To Catch a Predator

Only after the council rubber-stamped the city’s agreement with the Predators did Kerr, in a victorious column last Thursday, finally ask a touchy question.

“How do you build a die-hard hockey fan base in a football town?”

“I don’t know,” replied David Freeman, the leading owner of the Predators. “I still don’t know. If there was an answer we’d just plug it in.”

Well, that’s reassuring, considering the success of the deal hinges in part on Freeman’s franchise being a viable business.

Coming just weeks after Mayor Karl Dean proposed laying off 200 employees and cutting budgets for nearly every city department, the council’s vote to amend the Predators’ lease agreement at the Sommet Center means subsidizing the team with $7.4 million in payments and incentives, while making it a little more difficult for the team to pack up and leave town. It’s a complicated arrangement, and several (fairly) intelligent council members voted in favor of the deal in part because they wanted to keep the arena’s most prominent tenant. But if the new lease itself isn’t entirely wrongheaded, it’s at least questionable—unless, of course, you’re The Tennessean and you don’t ask any tough questions.

The paper’s reporting on the deal has been little more than dutiful, focusing more on process than meaningful, comprehensive stories probing how this arrangement is good for the city. In fact, one of the few people who asked—and tried to answer—that question is Scene freelancer and Vanderbilt business professor Bruce Barry, who, to his credit, is not a trained journalist. Barry pointed to the lack of objective data showing the economic impact the Predators have had on the Nashville economy and cited a recent study that concluded pro sports franchises rarely do a thing to generate local spending. More importantly, Barry revealed the deceptive economics of pro sports in which gullible cities like Nashville fund a franchise that can’t turn an operating profit, allowing its owners to inflate its assets and sell it for a tidy profit.

Reject Barry’s analysis if you want, but at least he examined the underpinnings of the deal. The Tennessean’s Gail Kerr, however, uncritically promoted it in columns that should have had pom poms etched in the margins. Interestingly, James Weaver, attorney for the new ownership group, hinted that the inaugural Kerr puff piece was coming in an Aug. 10 memo to then-mayoral candidate Karl Dean and a lawyer representing his opponent, Bob Clement. The memo suggested a PR effort was looming, at which point Weaver wrote, “Gail Kerr is writing about this process this weekend in The Tennessean.”

Sure enough, two days after Weaver’s memo, Kerr penned a piece that featured four quotes from Peter Heidenreich, flack for the new owners, who may as well have written the column himself. Had he, though, Heidenreich surely wouldn’t have written—as Kerr did—that the city-controlled fund from the arena has “built up to $5.4 million above expenses in good years.”

In fact, the arena consistently loses millions of dollars for the city. But if Kerr got that fact right, it would have made readers question why we want to break the bank keeping the Preds as a tenant.

Desperately asked Weaver how he figured Kerr was going to write a favorable piece about his clients two days before the column was published. (Why mention it in a self-serving memo, otherwise?)

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I can guess what direction the story is going to go,” Weaver says, before correctly guessing the direction this column would go. “I was able to predict by the type of questions she asked.”

Of course, Kerr didn’t stop aiding and abetting the prospective ownership group after just one column. On Oct. 4, she tried to scare the city into approving the new lease by referencing an arbitrary date that both the owner and new buyers of the Predators clearly used to hasten some sort of shotgun marriage. “If a deal isn’t finalized here by the Oct. 31 deadline, at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 1, team owner Craig Leipold will have another offer,” she warned. “And in June 2009, it is quite possible they’ll become the Kansas City Predators.”