Alex Machaskee- not fondly known among many reporters as The Snake - rose from a sales department worker in 1968 to Tom Vail’s gofer before dethroning Vail and becoming president and publisher of the Plain Dealer in 1990.
His announced “retirement” is delayed but most welcome news.
I will skip any encomium to him since Sunday’s paper likely will overflow with them as they boot Machaskee out. Any regular reader of the PD knows of Machaskee’s unquenchable thirst for awards and accolades.
Machaskee has been a blight on the Plain Dealer, Cleveland journalism and the city for at least two decades. He represents the bad judgment and backward thinking that has infected the city’s civic and political life. Rather than offer the city enlightenment, guidance and energy, his Plain Dealer has offered, with few exceptions, a conservative, elitist and weak leadership that now reveals this once proud city broken and dispirited.
During his tenure as a leader of the state’s largest newspaper, the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have declined economically, as has the State of Ohio. A Machaskee led newspaper had editorially backed those leading this area and state for years.
Dwindling population has hurt the newspaper economically. Some believe that the Newhouse Family, owners of the Plain Dealer, will bring in a publisher from outside rather than promote within. There are fears that a new publisher will cut staff, particularly in the editorial department.
Machaskee also spurned Cleveland by taking the Plain Dealer production facilities and jobs out of Cleveland by locating its new $200 million facilities in suburban Brooklyn.
The deterioration did not start with Machaskee but he promoted a journalistic mediocrity throughout his career. This is not to say that the Plain Dealer did not have stellar reporting at times. However, the tone set for the community was one that did not demand performance from community leadership – political or civic - beyond what major corporate forces wanted. It was a newspaper dedicated to those in power, not justice for all.
When Machaskee took power in 1990, my newsletter headline was: “Machaskee Moves In – Pee Dee Dark Ages.”
I wrote: “Maybe you thought that the Pee Dee couldn’t get any more shallow, any less responsive to readers, any more attentive to advertiser desires."
“Well, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
It is difficult to get high-level editors, even after they have left their positions, to speak about their boss. However, I quoted a former PD executive editor Bill Woestendiek, and then head of a university journalism department in Los Angeles, about the meaning of Machaskee’s rise to the top job.
“It means a lot of things. One, it means the continuation of the encroachment into the news room from the business side,” said Woestendiek.
Presenting first-hand knowledge, Woestendiek said there had been great pressure from Machaskee primarily “to alter the editorial content to meet advertiser needs or complaints.” The editor admitted he fought “a losing battle” with Machaskee.
For a time when the newspaper was redesigning its pages, a committee of editors and business side personnel discussed the best way to do it. One desire of the editorial representatives was that the Metro page be absent of ads, as it is now but was not then. Bill Ostendorf, a graphics editor, said, “Alex and his people resented that we even asked” for an advertising-free front page. Ostendorf when he left the paper said, “The PD has the most gun-shy editors I’ve ever seen.”
Woestendiek said that though Machaskee was not publisher at the time he was fired, Machaskee was really the boss. “As far as New York (home of Newhouse family, owners) was concerned.” Vail was a mere figurehead with Machaskee in charge, he said. That was 1987. Woestendiek described his firing to me: “Machaskee notified me that I was to take early retirement, shall we say.”
A former editor favorable to Machaskee said of him, “Alex is a faithful servant… shrewd and energetic… with the right amount of deviousness.” One has to guess that the devious part resulted in his moniker, the Snake.
The string of journalistic violations attributed to Machaskee or committed under his rule is long.
Many believe that Machaskee played a significant role in the demise of the Cleveland Press in 1982. At the time, some believed that the Teamsters would strike only the Plain Dealer, giving the Press an opportunity to take economic advantage of the situation. That did not happen.
Jim Neff in his book Mobbed Up writes that Machaskee asked Teamster boss Jackie Presser to help make trouble for the Press by having Teamster labor problems at the then rival newspaper. Machaskee denied the charges.
Machaskee’s regard for journalism (and the public) was evident in a speech he was preparing, secretly slipped to me. It reveals the thinking of a rightwing devotee in trite stereotyping.
“Too often the frequently built-in liberal bias of reporters, especially younger ones, prevents them from writing fair stories when they are covering such industries as public utilities. They seem all too ready to accept the line of various consumer activists, many of whom are acting to fulfill various personal agendas, which often have nothing to do with the public good.“
“These reporters too often fail to adequately report the utility industry’s side of a rate hike request, for example. Nuclear power’s long range benefits and its total acceptance in many other countries, for example, are often overshadowed in reporting by the uninformed fears foisted on the public by a variety of consumer groups for a variety of reasons, some in, but some not in the public interest.”
Machaskee also revealed his simplistic political biases: “Most of these young reporters had their thinking on an even keel when they began college but then got turned to the Left by many university professors who have agenda of their own.”
Is it no wonder that Machaskee would not allow the Plain Dealer to endorse John Kerry for President in 2004 although the editorial board had voted to endorse him? You will remember the PD’s non-endorsement became a national embarrassment to the newspaper and its staff.
Alex enjoys using his power. Example: A local bank invited editors to a meeting but not Machaskee. Told the meeting was strictly for editors, a secretary, who called for an invitation for her boss, told the bank definitely, “Alex would appreciate an invitation.” He got one.
In another revealing case, Machaskee tried to muscle WCPN, the public radio station, into continuing ethnic broadcasts the station wanted to drop.
Machaskee used both inducements and threats to attempt to get his way. He offered the station $100,000 in free newspaper advertising as an enticement to continue the ethnic broadcasts and threatened a financial cutoff if it did not.
“These general terms are acceptable to the Plain Dealer, but are contingent upon the nationality program at WCPN remaining essentially the same as it has been since 1988,” Machaskee wrote to the board. He added, “Should nationality programming be diminished in terms of broadcast hours, or altered substantially in time or day of broadcast, the Plain Dealer would not be interested in pursuing any advertising relationship with WCPN.”
Machaskee also shielded former Mayor Michael White from critical comment in the Plain Dealer in White’s early terms. In a show of political arrogance, the publisher stepped into a tiff between White and City Council by arranging and participating in a peace meeting, hardly the position a publisher should take in local politics.
There were too many indiscretions under Machaskee’s rule to list in a mere column. It would take a book.
Under his rule, an editor killed a column that poked Dick Jacobs and the new Galleria for a $125,000 opening day party. Instead, the mall opening got page one excited treatment. He also later “ordered” a paragraph inserted into a PD story to minimize Jacobs’ intransigence during last minute negotiations on the Gateway lease. The “must” insert noted: “A source close to the Indians said the team made last minute concessions to give Gateway officials additional flexibility to satisfactorily resolve the arena questions.”
Some decisions show how petty the editorial atmosphere at the PD got under Machaskee. A gossip columnist, who gave “rocks” to note aversion, presented one to Higbee’s and its owner for closing a popular restaurant. She was told never to do that again and was assigned a special editor for her copy. Department stores, you understand, are big advertisers and particularly off limits to newspaper criticism under Machaskee.
In recent years, under Doug Clifton as editor, the newspaper has shown some journalistic improvement, even attaining for the PD the long coveted Pulitzer Prize, won by columnist Connie Schultz last year.
However, the newspaper remains severely limited by space problems. Many important stories are either missed or bypassed because of space. News, particularly the information needed by a community, remains so limited in the PD as to be a public embarrassment when citizens discuss the state of their only daily paper.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole hidden-email:Ebyqb@Nqrycuvn.arg?
See also Humble Serpent: As publisher Alex Machaskee prepares to retire, the PD lauds one of his public personas and ignores the other by Michael Gill, Cleveland Free Times here.
See also The power of a publisher by Lisa Chamberlain Salon.com here.
See also Machaskee retiring after 46 years at Plain Dealer by Bill Lubinger, The Plain Dealer 01.15.06 here.
See also Machaskee leaves a record of Mediocracy, Failure by Roldo Bartimole, Lakewood Buzz 01.19.06 here.
(:divend:)