Media Experts and Journalists Condemn Warwick Mayor Solomon’s Retribution Against Warwick Beacon
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Top regional journalists and media experts are condemning the retributive actions by Warwick Mayor Joseph Solomon against the city’s only local newspaper, the Warwick Beacon.
On Tuesday, GoLocal reported that embattled Mayor Solomon cut the city’s advertising as well as access to city departments for the Beacon, according to multiple sources and confirmed by Beacon Publisher John Howell.
The Beacon has been owned and operated by 77-year-old Howell for the past 50 years.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe move is believed to be punishment by the Solomon administration for the newspaper's coverage of the mayor and numerous emerging contentious issues.
Solomon refuses to respond to press inquiries, but some of New England's top experts condemned the actions.
“No public agency or other entity that subsists on public funds should punish a journalism organization for doing its job: reporting the news,” said Linda Levin, professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Rhode Island where she served as the department chair from 2001 to 2011.
“[Mayor Solomon’s] actions will have a chilling effect on responsible efforts to inform Warwick's citizens about the activities of their city's government -- knowledge that they're entitled to. And it will make it easier for the mayor and the rest of his administration to cover up bad decisions,” said former long-time editorial page editor for the Providence Journal and now GoLocalProv columnist Robert Whitcomb.
“The Beacon has been a reliable and public-spirited source of local news over the years,” Whitcomb added.
Spiteful Political Decision?
"This [political retribution] has not happened with a Mayor since the 1970s," said Howell in an interview with GoLocal on Tuesday.
"My response to the City when officials were blackballed from talking to staff at the Beacon then was to start a column called 'The Way I Heard It,' which gave voice to sources in the city," said Howell.
John Pantalone, the chair of URI’s Journalism Department said, "It seems like the kind of spiteful political decision that gives politicians a bad name. Punishing a newspaper for simply reporting facts sounds a little Trumpish to me. It's been done many times before, but it has a sharper edge to it in the climate of political attacks against the media that have come from the White House with great regularity."
"I don't know much about Warwick politics, but this all just sounds very cheesy. Like, 'Don't you have anything better to do with your time?'" added Pantalone.
Dan Kennedy, an Associate Professor of Journalism at Northeastern University said he could not speak to the specifics of the Warwick battle, but decried the efforts by politicians today to intimidate local media.
“Local government officials have a lot of power at their disposal that they can use to harm their adversaries in the press. It’s irresponsible for them to use that power in an attempt to make it impossible for the media to do their job or to hurt them economically. Politicians who don’t like the coverage they’re receiving certainly don’t have to remain silent about it. But they need to recognize that the press has an important role in holding them to account on behalf of the public,” said Kennedy, who is the author of “The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry are Remaking Newspapers for the 21st Century.”
In a column in the Columbia Journalism Review, Jonathan Peters wrote, “It’s nothing new, of course, for state and local officials to criticize the press or restrict access to public information. In recent years, state lawmakers used Sunshine Week to introduce bills that would have made it more difficult to record police activity in plain view, and several government entities have sued their own citizens for filing FOI requests. But Trump is setting a new anti-press standard."
"Fueling that fear is the reality that state and local news organizations aren’t in a great position to push back. A Knight Foundation study released in March showed that roughly half of FOI experts believe access to information has gotten worse in the last four years, and nearly 90 percent believe access will get worse under Trump. And a Knight study released last year reported that 53 percent of US newspaper editors agreed that “news organizations are no longer prepared to go to court to preserve First Amendment freedoms,” he added. Read the rest of the story HERE.
Editor's Note: An early version of this story said that Dan Kennedy was a contributor to WBUR, he is a contributor to WGBH. We apologize for the error.
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