissioners, which has trashed his reporting and assailed his integrity in a series of partisan-tinged clashes over the past two years. The contretemps have stemmed from such issues as the county budget, procurement rules and youth strip searches — outwardly generic, local issues that have taken on the appurtenances of left vs. right warfare in this swing state county.
LNP stands in the middle, its status as the butt of Republican media attacks placing it somewhere on the spectrum between anomalous and emblematic. “In communities across the U.S., we’re seeing conservative Republican state and local officials, often identifying as MAGA supporters, use numerous tactics to undermine both the credibility of local newspapers as well as their financial sustainability,” notes Penelope Muse Abernathy, an authority on local journalism. Those tactics, says Abernathy, range from disparaging comments to denial of public records and so on.
In the case of LNP, the attacks have “gotten so over the top, vicious and malicious that it’s beyond the pale,” says Murse.
Those attacks have implications for the newspaper on many fronts, including its morale, its financial viability and its ability to build trust with conservatives in its own circulation area. Yet the events in Lancaster County bear just as heavily on a question that has vexed leaders in journalism in recent decades: Just how should they respond to the frequent, strident and often flimsy attacks from Republican politicians? Should they stick to the industry’s default mode of turning the other cheek? Or should they speak up to challenge the gripes?
LNP, as it happens, has borrowed from both of those approaches. For months and months, it adopted the traditional journalistic posture of refusing to become part of the story. Then, a week before the Nov. 5 presidential election, Parsons again recited his list of grievances against Lisi and LNP. This time, Lisi chose to engage, with the result being a fierce 20-minute polemical clash between a young reporter and a veteran county commissioner.
It left no doubt which path embattled media organizations should choose.
The Lancaster County Board meeting room has a technocratic feel, with public seating, a dais for the three commissioners and a lectern placed at a perfect angle for the camera. It’s here that the county hashes out its divisions, and any citizen may get up to address the commissioners. That privilege doesn’t go underutilized. Joel Saint, a pastor atIndependence Reformed Bible Church , frequently thunders from the lectern about local issues, including a spat earlier this year about drag queen story hour. “We heard from this so-called LGBTQ-plus community,” said Saint in June. “Still don’t know what the ‘plus’ stands for. Scares the daylights out of me quite frankly — what that ‘plus’ means. Who knows!”
But while some Lancastrians are happy to hover at that lectern, spouting off about the latest set-to and throwing shade at their local detractors, not so Lisi. “I’m not an exhibitionist type person — to me that’s not the job,” says Lisi.
Wherever he plants himself, however, Lisi gets dragged into the proceedings one way or the other. “Tom has lied about things that have occurred [in] this room that are video- and audiotaped,” Parsons said of the reporter at an Aug. 14 meeting.
When demagogic buffoons say things like that, journalists have little trouble brushing them off. Parsons, though, is no demagogic buffoon. He’s a former U.S. Army infantry officer who transitioned into a legal career that includes nearly five years as a prosecutor. In 2015, he was elected as county commissioner, a post responsible for managing county government agencies and naming people to boards and commissions and the like. Before his time on the board, Parsons had served as clerk of courts and, all told, has spent about 18 years in service to Lancaster County.
According to a website funded by Friends of Josh Parsons, he has “worked hard with the Trump team.” The third-term commissioner, however, doesn’t sound very Trump-like when he plows through a crowded agenda at board meetings; or when he touts the county’s distinguished record on fiscal restraint and on farmland preservation. He comes off as the sort of Republican who, if Trump had asked him to “find” votes for him in November, would have told the former president to pound electoral sand.
Parsons abandons a lawyer’s rigor, however, when he pronounces on LNP. His approach goes heavy on molehill-to-mountain conversions, espying journalistic malice behind every carriage return. On Oct. 2, for instance, he wrote a bulletin on Facebook saying that he’d received a note from a “member of the community” who accused LNP of whipping up a “fabricated story.” It raises only one question: What’s this guy talking about?
When Parsons accused Lisi of lying on videotape, he was litigating an Aug. 2 article about strip searches of children at the county’s Youth Intervention Center (YIC). That policy had ended, reported Lisi, though some citizens later expressed outrage that it was in place to begin with.
In his piece, Lisi wrote that Parsons had “barred” him from discussing the policy change with the center’s director after a meeting. “Josh put an arm between us and said, ‘No, no, no, you can’t talk to him. You can ask your questions during the meeting,’” Lisi told me about the incident. Yet in a Facebook post, Parsons claimed that Lisi’s account was a “lie.”
The commissioner’s logic in formulating this accusation merits detailing: Parsons contends that the county board is a transparent entity with around 150 meetings per year, and reporters are aware that they can step forward to ask questions of county officials at any one of them. Therefore, they are not “barred” from pressing county officials on any matter. A memorable passage from Parsons’s Facebook post articulates this bizarre standard: “In this case, WITF/LNP’s most unethical reporter, Tom Lisi, (and that is really saying a lot) asked NO questions at the public meeting,” wrote Parsons in the Facebook post. “He deliberately waited until AFTER the public meeting and then skulked around waiting to ambush County staff. He was then redirected to ask his questions during any of our many public meetings.”
“Reporter” is an appropriate term for someone who skulks around “waiting to ambush County staff.”
Flashpoints in the spat between Parsons and Lisi emerge every so often, but the commissioner’s anti-LNP spiel has become a fixture in the Lancaster County political landscape. When the newspaper comes up in discussions — which is all the time — Parsons bemoans LNP’s alleged circulation of lies and distortions that promote a liberal narrative and short-shrift the county’s Republican leaders. Years ago, by most accounts, there was less vitriol in the relationship, but then the pandemic came along to radicalize the entire affair. “Our approach,” writes Parsons in an email, “has been largely proven correct both substantively (for example see data on prolonged school closures, which we opposed) and in terms of support from our community (see reelection results.)”
In the post-pandemic years, Parsons has appealed for “some kind of streaming forum” — essentially a debate with LNP leadership in which the newspaper could explain “why it is okay for your journalists to be engaging in this kind of conduct.”
Not all of Parsons’s attacks against LNP age like raw milk. In September 2022, for instance, he busted Lisi for misinterpreting a discussion on the county budget. LNP ran a clarification, and Parsons alleged that the newspaper had fashioned the report “out of whole cloth” — a preposterous exaggeration of what was clearly an error. And in April, Lisi “liked” an X post blasting Parsons for being an “arrogant, mean, entitled brat who can’t stand women and thinks the rules don’t apply to him.” In a subsequent meeting, Parsons protested the critique: “I demonstrably don’t hate women,” he said — and declared that “No ethical news … organization would continue to employ Tom Lisi.” Lisi says that he “liked” the post because it included a link to one of his stories, not to support the criticism. Murse declined to address “any personnel discussions” regarding LNP’s social media policy.
Another target of Parsons’s attacks is the LNP editorial board, which routinely amplifies reporting that the commissioner views as biased in the first place. In an episode that rankled Parsons, an opinion staffer once referred to the GOP in a tweet as “The pro-child-massacre party, literally.” LNP Opinion Editor Suzanne Cassidy says she doesn’t comment on “internal matters.”
“I don’t want a Republican newspaper; I don’t want a Democrat newspaper. I want an objective newspaper,” said Parsons last January.
Republican attacks on local news outlets have become enough of a thing to attract academic interest. In a survey experiment, Allison M.N. Archer and Erik Peterson — of the University of Houston and Rice University, respectively — found that “exposure to a Republican politician’s attack on a local newspaper dramatically reduces the public’s trust in and intent to use local news”— and some of the ripple effects extend beyond Republicans to Democrats and independents.
In an April article in CJR, Doron Taussig called this phenomenon the “‘fake news’-ification of local news” and suggests that local journalists “tell a new and better story about why conservatives should trust them.”
Just how prevalent are attacks of the sort faced by LNP? That’s tough to say. A survey of state press associations across the country turns up many complaints about local officials seeking to pull public notices from newspapers that publish unflattering stories about their actions. Attacks on local newspapers for allegedly biased coverage are also widespread, though apparently not quite as strident as what’s going on in Lancaster — “fortunately,” in the summation of three state press association leaders.
There’s no handbook, accordingly, for how local news operations should respond. Russ Walker, Lisi’s editor, believes that “arguing with Parsons on his home court, almost always, is to his advantage and not ours, because he’s a smart guy and controls the microphone.” And Murse says, “I don’t know that we ever reached a point where we had a clear strategy in dealing with this.”
What is clear is that LNP, in its ambivalence, allowed the Republican Lancaster commissioners — Parsons and colleague Ray D’Agostino — to smear the outlet in board meetings, public events, Facebook, wherever. “Some of the things that they are saying are so blatantly, obviously false that, of course, we don’t have to respond because everybody that hears this knows it’s false,” says Murse, noting that responses can give “oxygen” to unworthy complaints. For instance: Parsons’s claim that the paper fashioned a budget story from “whole cloth.” “It’s absurd, as an editor, to defend ourselves and to publicly state: ‘Listen, people, we don’t make up stories out of whole cloth,’” says Murse.
County commissioner, says Murse, isn’t a “glamorous” post, and the 49-year-old Parsons is eyeing an opportunity in the state senate. Bashing LNP helps him climb the political ladder. “It’s not my job to engage in a public battle with a county commissioner over the false allegations he’s making against us. It only serves to elevate his profile,” says Murse.
The nonstop disparagement is a function of Lisi’s productivity on the county beat, where he has racked up around 400 bylines since June 2022. It makes sense on one level: LNP is the news provider for Lancaster County, though there are some smaller print publications, TV stations, radio and digital properties that pitch in as well. Lancaster’s media bashers would face a taller task if there were five or six Lisi look-alikes haunting the margins of county board meetings. When it’s just one affable, bearded dude in the peanut gallery, on the other hand — no sweat at all. Blast away.
The newspaper is the present-day incarnation of a tradition that reaches back to the founding of the Lancaster Journal in 1794 — which is to say that the paper was born with a far better name than its clunky contemporary moniker. For a good chunk of that history — 158 years — the property fell under the ownership of the Steinman family, which drew distinction for its media holdings and philanthropy.
Modern media economics test even the most stalwart family newspapers, however. According to Robert Krasne, chairman and CEO of Steinman Communications, the family in recent years determined that it “didn’t have anyone with both the aptitude and the interest” to continue guiding LNP . Its stewardship, like that of many other similarly situated families, would peter out after four generations.
Figures from the Alliance for Audited Media only hint at the reasons why. LNP’s Sunday print circulation dropped from 79,002 in 2014 to 44,747 in 2022. Digital subscriptions — which have grown from nil in 2017 to 12,890 in 2022 — have struggled to fill the gap.
Local newspapers these days don’t command top dollar, though there’s at least a vulture fund or two that’ll swallow the property just to lay off journalists, freeze their salaries and flyspeck their expenses. In the case of LNP, however, the Steinmans abjured that option, choosing an arrangement in which they “donated” the newspaper — along with three smaller publications — to the regional public broadcaster WITF. A press release called the move the “capstone to the family’s two centuries of community service and philanthropy.”
Explaining the newspaper’s ownership structure requires a doctorate in Lancaster media studies. As part of the donation agreement, the Steinman Foundation extended a multiyear grant to WITF, which, in turn, has used it to create an entity called the Steinman Institute for Civic Engagement. That entity helps “to map and develop further the news ecosystem in central Pennsylvania,” according to Ron Hetrick, who is president and CEO of Pennon, an umbrella group over WITF public media, LNP and another entity. To further muddy the picture, the Steinman Institute for Civic Engagement runs “independently” under Pennon, according to Hetrick.
How much bureaucracy can you wrap around a local newspaper? Fancy titles and letterhead are all over the place: Pennon has a board; LNP has a board; the Steinman Institute for Civic Engagement has a board. A fundamental mission is to administer LNP, which, according to Hetrick, was a money-losing operation upon its donation to WITF, primarily because of the Steinman family’s “commitment to providing local journalism.”
All these boards share a vulnerability when their newspaper gets in culture wars with local politicians: Their various members serve as potential pressure points for people who want to influence coverage. According to emails obtained through a public records request, Parsons earlier this year sought a meeting with Pedro Rivera, a member of what was then the WITF board, to discuss his critique of the newspaper. Parsons reports that the two men “seemed to agree on a number of areas.” Through a representative, Rivera said he doesn’t remember details of the meeting.
LNP’s boardocracy also means a bevy of executives with their own particular paper trails. In October 2023, Lisi wrote a story citing Parsons’s concerns about political donations from people in the management group — or related to them — to Democratic politicians. “Your organization is literally part of the opposing campaign,” Parsons texted Lisi.
LNP’s quest for credibility with a mammoth constituency on its home turf — conservatives, that is — plows onward. “By focusing on local issues, local events, telling local stories — that’s how we build trust and connection with the 550,000 people of Lancaster County,” says Hetrick, sounding like an off-the-rack news executive. If the solution were that simple, thousands of national and local newspapers would be thriving right now, paying top dollar for reporters who would be bumping into each other in city halls across the land.
None of that is happening. What is happening is that newspapers are trying to woo conservative readers with friendly material. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, just added CNN commentator Scott Jennings, a fiery supporter of Trump, as a contributor. The McClatchy newspaper chain has created a newsletter featuring “center-right news and opinion content.” LNP’s Cassidy says the paper’s opinion section tries to “offer a mix of conservative and liberal voices every day.”
An entire country’s political drama descends on Pennsylvania every four years, thanks to its standing as the swingiest of swing states. Tensions from the contest between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris seeped into the Lancaster boardroom in the last weeks of the race.
On Oct. 19, Walker and Lisi reported that the administrator of Franklin & Marshall College’s voter registration program said that a county election staffer “provided inaccurate information to at least one student and to herself about what’s required to register to vote in Pennsylvania,” according to the article. A few days later, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt alleged in a letter that county election officials had created a “misconception” about voter eligibility and demanded corrective action.
No way, countered a peeved Parsons at an Oct. 22 board meeting. The reports were false, he said, and the county was acting in accordance with the law. “Once again we have LNP lying, and it has real-world impacts on our elections and our staff,” said Parsons, who denounced what he saw as “a coordinated effort by liberal groups like LNP/WITF, F&M staff, the ACLU and, now, Al Schmidt.” Parsons claimed that the board heard about the Schmidt letter via LNP before the board itself received it — a notion that Schmidt’s office called “false” in an email to The Post.
Amid his sharp-tongued attacks, Parsons riffed about the possibility of taking legal action, insisting that the county could prove its version of events in a “court of law.”
Given the stakes, the story would not die, despite an effort to smother it. Lancaster County sent a cease-and-desist letter to F&M on Oct. 23 warning the college about statements regarding county employees, according to an LNP article. A former F&M trustee told LNP that he couldn’t think of a reason for the letter other than to “chill” the college’s actions.
The whole fracas blew up in colorful fashion at a meeting one week before the election. From the dais, Parsons unleashed his usual claims about LNP being an activist organ spreading falsehoods about county government. Lisi, though, had questions, including one about the investigative steps that Parsons had taken to determine that his colleagues had acted in accordance with the law.
Isn’t it “your job,” asked Lisi, to contact the people in LNP’s articles who made the allegations about the elections office?
Parsons: “You want to create — see, LNP, you love this — you don’t actually report the news, you’re creating the news. So …”
Lisi: “You haven’t talked to F&M, so how would you know how much evidence they do or don’t have?”
Parsons: “Here’s part of the investigation: How is the secretary of the commonwealth communicating a letter —”
Lisi: “See, you’re just obfuscating. You’re just misdirecting now.”
Parsons: “You’re the one that has created this story and has put —”
Lisi: “Yeah, because we have —”
Parsons: “Yeah, he admits: He created the story.”
Lisi: “Yeah, we — it’s called investigative enterprise reporting. We don’t need to wait for you to say something to report it.”
Parsons: “You generated the story, that’s why —”
Lisi: “Yes, generating the news, that’s part of my job. That’s not making something up!”
Via spontaneous combustion, Parsons was finally getting his wish for “some kind of streaming forum” in which he could face off against LNP. According to Lisi, the commissioner had been banging the drum for such an encounter at least since 2022. And in this forum, Lisi had one line of inquiry left, one that would put Parsons on the spot not only for his claims about LNP’s coverage of the voting story, but for his claims about other stories as well — all those claims that Lisi lied, manipulated and fabricated his journalism. That line of inquiry: Hey, why don’t you sue us?
“According to you,” Lisi told Parsons, “we’ve committed so many cardinal sins that would, if your claims are true, would be spreading very irresponsible allegations about voting in elections in a very, you know, insecure time for those things. So, I mean, if you wanted to correct the record, I would think that you would do that, but you’re not.”
Responded Parsons, “How many times have we sat here and gone through articles and articulated exactly — ”
Lisi countered: “Yeah, but you can say whatever you want here. You can’t do that in court.”
In a sharp break with precedent, Parsons appeared to have no response. He sat for a couple of beats and looked at Lisi, who said thanks and left the lectern. As the reporter made his way to the back of the room, Parsons delivered another slight: “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an activist. That is not a reporter.”
Anyone steeped in Lancaster County board meetings could identify this as a moment. An unplanned one, too. Walker says there were no instructions that Lisi confront the commissioner. “He heard enough to counter whatever Parsons was saying with facts, and that’s what he did,” says Walker. In doing so, Lisi highlighted a critical contrast: When Parsons bashes LNP without pushback, his arguments come off as seamless, bulletproof. But when he bashed LNP with pushback, his arguments sputtered and fizzled.
The lesson here? Toss out the noble but outdated industry wisdom that it’s best to avoid jawing with the haters because the work speaks for itself. Well, the people who need to hear the pushback aren’t reading the work that speaks for itself. Confront the media bashers wherever they practice their profession.
A earlier version of this column incorrectly identified Penelope Muse Abernathy as a professor at the University of North Carolina. She no longer holds that position. This version has been updated.
No comments:
Post a Comment